The archivist who loaded the file expected another forgotten revival of a Victorian serif. Instead, she found something wholly unfamiliar. The font file contained no metadata, no designer credit, no creation date. It simply installed itself as “Septimus Regular”—and when she opened a test document, the letters that appeared on screen seemed to breathe.
“Septimus was a man, not a number,” he said. “Septimus Cole. Letter cutter. Disappeared in 1927 from a village in Cornwall. He was said to be carving a set of punches for a private press—a typeface meant to be used only once, for a single book.” septimus font
Or so the story went.
“What book?” the archivist asked.
In 2010, a rare book dealer contacted her. He had found a copy of The Book of Unspoken Names in a sealed chest in Prague. The pages were blank except for the title page. But when he held a black light over the paper, the text appeared—set in Septimus—and began to move, letter by letter, spelling out a name. The archivist who loaded the file expected another
The Book of Unspoken Names, they learned, was a handwritten grimoire that Cole had been hired to typeset. It contained the names of people who had been erased from history—not killed, but unwritten . Cole became obsessed. He spent two years cutting Septimus, not as a tool for reading, but as a prison. Each letterform was designed to hold one phoneme of a forbidden name. Letter cutter
In the autumn of 1998, a floppy disk arrived at the Type Archive in London, mailed from a return address that no longer existed. The disk was unlabeled except for a single word, written in a shaky, sepia-tinged hand: Septimus .