Digitizing Faust

Carl Shank • July 11, 2025

Charles Ayers Faust (b. 1860) was an American calligrapher and typographic designer known primarily for his 1912 compendium Faust’s 75 New Alphabets, a richly illustrated manual of lettering techniques. Published in Chicago by the C. W. Braithewait Company, this 72‑page volume is now in the public domain. CARE Typography, in its mission to digitally restore older typography, has restored some of Faust's designs for the modern type world. 75 unique alphabets for artistic lettering, including brush, air-brush, air-pencil, relief, stencil, marking, shading, and both ornate (Payzant, Soennecken) and practical “common pen” styles. They are Highly visual, serving as both an instructional guide and inspirational specimen book for sign-writers, designers, artists, and printers of the early 20th century.


As a historical reference these pen inspired drawings offer a snapshot of commercial and decorative lettering techniques before the rise of digital typography. They are still used today by lettering artists and calligraphers looking for period-authentic styles. The pen styles range from Art Nouveau (2 styles) to large poster display type to fancy pen lettering.


A note about the payzant pen. The Payzant pen is a specialized broad-edged lettering pen associated with expressive calligraphy, particularly for display and titling purposes. It's named after Canadian calligrapher, artist and educator Douglas Payzant, who popularized a unique, energetic, and highly legible script style using this tool in the mid-20th century. Payzant was known for his expressive, rhythmic lettering, developing a distinctive style that emphasized rapid execution, clarity and boldness, and a sense of liveliness. His style was especially influential in the 1960s–1980s during a resurgence in interest in expressive pen-lettering techniques. The pen techniques included flowing and natural stroke sequences, wide verticals versus narrow horizontals, legible but informal, and designed for large-scale lettering such as in sketchbooks, scrapbooks, and decorative journal pages. It was perfect for posters, title pages, and public signage due to its bold strokes and was commonly used in manual layouts, advertising mockups, and theatre/film title art.


CARE Typography has digitized some of these pen lettering samples from Faust, seeking to retain the descriptive flair and flavor of the lettering. They are available as a package or as select fonts. Contact CARE Typography at cshanktype@gmail.com for ordering and prices.



Successful Layout & Design

English Penman Calligraphic Fonts

By Carl Shank • July 13, 2026
George Bickham the Elder (b. 1684) was one of the most influential English engravers, calligraphers, and writing masters of the eighteenth century. Although he was a capable print engraver, his lasting significance lies in his role in preserving and popularizing English Round Hand (later known as Copperplate script) through beautifully engraved writing manuals. His work shaped business handwriting, penmanship education, typography, and ornamental lettering for generations. He trained as both a writing master and an engraver, two professions that were closely linked before the advent of modern printing. Rather than merely copying handwriting, he engraved elaborate penmanship examples onto copper plates, allowing thousands of identical, highly detailed specimens to be printed. He became renowned for his extraordinary ability to translate handwritten originals directly onto copper plates with exceptional fidelity, a skill admired by his contemporaries.

Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase”

By Carl Shank • June 13, 2026
Compositors & Type: Origin and Use of “Uppercase” and “Lowercase” Carl Shank, CARE Typography Most everyone knows what “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters are. They refer, of course, to our “capital” letters and our “regular” small print. But not many know why or how they came to be known by such terminology. The answer is found in the history and development of typography and printing. “Case” here doesn’t refer to “circumstance” or “condition.” It refers to the wooden trays used to store metal letters, the top case for capital letters (“uppercase”) and the lower case for small letters. Each tray was divided into compartments to hold the type. The lower case also held the punctuation marks and other pieces of type, like “spacers.” The type case was a shallow wooden tray divided into compartments of various sizes. There were about thirty styles of type cases, and some of these were made in different sizes.[1] The most common, or standard, size was 32¼ by 16 inches, outside dimensions, and ⅛ inches deep, inside. One of three traditional plans or schemes for such type cases involved (1) all characters in one case; (2) capitals, small capitals and a few other characters in one case; or (3) the small letters, figures, points, spaces and quads in another case. The two latter cases formed a pair and would nearly always be used together.(See Images) Hand compositors (or “swifts”) would take individual letters, spaces and punctuation marks or other characters from the type case and place them in what was called a composing “stick” in such a manner that when the type characters are properly assembled, they form words, sentences and paragraphs. The work of the press room compositor was divided into two fundamental operations — the “setting” of type and the “unsetting” of type. The former was called composition and the latter, distribution. A visual example of such typesetting can be seen in some of the episodes of The Waltons, an American historical dramatelevision series about a family in rural western Virginia in the Appalachian/Blue Ridge mountains chain, during the economic hardships and mass unemployment of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the subsequent United State home front during World War II in the 1940s. The series aired from 1972 to 1981. John-Boy, a leading character of the series, opened a print shop in a shed by the family home with an old-fashioned mechanical printer that required setting cold metal type from a type case. His brother was the compositor while John-Boy ran the printing machine.
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