HWT Arabesque

A PSYCHEDELIC FONT FROM THE 19th century

Digitized by Terry Wudenbachs

 

A long lost Art Nouveau wood type from the Hamilton Museum Collection evokes the excesses of Victorian design and the equally quirky 1960s Psychedelic era revival of the Victorian type styles. Free flowing organic designs that flourished with Art Nouveau in the late 1800s were directly referenced and further distorted with with phototype in the late 1960s. This design, known as Arabesque, was produced by the Morgans & Wilcox Co. and the Wm. Page Co. as almost identical designs. Both manufacturers were acquired by Hamilton and offered briefly by Hamilton as design #618.

This curious wood type defies most of the basic tenets of type design and what comes to mind when one thinks "wood type". Many characters have a lively eccentricity that were all left true to the original design. Additional characters were designed to fill out the standard range of characters found in digital fonts. This font includes over 280 characters for full unicode support of Western and Central European Latin characters.

 

Price: $24.95

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Also Available as part of the current Full HWT Collection

TEST DRIVE

 

The two primary sources for this digitization come from the Hamilton Wood Type Museum Collection and from the WNY Book Arts Collaborative for the lower case specimens. Other references were sourced from Page and Morgans & Wilcox specimen books found in the collection of the Cary Library at RIT, the Newberry Library in Chicago and the archive of the Hamilton Wood Type Museum.

While many wood type designs are often found from several manufacturers, this design only seems to have been offered by Page and Morgans & Wilcox (and later Hamilton).

• Page Arabesque, first shown in 1872
renamed No 618 after Page concern is purchase by Hamilton in January, 1891

• Morgans & Wilcox Arabesque, 1884
renamed No 3189 after M & W concern is purchase by Hamilton December, 1897