A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, a very useful design for display, lowercase missing, very narrow, unusual splayed serifs at top and bottom of strokes.

Tuscan wood types cover a fairly wide range of styles, and there is sometimes confusion over what is classified as a Gothic Tuscan and what is considered an Antique Tuscan. HWT American Chromatic and P22 Tuscan Expanded are more precisely faces of the Antique Tuscan variety. Gothic Tuscans are generally absent of the heavy serifs typically associated with their Antique Tuscan brethren (although decorative bifurcation of terminals can imply serifs). Additional internal decoration with spikes along the stems gives some Tuscans their distinctive look, these faces are often described as “Circus Types.” Tuscan Extended is an extremely wide design, with a distinctive slab crossbar running through the center of most characters. Each letter is a complex system in its own right. This typeface is best used very large in short headline work. The style defies falling clearly into either the Antique Tuscan or Gothic Tuscan category. The new HWT version of Tuscan Extended has been meticulously redrawn by Frank Grießhammer. During production, he also incorporated a number of new letterforms, bringing the font to over 300 characters (including a full ASCII character set and Central European accented characters).

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, condensed, bold, a very useful design for display.

A revival of one of the popular sans serif wooden type fonts of the 19th century, narrow, rounded strokes at top and bottom, pointed horizontal devices in centers, no lower case designed.

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, for large display. Lowercase not designed for this type.

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, a very useful design for display.

The first Tuscan lettering was penned in the mid-fourth century by the calligrapher Furius Dionysius Filocalus. The style was still in common usage as calligraphy when Vincent Figgins designed the first Antique Tuscan for print in 1817. Antique and Gothic Tuscan woodtype fonts appeared in the 1830’s. By the 1850’s, Tuscan fonts had become popular in America. These styles continued in print use into the twentieth century. Tuscan Antique and Gothic styles, borrowed from print and calligraphy, were perfect for signs, posters, handbills and other large format advertising. Sign painter, Frank Atkinson demonstrated several Tuscan forms in his book Sign Painting, A Complete Manual. Modified & Spurred Tuscan Romans were inspired by this and other works of the same period.

Gothic Tuscan One is a all-cap condensed gothic with round terminals and decorative “tuscan” center spurs. It was first shown by William H. Page of Norwich, Connecticut among his wood type specimen pages of 1859. Gothic Tuscan One exemplifies the strength of decorative wood types: large, simple type forms that provide the visual boldness sought by advertisers of the Victorian period. While our marketing has gotten so very sophisticated, there is always a place for simple, visually strong typeface. Although about 14 miles inland, Norwich lies at the head of the Thames River. The river is both wide and deep, and therefore was not bridged in the early 20th century. From the 17th century until then, if you wanted to get from Groton on the west bank to the whaling port of New London on the east bank by land, you had to had to go by way of Norwich. Because of its size, the Thames is navigable all the way from Norwich to New London. Docks were built in Norwich around 1685 and the city became Connecticut’s 2nd largest port by 1800. With the construction of the Norwich & Worcester Railroad in 1835, Page could easily ship his wood type north by rail or south by coastal schooner. Included with our font, Gothic Tuscan One, are two 19th century printer’s ornaments of sailing ships similar to those that sailed up the Thames to Norwich. There is also a more contemporary glyph of a whale, looking quite pleased that the only whaling ship left in Connecticut is the Charles W. Morgan, permanently moored at Mystic Seaport. Reference: Moon’s Handbooks, Connecticut 2nd Edition (Emeryville CA 2004). Gothic Tuscan One ML represents a major extension of the original release, with the following changes: 1. Added glyphs for the 1250 Central Europe, the 1252 Turkish and the 1257 Baltic Code Pages. Added glyphs to complete standard 1252 Western Europe Code Page. Special glyphs relocated and assigned Unicode codepoints, some in Private Use area. Total of 332 glyphs. 2. Added OpenType GSUB layout features: pnum, ornm and dlig. 3. Added 330 kerning pairs. 4. Revised vertical metrics for improved cross-platform line spacing. 5. Redesigned mathamatical operators 6. Included of both tabular (std) & proportional numbers (optional). 7. Refined various glyph outlines. Please note that some older applications may only be able to access the Western Europe character set (approximately 221 glyphs). The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.

