It began, as most obsessions do, with a single letter.
I was knee-deep in the archives of a defunct Leipzig print shop, cataloging type specimens from the 1960s. Dust motes danced in the slivers of afternoon light. The shop’s owner, a gruff man named Klaus, had warned me that the basement held only "junk." But junk, to a typographer, is often buried treasure.
I asked Klaus if I could scan the proofs. He shrugged. "For what? The ghost is dead."
Use it when your design needs the discipline of the 1960s and the soul of the 14th century. Use it for book covers that need to whisper, or posters that need to sing.
SIL Open Font License (OFL) – Free for personal and commercial use. File Type: TTF / OTF Character Set: Basic Latin, Western European accents. The Moral of the Story Great design never dies. It just waits for someone to digitize it. Download Ars Nova Regular today and let your next project carry a piece of typographic history.
For three months, I painstakingly digitized those grainy, imperfect proofs. I traced the calligraphic lift of the ‘a’, the stoic verticality of the ‘l’, the unexpected, joyous flick at the terminal of the ‘r’. It was like performing a seance, coaxing a lost soul from paper into the cold logic of Bézier curves.
Today, you can download the restored —a true piece of typographic history pulled from the ashes of a Leipzig fire.
