Mengelt Basel Antiqua
Mengelt Basel Antiqua
Mengelt Basel Antiqua: a reading font with
historic connections
The task of finding a suitable font for the re-edition of a historical anatomy atlas led experienced typographer Christian Mengelt to research book fonts from the 16th-century Basel. He distilled the major design characteristics of the original prints and created Mengelt Basel Antiqua, a font with historical references that is not only suited to demanding, scientific texts.

The American philologist Daniel H. Garrison provided the initiative for Mengelt to explore the Basel Antiqua fonts from the 16th century. He is working on a re-edition of the “De humani corporis fabrica” and is looking for a fitting print font which has historical references, but the technical characteristics of a modern font. Mengelt takes on the challenge and designs his Mengelt Basel Antiqua font on the basis of the original Basel prints.

Mengelt extracted the commonalities and began a very careful adaptation of the characters, without taking them too far from the original font. As a result, elements of the various alphabets are reflected in the Mengelt Basel Antiqua font.
The letter forms of the Mengelt Basel Antiqua font and their contrast among the weights recall the proportions of the Renaissance Antiqua. The axis of the letters is inclined strongly to the left, which is easily noticeable in the lower-case “o” or “d”. The lower-case “e”, with its inclined crossbar, also picks up on this design principle.

The strong, carefully grooved serifs have been designed with slanted terminals and thus provide for an additional dynamic character in the Mengelt Basel Antiqua font. Among the capital letters, the “R” with its curved leg or the “M” with its stems curved slightly outwards also add to the font’s lively character.



Mengelt Basel Antiqua is available in two weights, Regular and Bold, each with an italic. In this way, it has the base features of a text font.
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