Mr Eaves
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|
| Category | Serif |
|---|---|
| Classification | Transitional |
| Designer(s) |
Zuzana Licko John Baskerville John Handy |
| Foundry | Emigre |
| Variations | Mrs Eaves XL, Mr Eaves |
Mrs Eaves is a transitional serif typeface designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. It is a variant of Baskerville, designed in Birmingham, England in the 1750s. Mrs. Eaves adapts Baskerville for use in display contexts, such as headings and book blurbs, through the use of a low x-height and a range of unusual combined characters or ligatures.
Mrs. Eaves was released by Emigre, a type foundry run by Licko and husband Rudy VanderLans, and has been joined by an 'XL' version for body text, as well as Mr. Eaves, a sans-serif companion.
Mrs Eaves is named after Sarah Eaves, the woman who became John Baskerville's wife. Like his typefaces, John Baskerville was, himself, a controversial character. As Baskerville was setting up his printing and type business, he hired Sarah Eaves as his live-in housekeeper; eventually, her husband Richard abandoned her and their five children, and Mrs. Eaves became Baskerville's mistress and eventual helpmate with typesetting and printing. She married Baskerville within a month of her estranged husband's death. Selection of the name Mrs Eaves honors one of the forgotten women in the history of typography.
Stylistically, Mrs Eaves is a revival of the Baskerville typefaces cut for Baskerville by John Handy. Like Baskerville, Mrs Eaves has a near vertical stress, departing from the old style model. Identifying characters, similar to Baskerville's types, are the lowercase g with its open lower counter and swashlike ear. Both the roman and italic uppercase Q have a flowing swashlike tail. The uppercase C has serifs at top and bottom; there is no serif at the apex of the central junction in uppercase W; and the uppercase G has a sharp spur suggesting a vestigial serif.
Licko's design is unorthodox and not a pure revival. In creating it, she was influenced by how it would be printed by contrast to printing in Baskerville's time: considering the flatness of offset lithography in comparison to letterpress printing, and the resolution of set devices and on-screen display. The overall stroke weight of Mrs Eaves is considerably heavier than most other revivals, countering the often anemic reproduction of smaller point sizes in other digital revivals of Baskerville, and restoring some of the feeling of letterpress printing's unpredictability. To compensate for this and create a brighter-looking page, Licko lowered the x-height, reducing the amount of space taken up by ink on the page.
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