HWT Bernice is an ornament font system designed by Marian Bantjes for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. The font was named for retired type trimmer Bernice Schwahert as part of the Hamilton Wood Type Legacy Project.

Bantjes designed these shapes specifically for Hamilton’s newly refurbished border–stamping machine as a new application for this 150-year-old device. The operator of this machine would use multiple dies to stamp complex and continuous border patterns similar to those in Victorian-era wood type catalogs. Marian decided to design a set of six simple ornaments that the museum could use to stamp contemporary border designs.

The digital font version expands a bit beyond what is possible with the stamping machine and allows designers to assemble these six base shapes into a multitude of ornaments, borders, and patterns by accessing flipped and rotated variations of these shapes, which are all accessible in the font as simple keystrokes.

Here’s how the font works: The first glyph is assigned its eight rotated and flipped variations to the keystrokes A B C D and a b c d. The second glyph is assigned with the same variations to E F G H and e f g h, and so on. You can use the font by simply typing patterns of letters row upon row. You can mix all of these glyphs together for more complex borders and patterns. The number of combinations is limited only by the user’s imagination.

This digital version of the Bernice font is available from P22 Type Foundry, or you can contact the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum about acquiring the wood borders for your letterpress printing projects. The Chapbook is is also available from P22 and Hamilton.