About

I'm Neve Sorel, and Burin is my studio. Before I drew a single digital letter I spent eleven years as an intaglio printmaker, cutting plates for a small run of artists' books and, for two of those years, working restoration proofs for a print conservator who needed clean pulls from damaged copper. That work is where the foundry actually started, though I didn't know it at the time — restoration proofing means looking at a worn plate for hours, deciding which scratches are damage and which are the engraver's own hand, and that distinction turns out to be exactly the judgment call a type revival needs.

Why engraved sources only

Burin revives only from engraved originals — plates cut with a burin, a scorper, or a drypoint needle, where the letter exists first as a groove in metal and only second as ink on paper. I don't work from printed specimens, type-founders' show sheets, or scanned book pages, because the printing process itself already interprets the letter once, softening the plate's sharpest transitions and adding its own ink spread. Going back to the plate, or to a photograph of the plate taken under raking light, gets me the engraver's line before a press ever touched it. It's slower. Ex-libris bookplates, banknote counters, and survey-map cartouches are usually the only surviving engraved lettering left from a given decade, since most engraved text was reproduction work, not type design, and nobody expected anyone to draw a font from it later.

The Plate Mark discovery

The foundry's first typeface, Plate Mark, came from a box of estate-sale ephemera that turned out to include a 1791 armorial bookplate cut for my own family's library — the Sorel bookplate, engraver unrecorded, found by accident in a dealer's lot labeled only "ex-libris, mixed." I didn't set out to revive my own family's plate; I bought the box for three unrelated banknote proofs and found the bookplate underneath them. That coincidence is most of why the foundry exists at all. Once I'd redrawn one plate's worth of letters by hand, I wanted to know what else was sitting in archive boxes labeled "misc."

How a revival gets made

Each typeface starts with the highest-resolution photograph I can get of the source, shot at a low raking angle so the burin's cut catches shadow rather than disappearing into flat ink. I trace the visible letters first, then extrapolate the missing ones from the engraver's other surviving work where I can find it, always noting in the release page which letters are traced and which are reconstructed. Proofing happens on a small tabletop press before anything ships digitally — if a revival doesn't hold up printed at the size the source was actually cut for, it isn't finished.

Licensing and getting in touch

Every typeface ships under a studio license covering desktop and web use for a stated number of seats; larger or broadcast use is priced per project, and I reply to license questions within a week. I take on a small number of custom revival commissions each year for archives, libraries, and publishers who have an engraved source they want brought back as working type — write to studio@burin.type with a photograph of the plate if you have one, or a description of where it's held if you don't. The full typeface catalogue is the best record of what a Burin revival actually looks like once it ships.