Esperanza Collection

About Esperanza

Esperanza was designed in 2022 for the Athens Cultural Center, in the Hudson Valley village of Athens, New York. The design was inspired by the lettering stamped into stoneware manufactured there throughout the 19th century at the Athens Pottery Works by Nathan Clark and his partners and descendants. The type echoes the sturdy late transitional English types of William Martin and Richard Austin which would have been predominantly used in the former colony.

The tract of land called Caniskek was purchased from its Native American holders in 1665, and changed hands several times in the years which followed, eventually coming into the possession of Dutch blacksmith Jan van Loon, who built his house in 1706 and named the settlement Loonenburgh, often anglicized as "Lunenburg". In 1794 a group of land speculators commissioned an urban plan from the French surveyor and architect Pierre Pharoux for a city to be named “Esperanza" located on the Hudson River at Loonenburg. That plan failed, but a much more modest one was realised in 1805 and the Village of Athens was incorporated, riding the classical-revival toponymy craze of 1790–1850. (Within two hundred miles you'll find Rome, Troy, Utica, Syracuse, Ithaca, and Phoenicia, and you can easily drive from Athens to Cairo in 20 minutes.)

The original Esperanza types were caps-only in roman and a subtly-rounded stencil, designed to be genuinely useful for stencilling and not merely as an affectation. Happy with how the type was working we drew a lowercase to go with the capitals, and wondered what would happen if we applied the traditional "tail" terminal of the 'a' to the 'u'. Which opened the door to a complete "upright" lowercase: a non-italic doing italic things, inspired by Aldus Pius Manutius and William Addison Dwiggins in equal measure.

Supported Languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Kurdish, Latin, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian, Lower Sorbian, Luxembourgish, Malay, Maltese, Manx, Māori, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Sami, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Walloon, Welsh