Emigre Fonts: Type Specimens, 1986-2024

Published by Letterform Archive.
Hardcover, 1,264 pages, 5.25 × 8.25 inches, 4 colors throughout and 2 spot colors on the case.

Designed and edited by Rudy VanderLans.

Emigre is happy to partner with San Francisco-based Letterform Archive on a reissue of our first volume of type specimens, an ample tome first published in 2016 and since sold out. But this time, we nearly doubled its already impressive extent to more than 1,200 pages and added new texts by Letterform Archive associate curator Stephen Coles and longtime Emigre collaborator Jeffery Keedy. In addition to specimens not included in the first volume, Licko and VanderLans also revisited their type design process files to create a special behind-the-scenes section, offering readers a look at their photos, sketches, and hand-written correspondence.

“Emigre will always be associated with the new typography of the 1990s, but recalling those qualities that were most inspirational or most provocative at the time gravely risks overlooking the sheer breadth of ambition and diversity of themes, and its historical span as journal, foundry and online resource. One of the many virtues of this compendium is in restoring some balance to these conceptions. What emerges is a collection that covers a range of enquiry and ambition both wider and more varied than we tend to associate with the ‘brand’. Rather, it seems as if each key tendency, design question, debate or avenue of speculative enquiry in the field of typeface design is represented here in some form: the ways in which letters might be constructed, the font as hypothesis or polemic, as statement of possibility or disruptor of orthodoxies. Emigre was at the forefront of a dizzying succession of debates.” — Will Hill, Parenthesis 50, Spring 2026

Read reviews of the first volume of the Emigre Fonts book at:

Communication Arts website. Published in 2016.

Kenneth FitzGerald's Ephemeral States website. Published in 2016.

And an Interview with Rudy VanderLans by Karli Petrovic for Print magazine. Published in 2016.