About the type

The text of this volume was set in Filomela, a typeface designed in 2020 by Compassiana Brevi, who created it for digital typesetting as a postmodern riff on, and ironic homage to, the nineteenth-century typeface Industre, designed by Jurgen Semefoe (1865-1914). Filomela, an example of Brevi’s violent intoxication with ampersands, exhibits contemporary proportions, with acutely angled, deep feeling crossbars, complemented by clear-eyed, drop-leg cherubs. The abbreviated finials and ears of Filomela recall the font’s namesake, the Athenian princess who was raped and rendered tongueless by a family member, avenged in blood, and thereafter transmogrified into a nightingale mid-flight, which one can almost witness in the thinnest of hairlines and elevated ligatures of Brevi’s beatific vowels and ascenders. Born Compassiana Rimarginarsa in Reggio Calabria, Brevi fled neo-fascist climate anarchists across Europe and the southern United States, gathering stories of fellow refugees along the way, and inspiring a committed following of grassroots typographers, before arriving in Lexington, where she finished an advanced degree in Somatographic Communication at the University of Kentucky, and now teaches the Defection of Form, and designs the space around letters, in silent protest.