Typography Tuesday
REGULUS TYPE
In 1996, American poet and type designer Dan Carr, co-founder with his partner Julia Ferrari at Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press, designed and hand-cut his Regulus typeface. The font is named for the star rising in the constellation Leo when the first alphabet was completed. Of this endeavor, Carr writes:
Making this type required that I learn to cut punches well, to strike and justify matrices accurately and make or acquire all the necessary tools. In this process I gained fresh insights into the history of making type. . . . Cutting a typeface is like building your house with stones, you must hold each stone in your hands. Finding the shape and weight of each part of every letter and placing it where it fits involve choices that reveal the taste a punchcutter has for letters.
With the entire font of type complete after nearly ten years, Carr and Ferrari began setting their first first book in Regulus, Carr’s own Gifts of the Leaves, an exploration of the seasons through the symbolic alphabet of trees. Shown here are the prospectus for the book along with photographs of the punches and matrices for the type from Carr’s article “Making a Visible Spirit: Cutting Regulus Punches by Hand,” published in Matrix 16, Winter 1996, pp.19-25.
Matrix 16 was printed in an edition of 925 copies by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.
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