Typographic Specimens: A Natural History of Letterforms

Typographic Specimens is a collection of extraordinary creatures made entirely out of letterforms, numerals and punctuation marks. The book presents 60 'species' from the imagination of author and illustrator, A.W. Bainbridge, taken from a fictional manuscript by the Reverend Jackson Whitehead, who served aboard the HMS Pica sister ship to the Beagle during Charles Darwin s famous voyage in the 1830s. The menagerie of beasts, fish, fowl and invertebrates, all created from traditional typefaces, numerals and punctuation marks, ranges from the Bracket Spider or Hanging Parentheses , which traps its prey by encasing them in its finely bracketed web, to the Comma Cat, identifiable by its very short pause.