P22 Tuscan Expanded is a digitization of the mid-19th Century Woodtype font "Antique Tuscan Expanded - Wells & Webb 1854". Specimens of this font are rarely, if ever, seen with a lower case. It is noted in the book American Wood Type 1828-1900 by Rob Roy Kelly that the lower case is "missing". This version was digitized from a recently discovered full set including all lower case plus ff ligatures. One unique feature of this design is the heart shape formed in the V, X & Y.

Wood Tuscan JNL is a bold, compressed serif font in the Tuscan style and was re-drawn from vintage wood type examples.

A revival of one of the popular wooden type fonts of the 19th century, suitable for display. The bold version has rounded ball shapes at top and bottom of stems as well as at horizontal strokes. The pointed version has pointed shapes at top and bottom of stems as well as at horizontal strokes. Lowercase was not originally designed for these fonts. These new versions include caps, figures and accented caps.

A display style font, upper case only, very typical of wooden type of the 19th century, ideal for circus posters or posters of any kind which might feature antique material and so on

Tuscan X Condensed (whose actual name is Gothic Concave Tuscan Extra Condensed) was first produced in wood type by William H. Page & Company around 1872. The design is derived from a Gothic Condensed typeface, but with vertical stokes bowing inwards at the center. We modified the weight of the uppercase characters (since the original wood type has a lowercase much thinner than the caps) to harmonize with the lowercase when used digitally.

Antique Tuscan No.9 was one of the earlier wood-type designs by William Hamilton Page. It was first shown among the specimens produced in 1859, shortly after Page entered into a new partnership with Samuel Mowry, owner of the Mowry Axle Company. The new company was named Page and Company and was located at the Mowry facility in the Greenville section of Norwich, Connecticut. Antique Tuscan No.9 is an extra-condensed version of the tuscan style that had been released in moveable type by Vincent Figgins of London in 1817 and had become so popular for advertising in the intervening years. Because of the extreme compression in the design, we might be tempted to describe it as "Triple-X," but that might be misleading. The analogy would, of course, be to clothing sizes, not movie ratings. Because of the compression, this typeface reads best when set extra-extra-extra large. For printing, we recommend 36 points or larger. For the screen, we suggest at least 72 points. An unusual and distinctive design, it is best used with discretion. If I were doing a term paper for school or submitting an article to a magazine for publication, I might use it for the title page, to grab someone’s attention. I would certainly not use it for the main body of text - not if I expected anyone to read what I wrote. If you wonder why we make this recommendation, take the Ten-Point challenge. Print this paragraph using Antique Tuscan No.9 and set the font size at 10 points. If you are young and blessed with good eyesight, you will probably be able to read it - with effort. So, here is the challenge: hand it to your Grandmother and ask HER to read it.

A very condensed 19th century Tuscan style wood type design with a full character set with ligatures. This design was first shown by Wm H Page Co in 1859 and this is the first digital version of this font to include a lowercase and extended European character set. This is a font best used at large sizes.

Mark van Bronkhorst designed MVB Celestia Antiqua at a time when font choice was limited. Design was characterized by overuse of the few fonts that came with laser printers. A rustic typeface, recalling the roughness and irregularity of pre-digital printing, was a response to the cold crispness of DTP. MVB Celestia Antiqua holds its own among a large group of other “weathered” serif fonts, in part due to the size of the family: three weights, small caps, italics, and two titling styles. But it's also successful because it's simply drawn well, the contours only as rough as they need to be, enabling text at any size, large or small.

MVB Aunt Mildred has a vintage charm that evokes hand-lettered postcards or advertising. Akemi Aoki drew the letterforms with a fine-tip felt pen and named it after her great aunt. Since its release in 1995, Aunt Mildred has been a popular choice for children’s books. Italics and bold weights have been added, making it even more useful for publications, packaging, and greetings of all sorts.

