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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