Mayfair

The long awaited and much requested revival of Robert Hunter Middleton’s very popular classic is finally here. Mayfair Cursive was an instant hit for Middleton in 1932, and it went on being used widely until late into the 1970s, in spite of it never having crossed over to film type technology.

Like a few of its contemporary designs, most notably the work of Lucien Bernhard, Mayfair is a formal script that is somewhat based on traditional italic forms with swash uppercase, but also employs subsidiary hairline strokes in some of its lowercase as an emphasis to the script’s cursive traits.

Why these gorgeous letters never made the leap into photo typesetting is a mystery to us. But here they are now in digital form, almost three quarters of a century since they first saw the light in metal. Mayfair was redrawn from original 48 pt specimen. It also underwent a major expansion of character set. Plenty of swash characters and ligatures were added. An alternate set of lowercase was also made, in order to give the user a choice between connected and disconnected variations of the same elegant script.

Mayfair ships in all popular font formats. While the Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts (Mayfair and Mayfair Alt), the OpenType version is a single font containing all the extra characters in conveniently programmed features that are easily accessible by OpenType-supporting software applications.

We are quite sure today’s graphic designers will be appreciative of having access to the face that all but defined menus, romance covers, wine and liquor labels and chocolate boxes for almost two 20th century generations.