What the Font?!

I have to admit, I’m a little bit font-obsessed. Every time I have a project due, I spend at least an hour perusing the Internet for new and unique fonts. I’ve tried my hand at identifying fonts before, usually by Googling “such-and-such movie poster font” or something like that, but I didn’t have much luck Googling “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland font”. When I did, most of the hits were along the lines of this. I was about to go with a generic talk on popular fonts in certain eras, when Erin Hensley introduced the class to a nifty site, identifont.com. With the aid of this site, I was able to find close matches to the fonts in my books.

I’ll start off with the first edition. I stumbled across this page, which happened to have some high-resolution images of a few of the pages from the first edition. Identifont thought the font used on both the title page and in the book was Monotype Modern Condensed, released in 1896—too late to be used in this book. The handy-dandy FontBook app lists a font called Monotype Old Style, which was designed in 1858 by Alexander Phemister. This seemed like a more suitable match, until I looked at it on Identifont--the Q is all wrong. So I'll go with Monotype something. Monotype Not-Corsiva. :)

Title page from Alice first edition

Text of Alice first edition

The title page of the Penguin Classics edition is eerily similar to that of the first edition, but it’s not exactly the same. It looks much more like Monotype Modern Condensed. The font in the rest of the book is different, and Identifont identified it as Bembo, released in 1929. The font in the text of the book looks way too modern to be a reasonable facsimile of the 1898 text like the title page is, so it is very possible that Bembo, or something very similar, was used.

Look familiar?

Penguin text

In the Garcia-illustrated book, the title page has the title in Garcia’s artwork, but some of the other words are in a font that is very, very familiar to me, as a Tim Burton fan. It’s called Burton’s Nightmare, and it’s based off the font used in the Nightmare Before Christmas. According to Identifont, the font used for the text of the book is EB Garamond, designed in 2010 (the same year the edition was published). I don’t know if it’s exact, but the font used in the text of the book is definitely similar. It’s definitely something Garamond. 

Garcia-illustrated title page

Check out the versals Garcia did. Love.

Next week's blog will be about illustration, which I'm excited about. :)