#regulus typeface

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.

View other posts with work by Golgonooza Letter Foundry & Press.

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Typography Tuesday

PARMENIDES ARCHAIC GREEK TYPE

This week we present examples of American type founder Dan Carr’s archaic Greek typeface named after the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea, released in 2000 by Carr’s Golgonooza Letter Foundry in Ashuelot, New Hampshire. Carr designed, cut, and founded the typeface for an 2004 edition of The Fragments of Parmenides printed in Berkeley, California by Peter Koch, with a translation by fellow typographer Robert Bringhurst.

These specimens were printed as an insert for Dan Carr’s article “Cutting Parmenides,” published in Matrix 22, Winter 2002, pp. 114-128. The specimen was handprinted at Golgonooza using a text from the Oxford edition of Richmond Lattimore’s line-for-line translation of the Odyssey, with the English printed in Regulus, also designed and cut by Carr. Koch asked Carr to design a typeface with a “somewhat rustic or crude look” and some “rock and roll” put into it. As source materials, Carr used Ionian Greek script (Parmenides was from the Ionian colony of Elea) found in Lillian Jeffrey’s The Local Scripts of Archaic Greek and examples of Ionian Greek inscriptions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In meeting Koch’s requirements, Carr also wanted to design a type that captured Parmenides’s specific way of thinking. Carr writes:

Typography is a way of thought, much as poetry is a way of thought. . . . The typography of different languages and different times can provide useful clues to the thought of the people. . . . Typography reflects so much of its culture and language that it may be one of the most evocative artefacts of a literature.

Matrix 22 was printed by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England in an edition of 825 copies, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

View more posts from Matrix.

View other posts relating to the Whittington Press.