The package contains also BOSMAN_dings! TRY OTHER CABAJ’S FONTS!

The package contains also BOSMAN_dings! TRY OTHER CABAJ’S FONTS!

A good while ago I developed an interest in the Japanese art of dwarfed potted trees, Bonsai Font. I bought some old pamphlets on the subject from Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

In one—“Handbook on Bonsai: Special Techniques” (seventh printing, February 1976)—the type was bad.

Old worn lead type, I suspect, spread wide in the tops of characters and disappearing at the bottoms. Two decades later, I came across my Brooklyn Botanic Garden collection and was struck again by this interesting type.

Inspired, I made a typeface. Didn’t take me long to decide on a name for it either: a name with a double meaning, based both on its look and its inspiration.

Bonsai, the typeface, has two styles, a roman and a true italic, and comes with more than 800 glyphs—including true small caps, lining, and old-style figures, lots o’ ligatures, fractions, currency symbols, and support for Central/Eastern European languages.

There’s a cemetery in Castine, Maine—a lovely coastal town perhaps best known for Maine Maritime Academy and a surviving crop of stately old American elms—with headstones dating back into the 18th century.

They have the standard old headstone shape, often topped by winged skulls. Thanks to a friend, I got my hands on a couple of rubbings that show a particular style of stone carving that was popular in New England at the time.

I found them captivating to the point of typeface design. Castine has both roman and italic styles, each with numerous historical ligatures, old-style and lining figures, Central/Eastern European alphabets, and a winged skull.

Pocket Serif is the companion to Pocket, a hand-drawn/lettered serif font. It has a very complete character set, supporting all western European languages, and has alternate glyphs for upper and lowercase characters, accessible through Opentype features, to give it a more authentic hand-lettered look. Regular & Bold versions included.

Blackwood – hand-drawn font in 4 weights. Blackwood is a typeface made with love by Fonts of Chaos and is available in four weights.

UPPERCASE lowercase Numerals Symbols

Font format:

• .ttf