Garalde: the word itself sounds antique and arcane to anyone who isn’t fresh out of design school, but the sort of typeface it describes is actually quite familiar to all of us. Despite its age—born fairly early in printing’s history—the style has fared well; Garaldes are still the typefaces of choice for books and other long reading. And so we continue to see text set in old favorites—Garamond, Sabon®, and their Venetian predecessor, Bembo®. Yet many new books don’t feel as handsome and readable as older books printed in the original, metal type. The problem is that digital type revivals are typically facsimiles of their metal predecessors, merely duplicating the letterforms rather than capturing the impression—both physical and emotional—that the typefaces once left on the page. MVB Verdigris is a Garalde text face for the digital age. Inspired by the work of 16th-century punchcutters Robert Granjon (roman) and Pierre Haultin (italic), Verdigris celebrates tradition but is not beholden to it. Created specifically to deliver good typographic color as text, Mark van Bronkhorst’s design meets the needs of today’s designer using today’s paper and press. And now, as a full-featured OpenType release, it’s optimized for the latest typesetting technologies too. With MVB Verdigris Pro Text, Van Bronkhorst has revisited the family, adding small caps to all weights and styles, extensive language support, and other typographic refinements. Among the features: • Support for most Latin-based languages, including those of Central and Eastern Europe. • Precision spacing and kerning by type editor Linnea Lundquist. The fonts practically set beautiful text by themselves. • Proportional and tabular figure sets, each with oldstyle and lining forms with currency symbols to match. • Ligatures to maintain even spacing while accommodating Verdigris’ elegant, sweeping glyphs. • Numerators and denominators for automatic fractions of any denomination. • Useful, straightforward dingbats including arrows, checkboxes, and square and round bullets in three sizes. • Alternative ‘zero’ and ‘one’ oldstyle figures for those who prefer more contemporary versions over the traditional forms. • An alternative uppercase Q with a more reserved tail. • An optional, roman “Caps” font providing mid-caps, useful for titling settings, and for those situations when caps seem too big and small caps seem too small. __________ Sabon is a trademark of Linotype Corp. Bembo is a trademark of the Monotype Corporation.

MVB Fantabular proves that monospaced faces needn’t be formal or bland. Inspired by the letterforms of older typewriters, Akemi Aoki designed a playful family of three weights with italics. With every character the same width MVB Fantabular works wherever a monospaced font is needed, but the face is so loose and carefree it hides its fixed pitch construction well, allowing it to be used in other settings too. MVB Fantabular Sans is the sans serif version of MVB Fantabular.

MVB Solano Gothic Bold was originally designed as a display face for the City of Albany, California (located on the San Francisco Bay facing the Golden Gate Bridge and bordering Berkeley). Named for the City’s main street, the typeface needed to work on signage in proximity to early 20th Century buildings, and in contemporary settings. Rather than creating a neutered design to cover all bases, Mark van Bronkhorst chose to develop a simple, strong, condensed face that would offer flexibility of style by providing both retro and more contemporary forms. Solano Gothic has since been expanded to a family offering five weights from Light to Bold. The basic fonts provide upper- and lowercase forms, with figures designed to harmonize within upper- and lowercase settings (the standard figures are not full cap height). The same figures are provided with Small Caps, and align to small cap height. For all-cap settings requiring figures and monetary symbols of full-cap height, there are the “Cap” fonts. An alternate tabular “1” is provided in all fonts so that both fitted and tabular settings of figures are possible (access to alternate characters subject to system or application support).

Mark van Bronkhorst’s MVB Sacre Bleu was inspired by an example of French handwriting from the 1930s. With a goal to keep the script as authentic as possible, the font includes a number of ligatures to avoid letterform repetition. The year it released, MVB Sacre Bleu was selected as one of Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces, where reviewer Joshua Lurie-Terrell deemed it “stylish, memorable, and decidedly unkitschy.”

Kanna Aoki was designing fabrics and dishware for several major manufacturers when she designed MVB Cafe Mimi. The design came from a few words Aoki painted as decoration for a set of cappuccino cups. Aoki created the Regular weight for MVB Fonts using a brush. The Bold was adapted after digitization. Using several double-letter ligatures, the fonts can feel as natural and spontaneous as the original hand-painted lettering. Despite its curlicues and free-flowing forms, great care was taken to keep this script balanced and legible. It skips and hops along the baseline but doesn't lose its step.

MVB Bossa Nova is based on unattributed hand-lettering found in an old book, circa 1946. Yet unlike many scripts based on a vintage source, it feels fresh and dynamic. This is due to the skilled hands of Holly Goldsmith, who gave the forms a contemporary vigor despite their age. Alternate glyphs with extended ascenders offer extra flair.

