Every letter has a voice, even before it speaks. Before the sentence, before the sentiment — there is the shape of the words. The weight. The whisper. The texture of language rendered not in sound, but in style.
Typography is more than function. It is memory. It is mood. And in our work at The Postscript Society, it is the architecture of fiction itself.
We do not treat fonts as neutral containers. We treat them as artifacts — deliberate, embodied, and haunting. Our typefaces are not chosen to vanish, but to linger. They are our typographic ghosts: echoes of eras, echoes of hands, echoes of imagined archives that never quite existed — but feel like they might have.
And that’s the point.
The Fiction of the Font
A letter arrives in the post. The envelope bears a name. You turn it over. You unfold the paper. And before you even read the first line, the typeface begins to tell its story.
A trembling serif suggests restraint. A crisp modernist face hums with precision. An over-inked monospaced line evokes the hum of an old typewriter. The fiction begins before the fiction begins. This is no accident.
We choose fonts as one might choose a perfume: not simply for their notes, but for their impression. For what they leave behind. For what they awaken in the reader before reason has caught up.
What does it feel like to read a letter in Caslon? What ghosts live in a page set in Garamond? And what happens when a forgotten 19th-century specimen is resurrected to tell a lie that feels truer than fact?
These are not design questions. These are literary ones.
The Archive That Never Was
One of our favorite illusions is the idea that the story you’re reading is merely the surface of something deeper. That there are boxes in a forgotten library that house more letters. That there is handwriting in the margins of a ledger in an attic no one visits. That the font on the page is not a digital selection, but the product of some long-defunct printing press with a name like “Balthazar Type Foundry, Est. 1882.”
We are not trying to recreate history. We are inventing the feeling of history.
And type is one of our most trusted tools.
When a fictional character’s journal is printed in a font inspired by 1920s French stationery, something clicks. When a telegram is rendered in a brittle, all-caps grotesque, the illusion gains weight. We are not just dressing the story. We are aging it. Weathering it. Making it part of a lineage that feels almost — almost — real.
It’s a bit like wearing vintage couture that never existed. A fantasy so finely detailed it becomes its own kind of fact.
Typography as Temporal Shorthand
In a world of instantaneous communication, time is increasingly difficult to render with gravity. Everything looks like now. But our stories rely on then. On the particular rhythm, pace, and surface of pastness — whether that’s 1932 or an imagined future that smells faintly of the past.
Typography allows us to signal time without saying it.
A deco-inspired face does more than nod to the 1930s — it tells the reader’s body how to feel. It slows the eye. It squares the sentence. It suggests a world of doormen, gold elevators, and newspaper boys with headlines about Lindbergh.
Similarly, when we use letterforms inspired by midcentury typewriters or forgotten monograms, we’re engaging in a kind of visual timekeeping. The font becomes a clock. And in doing so, it becomes emotional — not merely chronological.
Time is never neutral in our work. And neither is typography.
The Romance of the Forged
Some of our most treasured typographic decisions are not historically accurate — they are emotionally persuasive. We are not reprinting old documents. We are building fictional artifacts that feel old, but with the clarity and grace of contemporary design.
This is a quiet rebellion against both extremes: against sterile modern sans-serifs that erase context, and against overly literal faux-vintage pastiches that smother authenticity. Our approach lives in the middle — in the tension between memory and myth.
You might call it forged elegance.
Not counterfeit — but imagined history with exquisite manners.
Fonts, in this context, are less about legibility and more about belief. Does this letter belong in this paper? Would it have been written this way? And if not — does it want to be?
Typography as Character Voice
In our epistolary fiction, the narrator is rarely alone. The page must speak in multiple tones — a journalist’s report, a scribbled love note, a ledger, a boarding pass, a legal transcript. Each one deserves its own voice.
And we do not mean italics.
We mean personality.
Fonts become characters. Some shy. Some overconfident. Some maddeningly formal. Some fading at the edges like someone trying very hard not to feel too much.
We once spent two weeks finding the right typeface for a fictional ghost’s typewritten letter. It wasn’t about mimicry. It was about soul. The final selection? A monospaced, lightly eroded slab serif that looked like it had been pressed one key too hard, as if the ghost herself were unsure of her strength.
That’s not design.
That’s dramaturgy.
In Praise of the Beautiful Lie
The typefaces we use may be digital. But the emotions they conjure are analog. And that, ultimately, is what matters.
We are not aiming for accuracy. We are aiming for resonance.
In the same way that Assouline might publish a book that reimagines a hotel that never existed, in a place that only partly did — we build fictional archives whose aesthetic power makes you forget to question their truth. Typography is a cornerstone of that illusion. A beautifully worn lie that opens a door in the mind.
Because once you believe the page is old, or lost, or secret, you begin to believe the story inside it.
And that belief — that flicker of willingness — is everything.
In Closing: A Haunted Alphabet
We do not take type lightly.
In our world, every letterform is a kind of ghost. A haunting. A voice from a time that may never have existed, but that nonetheless moves us. Typography is not just how a story is dressed — it’s how a story remembers itself.
So the next time you open a letter from us, pause before you read. Look at the spacing. The curve of the G. The angle of the terminal. Ask yourself:
Whose voice is this?
What time does it come from?
And who might have pressed the keys?
In the answers — or their absence — you may find yourself holding not just a letter, but a relic. One that exists nowhere else but in your hands.
With typographic affection,
The Head Archivist
The Postscript Society
