Foundry Old Style is a transitional roman in the classical tradition and shows the influence of the pen stroke in incunabula printed types. Although the pen stroke forms the structure of the letterforms it not as apparent as in these early types and it is less refined than the later Garamonds. Foundry Old Style is a small family of three weights with a book italic. Designed as book face.

Notes

The first Foundry typeface, Foundry Old Style released in 1990 was already underway as a design before The Foundry was formed. I wanted desperately to do a Renaissance old style serifed typeface and get it out of my system. I had been looking for ages at all those beautiful incunabula typefaces especially those of Nicholas Jensen.

I made a free interpretation using an old broken clarinet reed discarded by my daughter Hannah and fountain pen ink. All the letters were freely created and then overdrawn many many times onto detail paper and finally carefully traced onto tracing paper.