Eric Gill, British stonecarver, artist, type designer and religious mystic, created the first letter of this initial or drop-cap face in 1929 (see excerpt, next chapter). This digital version of his attractive line, 58 years later, should fill a need for those who now have much easier access to great Gill typefaces - such as Monotype/Adobe’s Gill Sans Serif, Joanna, and Perpetua - and want a little icing for the cake.
Floriated Gill has been released on boards in Macintosh Type 1 format, and in PC Type 1 format. There has been no True Type release (sorry), so if you see one, it has been transformed by others, and enjoys only my curse.
The font consists of twenty-six capital initials, and three bonus initial found in the a, b and i keys, along with two dingbats / \. The last five characters are provided as an incentive to register the font with me. Yes, Floriated Gill is shareware, for $5 Canadian for Canadians; $5 American for Americans and others. The money is destined to pay for about three or four shareware programmes I haven’t registered myself yet, and any overage will go into an education fund for my baby daughter. For those who register, I will send them a version of Floriated Gill fattened up with some other alternate initials and figures by Eric Gill.
Please feel free to bounce these two Type 1 versions around on boards and commercial online services, complete with documents, though anyone including either or both on a commercial CD-ROM disk should notify me first, just out of politeness.
Geoff Heinricks
Chevalier Gris Digital Foundry
216 Howard Park Avenue
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M6R 1W2
comments, complaints and suggestions to:
geoff_s._heinricks@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com
Background on the Original Design
“In 1929 Gill had designed a floriated intial N for use in the Perpetua specimen that was included in the seventh number of The Fleuron. Stanley Morison was delighted with the letter and asked him to design an alphabet containing this floriated motif. At that time Gill held that the mechanical methods which the Corporation must employ to reproduce their types contradicted the nature of his design. Hence he declined. In 1936, however, he changed his mind and offered the Monotype Corporation the drawings from which the charming Floriated Initials were cut. There have been few happier after-thoughts by a designer. The intials are as delightful as the decorated Locarno designs by Rudolph Koch. Unfortunately, they have been but rarely but used in England, a strange neglect, for they are well suited to many forms of typographical display, from dust wrappers to occasional items in jobbing printing. The type has been seen in one or two private press books, notably in Evelyn Waugh’s editing of Monsignor Ronald Knox’s Sermons, published by Dropmore Press in 1951.”
from Robert Harling’s The Letter forms and Type Designs of Eric Gill, Eva Svensson and David R. Godine, 1978 ISBN 0-87923-200-5
