These days I’m taking advantage of Raph Levien’s patent pending ‘Spiro’ technology to design fonts with much less work than conventional methods. I have a small handful of fonts at various early stages of development, but the one I’m most inclined to actually finish is Ĉielarko (= Rainbow) based on type used to print Isaac Newton’s ‘Opticks’:
Originally I was going to call it ‘Treatise’ but Ĉielarko seems more apropos. I don’t know who cut the type; the printers were a Smith and Walford who styled themself Printers to the Royal Society. Not all of the work is printed in this same typeface, which I found to be enticingly quirky (along with its italic).
Actually I might put an Aldine I started doing out there as just a set of capitals, and call that ‘finished’. I’m inclined to just start again rather than take my already-done stuff further, and I’ve found a better scan of ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (Aldine Press, 1499). To our good luck it was a big seller in its day, which you wouldn’t expect of a book about some kind of nymphal sex tour, would you?