A typeface is a tool. Sure, there are frilly fonts that are more art than craft, showy faces that exist merely to call attention to themselves. But, in the end, any functional typeface worth its salt lives to serve one thing first: the text, the content. Everything else—the fashion of the moment, the allure of individual words and letters—is secondary. MVB Solitaire™ epitomizes this universal typographic mandate. As a tempered sans serif somewhere between a humanist and a gothic, MVB Solitaire captures a 21st-century neutrality. But practical doesn’t have to mean banal. MVB Solitaire has a soul. While some “neutral” type is dead the moment the ink hits the page, MVB Solitaire delivers text that feels lively, contemporary, relevant. Readers will not tire of this type. Behind the useful exterior is an arsenal of thoughtful technical features. It’s no surprise that this family’s creator, Mark van Bronkhorst, was first a graphic designer before becoming a type designer. Mark built all the goodies into MVB Solitaire that he would appreciate as a user: case-sensitive punctuation; alternate forms that can be invoked individually or together; oldstyle and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths; slightly shorter lining figures that don’t stand out in running text, but also cap-height figures for all-cap settings; and the ability to speak nearly any Latin-based language. MVB Solitaire aspires to be the sort of workhorse that a designer keeps installed on their system at all times. It is a family bound to have a permanent spot in the font menu, always at the ready for projects (those most common of all) where the typography mustn’t mask the message. It has that quality that all truly useful typefaces have: the capacity to get the job done without getting in the way.

MVB Hotsy Totsy is Akemi Aoki’s first typeface design. Aoki created the letters in cut paper. Once digitized, the design was expanded to offer several weights and styles. Exaggerating the triangular serifs and tapering strokes of “Latin” typefaces, MVB Hotsy Totsy is the perfect party face, appearing frequently on board games, product packaging, and in children’s books. It is named for (what was at the time) a dive bar in Albany, California. The bar has since been renovated but its neon sign was preserved, a local landmark of San Francisco’s East Bay.

An old book found at a Paris bouquiniste contained samples of the typeface “Caractère de finance,” a bâtarde design by 18th century typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier. Rather than revive the type, Kanna Aoki decided to reinvent it, using a felt pen to achieve a rustic, handwritten quality, departing from the 18th century model as she saw fit. MVB Chanson d'Amour conveys a soulful elegance that stops short of the ostentatious, overwrought found in many formal scripts. It is lovely and sweet, but never saccharine.

MB NOIR is a 4 weight with italics font family that visually has different layers of style, at first glance its a modern clean geometry based face with some nice retro touches, it also has hints of the vintage about it, with a nod to the art deco style, with alternates and ligatures it gives a lot of scope for its uses and works very well at large and small sizes.

MB NEGATIVESPACE was inspired on a trip to Birmingham with my wife, seeing a billboard with the main text and parts of it missing. The idea is to use it sparingly; use a good amount of tracking to fill in the blanks and it works even better. Great for headlines, displays logotypes and short texts.

MB Vinatage is a 6 weight font family with italics that has its roots based firmly in the type and font design of the early 20th Century. With some art deco touches in the standard caps like the N and the low bars on the E, F & H, by using the stylistic alternates these can be changed to give the font a more contemporary look. The same applies to the lower case letters, with an alternate a and g and a stylistic lowercase t. The family works great as a display font using the thin and heavy weights and just as well for smaller & bulk text. Stay traditional or go contemporary or mix it up.

MB Empire is a font that like MB vintage has its roots in early 20th century design, It has a distinctly english feel with its style references to the classic Gill Sans. It has a very traditional look whilst still maintaining its own modernist individuality. It comes in six weights with italics and has extended language support. With many opentype features including oldstlye & lining figures, automatic fractions and more its a font family that will work for almost any application.

Inspired from geometric curves and circles, an audacious lower case display face with some alternate characters in Upper and Lower case glyphs. Great for Logos and Logotypes, headlines and larger text. Works well with smaller strap lines as well.

While uniqueness might be considered the main goal among type designers, our goal in this project was to be as far away from that uniqueness as possible. We designed MB Grotesk with strictest typography standards, holding fast to the type axioms long understood from the beginning of modern typography. After more than 600 hours of work — creation, production & release — the whole typeface family the MB Grotesk is a flawless branching away from the original Grotesque category. Included are 351 standard glyphs designed with geometric rules and grotesque type theories. MB Grotesk has 7 weights & their italics. It supports many languages including most languages which use both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. We are looking toward extending this family to include condensed, extended & Arabic versions as soon as possible.

A Hand Made hand painted font with over 100 ligatures to give the text a real free flowing and hand written feel. Great for wide range of applications and works best as upper and lowercase text in a range of sizes.

All Caps Art Deco font with alternate characters in Upper and Lower Case glyphs, some nice ligatures to create interesting letter sets. Great for Logotypes, Headlines, Straplines and smaller descriptive text to give that authentic Art Deco look and feel.

