3IP Type Foundry  is a division of Three Islands Press (3IP), a small digital publishing company in Rockport, Maine. Our specialties are historical recreations, fine text type, old map fonts, replications of vintage and modern handwriting, and a few offbeat/display creations.

Brian Willson grew up in Austin, Texas, in the 1950s and ’60s. He bounced around the Austin music scene a while before snagging a Radio/TV/Film degree from The University of Texas in 1979. The next year he became a father and promptly high-tailed it with his little family to coastal Maine, where he worked as a broadcast and print journalist for many years.

Willson founded Three Islands Press in 1989 to self-publish a book of pretentious nature essays. Soon after, he found himself tinkering with type design, and 3IP has since become known for its library of real-looking handwriting fonts—most of them modeled after historical penmanship—and antique text replications.

In the summer of 2019, Willson moved with Captain Jack, his Australian Cattle Dog mix, to Salt Lake City, where they hiked the mule deer trails in the amazing Wasatch foothills for a time. In 2022, missing water, they returned to Maine, where they enjoyed greener hikes together until Jack passed away in April 2024 at age 16. Willson is an avid birder and amateur bird photographer. And for the past several years, he’s been dabbling in long fiction.

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Swedish type designer Lars Bergquist (1936–2020) described himself as “a living fossil from the age of lead type.” He trained originally as a historian but left university life and went into publishing—of encyclopedias and reference literature—learning that side of typography from the bottom up. The bottom line being Linotype machines, smelling of hot lead and oil, and flatbed presses behaving like “demented mangles.” He used to say that he was a typographer who had gone all the way from cuneiform to digital.

Bergquist became a type designer at a late stage; because of his background in history, he specialized in text type with historical roots and even flirted with blackletter, building a second career under his proprietary Timberwolf Type brand. Two things put an end to this: medical problems leading to some close encounters with “sawbones of a specialist kind,” and the discovery that he’d produced so many fonts for different foundries that he was actually competing with himself.

After his Timberwolf Type operation wound down, he reverted to the study of history, “in rocking-chair mode”, and old hobbies like epistemology, photography—and type-watching. His typefaces, of course, still have a life of their own.

View fonts by Lars Bergquist »