HWT Arabesque

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 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.