Centaur Now
Tabular Type Foundry · Toshi Omagari · 2025
A scholarly re-revival of Bruce Rogers's Centaur, correcting the thinness of the original digitisation by reapplying anticipated letterpress ink spread from Monotype's production drawings, with three optical sizes and alternate letterforms drawn from Arrighi and earlier Montaigne cuttings.
About
The original Monotype Centaur was traced from production drawings without accounting for the ink spread that letterpress printing was always expected to contribute, leaving the digital version notably thinner than Rogers intended. Centaur Now restores that lost weight by working directly from the production drawings and offsetting outlines to approximate Monotype's historical ink-spread standard. Three optical sizes – Caption, Text and Display – replace the single-size digital original, and the italic offers additional alternate letterforms inspired by the Vicenzo and Arrighi sources that predated the Monotype cutting.
Classification
A revival of Bruce Rogers's Centaur, itself modelled on Nicolas Jenson's 15th-century roman – the definitive Venetian humanist model with almost no straight strokes in the upright and italic forms derived from Arrighi's chancery hand.