Aldus

Hermann Zapf
1954

Aldus was designed to be a book-weight companion to Palatino, Hermann Zapf’s exceptionally beautiful Renaissance-revival display face. Aldus is graceful, faintly calligraphic, quiet with a beautiful woven texture when set well. I’m very partial to the numerals.

There are fonts called Palatino installed on millions of desktop computers; inevitably a weak and ugly parody of the original. Regrettably every book published between 1987 and 1991 was set in some bad Palatino or other; this may be why I watched so much television in those years.

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