Perpetua

2. Perpetua was designed by Eric Gill. He was born February 22, 1882 in Brighton Sussex and passed away on November 17, 1940

3. Eric Gill, the highly skilled English letter-cutter, writer, and sculptor, originally designed this type for Stanley Morison at Monotype in 1925.

4-5. This font fits into the transitional classification because its face retains the qualities of stone-cut lettering, as well as the old style features of a slanted stress and medium contrast between thick and thin letter strokes. The serifs are particularly small, sharply cut, and horizontal. The italic looks more like a sloping roman compared to the usual cursive-style letter form. Perpetua has a small x-height which impairs readability. It also has long ascenders and descenders which need a lot of leading; this limits its use as a mainstream text face. Even so, the roman and italic fonts are widely available in regular and bold weights.

6. Three other fonts from the transitional classification are Baskerville, Caslon, and Bell.

7. In the year of 1925, the world starting to see the makings of World War II. This was the year when Hitler wrote his highly controversial book "Mein Kampf." The Locarno conferences took place to seek to secure European peace by mutual guarantees. John Baird transmitted the first television image in London. Leica marketed Oscar Barnack's 35 mm camera.

8. Eric Gill also designed the typefaces Gill Sans, Joanna, and Aries.

9. Perpetua is a typeface that was designed by British sculptor, typeface designer, stonecutter and printmaker Eric Gill (1882–1940). Gill attended art college in Chichester before studying under Edward Johnston at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. A devout Christian, Eric Gill converted to Catholicism in 1913. Between 1913 and 1918 Eric Gill produced fourteen reliefs with scenes for the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral in London. In 1918 Eric Gill co-founded the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, a religious community of craftsmen. In 1920 Eric Gill co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers. From 1924 Eric Gill designed book layouts and most of his typeface designs date from around 1930. From 1928 Eric Gill had his own printing press at Speen, Buckinghamshire. He received commissions from bibliophile publishers, including Golden Cockerel Press, Cranach-Presse in Weimar, Leipzig publishers Faber & Faber, J.M. Dent & Sons, and the Limited Editions Club (established in 1929). Eric Gill executed numerous book illustrations, woodcuts, graphics, and watercolors, which are mainly devotional in content.

Though not designed in the historical period of transitional type (the hallmark of transitional type was John Baskerville's type designed in the last half of the 1700s), Perpetua can be classified with transitional typefaces because of characteristics such as high stroke contrast and bracketed serifs. Along with these characteristics, the personality of Perpetua bears the distinctive personality of Eric Gill's letterforms. According to Robert Harling in The Letter Forms and Type Designs of Eric Gill, Gill began work on Perpetua in 1925 at the request of Stanley Morison, typogaphical advisor to Monotype. Morision sought Gill's talent to design a new typeface for the foundry. By 1929, Perpetua Roman was issued as Monotype Series 239. Gill designed two companion faces for Perpetua. The first was a typeface called Felicity. That design was met with mixed reactions. A second italic, called Perpetua Italic, was drawn by Gill and subsequently issued by Monotype along with Perpetua Roman. Telltale distinctions of the unused Felicity (as seen in the illustration in Harling, page 51) include the absence of a serif at the baseline of the lowercase d and a straight tail on the lowercase y. Overall, Felicity is less sloped than Perpetua Italic. Aptly named, Perpetua was set in a limited edition of a new translation by Walter H. Shewring of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. The book was printed in 1929. The same type and illustrations (also done by Gill) for that book subsequently appeared in the Fleuron (number 7) which was edited by Stanley Morision and printed in 1930. Also set in Perpetua and published in 1929 was Art Nonsense and Other Essays written and illustrated by Eric Gill. He would receive many important and prestigious commissions, including works for Westminster Cathedral, the League of Nations, the BBC, and the London Transport before his death in 1940. Gill’s articles and ideas are being revived, reprinted and spread by so-called traditional and conservative Catholics. For example, his article “Painting and the Public” was included in the book Distributist Perspectives: Volume 1, Essays on the Economics of Justice and Charity, published by IHS Press in 2004. But what made Eric Gill famous was principally his art. Even though Gill has a highly skilled artist, some controversy with him and his work because some of it became very sexually explicit. Library Journal endorses that “Gill flaunted traditional morality by engaging in countless affairs as well as incestuous relationships with both his sisters and daughters.”

President Barack Obama used Perpetua in his campaign logo.

“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist”

-Eric Gill