An Interview with John Hudson John Hudson, co-founder of Tiro Typeworks, world-class type designer and expert in font technology. Today it’s my honor to interview him and talk a little about the award-winning superfamily, Brill. ILT: Thanks again for joining us, John. My first question for you is: Brill is a modern classic text typeface…

Printing arrived in the Americas in 1539, in Mexico City. A hundred years later, the first press, owned by Elizabeth Glover, was established in Cambridge Massachusetts shortly after the first slaves arrived in August 1619, in the then English colony of Virginia. …

Recently, in Granjon’s Beautiful Bastard, I touched briefly and tangentially on some of the earliest printed calligraphy manuals. Today we’ll take a look at two of the earliest ‘writing mistresses’ to have had their calligraphy copybooks* published in print. * Whereas writing manuals usually provide some practical instruction (e.g. ductus…

During the first half-century of printing in Europe ( c. 1450–1500), there were few restrictions on the printing trade, either on who could start a print-shop or on what they chose to print. Censorship of printed books got off to a rather slow start. In 1475, the university of Cologne…

Type designers take care of the details so that we aren’t unnecessarily distracted by them. And good type designers relish those details. To listen to them explain their craft and describe their font-making processes is like watching the child of zero-sugar parents eat its first candy bar. Anyway, this is…

To the Egyptians, it was a reflection of the Nile; for the Babylonians, a giant serpent or length of rope. In Greek mythology, the infant Heracles was brought to suckle at the breast of a sleeping Hera, the goddess of childbirth. When she wakes, she pushes the child away and…

For the best part of 2,000 years, the earth stood at the center of the universe. It did not move but was surrounded by a series of embedded transparent spheres. Each hollow sphere, for the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and an outermost sphere or firmament of…

Perhaps this article should have ended at the question mark in its title. And by the end of it, you may well concur. …