Genovaite Baroniene is former school teacher and a native of Lithuania who loves fancy letters. When she writes, she likes to add extra flourishes to her handwriting and printing. It simply appeals to her to do so. While living in the United States a few years ago and working in the health care field, she put pen to paper to provide a specimen of her writing from which a font could be developed. The process has taken longer than either of us expected. Now we are finally able to present Baroniene ML, a stylishly unique example of what we call Lithuanian Folk Baroque. Baroniene ML has a total of 362 glyphs, including the Unicode Latin Extended-A glyphs (0100 to 017F), covering the more widely-used Central European languages. To resolve the cedilla/undercomma conundrum, we have chosen to design a hybrid disconnected accent for use with C, G, K, L, N, R, S & T. We hope this solution is acceptable to users of Albanian, Catalan, French, Latvian, Portuguese, Romanian and Turkish. Baroniene ML also comes with four ligatures: gh, Th, th and Ch (167, 172, 177 and 181). Baroniene ML is certainly not the polished script of a professional calligrapher. It is very personal. The human source is still visible in its form. The letter spacing is uneven. Some of the curves are not quite perfect. In sum, the individuality has not been refined out of it. That is why it is so charming. If you want for a font that has a very different look, perhaps Baroniene ML is what you need.

A heavy black display face with lots of retro 'cool'. Modernist to the extreme MB SIXTYTHREE oozes 'mod' culture. Great for magazines & headlines, logotypes, posters, album artwork.

Cruickshank is a decorative typeface from the late Victorian period. The upper case includes several letters with swash strokes, extending well below the baseline, as found in the original design. Alternatives to the swash caps are provided. The lower case contains small caps of simpler design. The face was designed by William W. Jackson and released by MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan Type Foundry of Samson Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1886. MS&J was founded originally as Binny & Ronaldson in 1796 and later known as The Johnson Type Foundry. Cruickshank has a strong late Victorian flavor without the extravagance of so many fonts of the period. In its simplicity and clarity, it may be seen as a precursor to the Art Nouveau style that would develop a decade later.

Gundrada ML was inspired by the lettering on the tomb of Gundrada de Warenne. She was buried at Southover Church at Lewes, Sussex, in the south of England in 1085. The Latin inscription on her tomb, STIRPS GUNDRADA DUCUM, meaning “Gundrada, descendant of the Duke” may have led to the speculation that she was the daughter of William, Duke of Normandy and bastard son of Robert the Devil of Normandy and Arletta, daughter of a tanner in Falaise. In 1066 William defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and was crowned William I of England. More commonly known as William the Conquerer, he commissioned a string of forts around the kingdom and charged trusted Norman Barons to control the contentious Anglo-Saxon population. William de Warenne, husband of Gundrada, was one of these Barons. There has also been the suggestion that Gundrada may have been the daughter of William’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, by a previous marriage. According to the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, England 1921-22), both of these contentions are in dispute. Searching the past of a thousand years ago is like wandering in a heavy fog: facts are only dimly in view. Regardless, I know that I found these letterforms immediately engaging in their simplicity. Unadorned and unsophisticated, they have a direct honesty that rests well in the company of humanistic sans serifs like Franklin Gothic or Gill Sans, appealing to a contemporary sensibility. The lettering on the tomb is in upper case only. Although Gundrada does not sound Norman French to me, her husband certainly and her father probably were Norman French. Nonetheless, the man that carved her tombstone was probably Anglo-Saxon, like most of the people. For that reason, we are quite comfortable with a fairly generic lower case from an Anglo-Saxon document of the time. The time was a time of transition, of contending language influences. This font reflects some of that tension. Features 1. Multi-Lingual Font with 389 glyphs and 698 Kerning Pairs. 2. OpenType GSUB layout features: onum, dlig, liga, salt & hist. 3. Tabular Figures and Alternate Old-Style Figures. 4. Alternate Ruled Caps (line above and below, matching to brackets). 5. Central Europe, Western Europe, Turkish and Baltic Code Pages. 6. Additional accents for Cornish and Old Gaelic. 7. Stylistic alternates A, E, y and #. 8. Ligatures ST, Th, fi and fl. 9. Historic alternate longs. The zip package includes two versions of the font at no extra charge. There is an OTF version which is in Open PS (Post Script Type 1) format and a TTF version which is in Open TT (True Type)format. Use whichever works best for your applications.