Type revivals hold a rich history in type design and play an essential role in the development and transformation of typefaces across changing technologies and time periods. They can be true to form or take on a new face of its own—transforming into something quite different. To introduce ourselves to this practice and to familiarize ourselves with the technology of our time, students of Type West were tasked with starting our own dialogue between a source of early printing from the metal type era, pre-twentieth century, and how we would study, understand, and interpret those those letterforms—bringing them into a digital space.

Beatrice No. 30 is a type revival of a late 19th century text type, Bruce Old Style No. 20 (and some help from Bruce Old Style No. 30)—and my first term project for Type West Online. I worked on this typeface over the course of 9 weeks. For the source material, I selected a library bound edition of Book II of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: The Vision of Purgatory. It was Translated by The Rev. Henry Francis Cary (along with critical explanatory notes) and has beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré.