A revival back and forth, as the stories of Bilbo Baggins: started as a wood typeface with missing pieces, went through a delicate process of adjustment and complementation of the missing characters and then returned as a multilayer digital font that will become a wood typeface again.
In 2018, we made a digitalization and revival of an incomplete set of movable wood type on behalf of “El ombligo del libro”, an small traditional printer in Mexico. At the beginning we only had samples of the uppercase letters and from this we developed the lowercase, numbers and the rest of the signs according to our personal interpretation of the samples we had. It was until later that we obtained the information about the original font, a Roman Scherer design from 1920, Serie 5409. Roman Scherer was a designer in Luzern, Switzerland, who ran Holztypenfabrik Roman Scherer, possibly the only wood type manufacturer in Switzerland. It was amazing and also funny to discover the resembles between our lower case and numbers design and the orginal ones.
These are the samples from wich we started to work
Xihtli a multilayer font
