Swedish type designer Lars Bergquist describes himself as “a living fossil from the age of lead type.” He was born in 1936 and 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 like Jurassic Singer machines, smelling of hot lead and oil, and flatbed presses behaving like demented mangles. He later used to say that he was a typographer who had gone all the way from cuneiform to digital.

Bergquist began dabbling in type design at a late stage; because of his background in history, he specialized in text type with historical roots and even flirted with blackletter. After retirement, he built a second career as a type designer under his proprietary Timberwolf Type label. 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.

Although the Timberwolf Type operation has wound down, good typefaces have a life of their own. Meanwhile, Bergquist has reverted to the study of history, in rocking-chair mode, and old hobbies like epistemology, photography—and type-watching, of course.

View fonts by Lars Bergquist »