Plate Mark

Plate Mark is the foundry's first typeface, and the one I didn't go looking for. I bought a dealer's box of estate-sale ephemera for three banknote proof sheets I wanted for an unrelated project, and found a 1791 armorial bookplate underneath them, engraver unrecorded, bearing a name I recognized as my own family's before I'd finished reading the motto beneath the crest. It had been cut for the Sorel library, four generations back, and nobody in my family had known it existed.

I didn't set out to revive my own bookplate. I set out to catalogue three currency proofs. But once I'd photographed the plate under raking light and seen how sharp the serifs still were after two centuries, I couldn't file it back into the box unread.

Source

The bookplate is a small oval design, roughly six centimetres across, with the family crest above a single line of Latin motto set in capitals and a name field below in a mixed-case text hand. The engraver's identity wasn't recorded on the plate or in any accompanying paperwork, which is common for bookplate commissions of the period — the client's name mattered to the historical record; the engraver's often didn't.

Redrawing an anonymous hand

Without a second signed plate to cross-reference, I treated every letterform on the Sorel bookplate as the full and only record of this engraver's practice, redrawing each one at face value rather than trying to regularize the alphabet toward some assumed period standard. The result keeps small inconsistencies between letters — the lowercase "a" and "e" don't quite match in weight — that a more aggressive revival would have quietly corrected. I decided the inconsistency was the record, and the record was the point.

Where it wants to be used

Plate Mark is a genuine text face, comfortable in paragraph settings from about 10 to 14 points, with a bold weight cut for the same source's heavier motto lettering. It suits colophons, credit lines, and any body copy that wants a serif with real historical weight behind it rather than a contemporary revival dressed in period clothing.

.colophon-text {
  font-family: "Plate Mark", Georgia, serif;
  font-size: 0.95rem;
  line-height: 1.6;
}