IM Fell English

Christoffel van Dijck cut the original of this one, and that sets it apart from the big Fell sizes Peter De Walpergen made at Oxford, which Stanley Morison measured against van Dijck’s Dutch work and found cruder. John Fell, Bishop of Oxford and Dean of Christ Church, collected type like this on purpose. From 1668 he was building a learned press, and in a letter of 1672 he wrote that doing things well “will not be don with English letters”.

When he died on 10 July 1686, at 61, his will left the whole collection of punches, matrices and molds to the University of Oxford, with orders to keep it together, and the university did. Stanley Morison, writing in 1951, called it the oldest surviving punches and matrices in England, and they were still being used to print books.

Igino Marini digitized the Fell Types size by size. This is the English size, which Marini says should be printed at 13.5 points to match the original. He spaced and kerned it with iKern, his own software.

The roman and italic come as a pair, the italic far narrower, near 16% shorter over a sentence. There are discretionary ligatures, stylistic alternates and 4 stylistic sets.

It suits a novel set in the 17th century or a facsimile title page, set at that 13.5 point size or close to it.