In 1916 the Prang company - still famous for their excellent pens and pencils - commissioned Thomas Woods Stevens to hire the best calligraphers of the era to hand letter sample pages with different Prang pens and in a variety of styles.

The resulting book is a font maker’s dream, a collection of period lettering samples perfect for making new fonts. One of the sample pages shows off the look of the Spoonbill pen with a set of classic art deco style letters by Charles Earley.

This sample is the basis for our Spoonbill font, which includes a full character set, plus character variations for nesting and overlapping, and a small selection of decorative border characters in the art deco style.