I always admired the beauty of Gothic letters, but lamented their low readability. The revivals of Gothic faces are beautiful, but they revive everything, including the traits that prevent readability. Blackletters are fine in ads and titles, but can’t be used in long texts (like books on Middle Ages, Medieval romances etc) where they would be the perfect historical choice. And I wanted to change this scenario. With Giureska, instead of taking one particular face to revive, I chose the best traits from many Gothic faces, i.e. the forms that were pleasant to look and easy to read. For the ‘small caps’, I studied uncial scripts and made a similar selection, adapting everything to make a unified font. With three weights, true italics and the uncials, Giureska can endure a variety of projects, bringing the appeal of Middle Ages much beyond the cover.

The Scriptorium got its start in the early days of personal computers with a few font designs for the Commodore 64, and the very first font which we did back then in the early 1980s was a gothic calligraphy font. That style of fonts - the medieval, gothic and black letter genre - has always been the backbone of our collection, but with recent releases we've stayed away from them to introduce a bit more variety. Well, with our new Zauberer font the antique, medieval and gothic look is back with a vengeance. Zauberer isn't a true medieval calligraphy style. It's based on early printed type from Germany which combines calligraphic elements with decorative embellishments from the woodcut printing era. The result is decorative and antique looking and rather appealing. The name comes from the German word for a magician or illusionist.