Monarch Nova

Monarch Nova is a distant, hazy memory of centuries past. A rickety cart, blunted by cobblestones. Moss covered dolmens standing tall. Wind swept hills and crumbling folly's. Clay pipes and pottery wash ashore...

The design started life as Monarch – the first font I published back in 2017 based on a rough set of sketches. It was an attempt to capture the graphic design zeitgeist of the time – one which harked back nostalgically towards a mystical, bygone age. Echoes of the Arts & Crafts movement of the early 20th century, which conjured an idealised vision of the past in response to an increasingly industrialised world. Modernism is dead – craft, beauty, and ornament are our new pillars of worship!

Although the original Monarch was a little rough around the edges, it by far made up for in character, combining a unique bodge of historical pastiche to create something that felt thoroughly original in spirit. I returned to the font a few years later and worked on a fully redrawn update which was published in 2020 as 'Monarch Nova'. The update sought to tone down some of the more clumsy aspects of the design and character to create a more harmonious and legible revision. This was aided by the help of the French type designer Margot Lévêque who assisted in the production.

More recently in 2024, I returned to the font once again to refine and expand on the design. Unsurprisingly, this led me down the inevitable path of redrawing everything all over again... Beside the more general refinements to the letterforms, the character-set was expanded and some of the more unique qualities of the original Monarch were brought back into the most recent update on a variety of stylistic sets. On top of that, the new update offers a range of alternative glyph sets to either tone down or crank up the character; formal pantaloons or silk breeches – whichever mood you're in.

Monarch Nova's strokes are clean, sharp and un-serifed. The font has a tall x-height, wide open counters, and features an array of characteristics including flourished cross-bars and various calligraphic cues. It's simultaneously flamboyant yet rational in design. The font works best at display sizes due to its delicate nature and stroke contrast but also serves well in running text. Legibility can be further improved by enabling the more conventional stylistic sets.

WT Monarch Nova

Size

QUADCOPTER
BELGIQUE

Size

QUADCOPTER
BELGIQUE

WT Monarch Nova

Size

Hunebedden is the Dutch name for the megalithic burial chambers of the Funnel Beaker or TRB culture in The Netherlands, dating to about 3350-2700 BC. It is also written hunebeds in English, which I shall use here. The TRB culture represents one of the first settled horticultural societies in the North European Plain and southern Scandinavia. Agriculture and stock-breeding began about 10,000 years ago in the Near East from where it gradually expanded to western Europe. About 5300 BC, the horticultural Bandkeramik culture or Linear Pottery culture colonised the fertile central European loess soils along the southern fringes of the North European Plain, almost as far as Paris. It also covered the southeastern most part of The Netherlands, the loess-covered southern part of the Limburg province, near Maastricht. Some fifteen hundred or two thousand years later, the much less fertile sandy regions north of the Rhine in The Netherlands, northern Germany and southern Scandinavia were occupied by the West and North Groups of the TRB culture, which built megalithic tombs to the west of the river Oder. Basically, these groups were horticulturalists, keeping domestic animals and cultivating grain and vegetables in small plots, which they had cleared within the primeval oak-and-lime forest. They used the ard-plough and wagons with two or four massive wooden disc wheels. To effect fertility for men, beasts and crops, people, objects, and pottery with food and drink were offered to the gods in lakes, rivers, wetlands and drier places. The TRB culture as a whole, consisting of a number of sub-groups, occupied the North European Plain between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Bratislava, Lviv, Kaliningrad, Uppsala and Oslo. Erratic boulders transported from Fenno-Scandia and the eastern Baltic to the North European Plain and southern Scandinavia by the Saalian or Weichselian glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Age were the building material for megalithic tombs, together with sand and loam. Megalithic tombs were built in the TRB North Group in southern Scandinavia and northern and northeastern Germany, in the Altmark and Walternienburg-Bernburg Groups in central Germany, and in the TRB West Group. This West Group occurred to the west of the Elbe, between Hamburg-Lüneburg, Hanover, Utrecht and the North Sea. Almost all Dutch megaliths are in the northeastern part of the country, mainly in the province of Drenthe, with a few in the provinces of Groningen and Overijssel; a stone cist was found in Friesland. In addition, a possible hunebed remnant is in Lage Vuursche, province of Utrecht in the centre of The Netherlands. Six hunebeds directly east of the Dutch border in Westphalia suggest that others may have existed in the Dutch province of Gelderland in places where enough large erratic boulders were available. Elsewhere in the TRB area genuine megalithic chambers are absent, or were built by the Globular Amphorae culture (KAK), a direct TRB descendant in central and eastern Germany, Poland, the Ukraine and Moldavia-Romania, which is partly contemporary to and partly later than the period in which hunebeds were built and used in the TRB West and North Groups. The TRB North Group interred its deceased in flat earth graves, flat stone-packed graves, earthen long barrows, megalithic tombs or stone cists. Pottery with provisions accompanied them. Male graves often had bows and arrows, axes and perforated battle axes with them, of which only the non-organic parts remain. Neither single nor collective interments of men, women and children are marked by specific grave goods indicating rank or prestige, and it is unclear why a person was selected to become interred in a megalith, in another type of grave, or not at all. The megalithic tombs of the North Group consist of different types of dolmens and passage graves. The first dolmens were slightly earlier than the earliest passage graves. Their earliest form, the Urdolmen or 'primeval dolmen', was a small square or rectangular grave chamber covered by one heavy capstone, which had to be shifted aside for secondary interments. The sidestones under the capstone usually lay on one of the longer sides.

Size

WT Monarch Nova

Size

Musée d’Orsay & Hôtel Solvay

Size

Musée d’Orsay & Hôtel Solvay

WT Monarch Nova

Size

OXFORD • LONDON • GLASGOW
NEW YORK • TORONTO • MELBOURNE • WELLINGTON
KULA LUMPUR • SINGAPORE • JAKARTA • HONG KONG • TOKYO
DELHI • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS • KARACHI
IBADAN • NAIROBI • DAR ES SALAAM • CAPE TOWN

© Oxford University Press 1978
Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

First published 1978
Reprinted 1978

Size

WT Monarch Nova

Size

Copyright © 1970 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved under Pan American and International Copyright Conventions.
Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road,
Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.

Standard Book Number: 486-22214-4
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-106491

Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc.
180 Varick Street
New York, N.Y. 10014

Size