I do hand lettering even when I'm doing ordinary writing, or even not-so-ordinary writing, like solving crossword puzzles. The cryptics of Henry Hook are not puzzles that mere mortals should be trying to solve with a stopwatch in hand, so you might as well take your time. So while I was going through one of his books, I redid the grids on graph paper, and lettered my solutions in this font. I know. I'm completely disgusting. Bayern - German for "Bavaria". Think of this as a calligraphy font made by someone who has heard of the concept, and that's about all. He turns his pen, he makes unusual strokes, and generally makes a mockery of the whole process. A spooky little hand-drawn font that's really quite harmless. Beltane is a Wiccan holiday, but more importantly is the name of my best friend's cat. This font was also FontFace's Font of the Day on November 11, 2002. Actually, the e-mail he sent said, "Beltane is coming!" and I thought, you're more than a month late. . . . While preparing for the National Puzzlers' League convention, I found I had a lot of work to do, and I was worried about whether or not people would be happy with what I was doing. To work off the extra energy, I did crossword puzzles, and I do them for speed. To fill in the squares faster, it's better to write the letters with as few strokes as possible, and, well, you get the picture. A font transmitted to me via tachyon telephone from my own future. Remind me to design this font someday to avoid temporal paradox. You know, I thought I made this word up, and I thought that'd mean that mine was the only Daybreaker out there, but it seems to be a New Zealand road rally, a villain who wreaks havoc on calendars, and most overwhelmingly, a CD by electronica-folk artist (?!) Beth Orton. I took the dearly departed Enigmatic Italic, skewed it upright again, got some thugs to rough it up a little, read in the resulting bitmaps, and voila! Instant grunge. No apostrophe in the title, because pedestrian crossing lights don't use one. The one that started it all. I've cleaned up the lines, much as I did for Three-Sixty, and I recreated the long-lost italic version of the font. The character set is now more complete, and I think all this has made the world a happier place, don't you? This font has been updated to Unicode 4.0 and Enigmatic 2, making, um, I dunno, Unatic 6-and-change. More puzzle lettering. This time I was doing cryptarithms, those puzzles where an arithmetic problem has been encoded, letters for numbers, and you have to figure out the solution. This weird art-decoish font came out, and so I named it after an appropriate author. It didn't occur to me until later that FITZGERALD had ten different, non-repeating letters, which make it a pretty good cryptarithm key.... Also comes with a "black" version so you can waste more ink when you print with it. A fellow puzzler asked me to help him identify a font he'd used in putting together a publication he'd made some years ago before techie typogs were running around digitizing everything in sight. Neither I nor the folks at Typophile could say for sure, but someone thought it could be something called Grock. Gangue is a G-rock: it's the stuff left over after you extract the vein of gold from your ore. GangueOuais isn't this font's original name, but given the, um, naughty nature of the publication in question, I can't tell you what the original name was. The basic serif font in all its glory, and all its variations. Click here to meet the family. And finally, you can grab everything on the site in one swell foop, with the Panther Memorial .zip file.