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About
Description

In the 18th century, the Dutch controlled what is now Indonesia (the so-called “Spice Islands”) as a colony. A Dutchman named Samuel Fallours, stationed on the island of Ambon, was busy making watercolors of local wildlife, mostly tropical fish. Because few Europeans had ever seen such incredible creatures depicted before, Fallours’ sketches were rather popular among the well-to-do, and he did well peddling copies of them.

Of course, no one back home would be able to tell if Fallours was careful and accurate in documenting these creatures. While his triggerfish looks a lot like a triggerfish, he adds a smiling face on its side for effect. Some of his illustrations are pure fiction. It is therefore not surprising that he might include a hard-to-believe creature in his collection of illustrations, and have quite a story to tell about its capture.

Fallours claimed to have observed a sirenne, or mermaid, in a tub of water in his home for four days, until it died. Hard to believe, yes, but Fallours, and a number of his colleagues documented his encounter in detail, including the sounds the mermaid made (it cried like a rat) and the form of its excrement (like that of a cat). It is possible Fallours made the whole thing up to enhance his notoriety. But both his story and his detailed drawing of the Sirenne, it appears, were accepted as fact.

Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, Louis Renard, a noted publisher of maps, published Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes, de Diverses Couleurs et Figures Extraordinaires (Fish, Crayfishes and Crabs, of Diverse Coloration and Extraordinary Form) in 1719, based on Fallours’ wonky illustrations. Renard included the mermaid in this natural history book, publishing Fallours’ story as fact.

What does this have to do with a typeface?

The artisan who engraved Renard’s book — likely a map engraver — had a distinctive style of lettering that was used on the descriptive captions for the many fishes (and mermaid) in Renard’s book. The plates used to print the illustrations were copper, the letterforms were hand-engraved (not a typeface). The engraved prints were then colored by hand.

The folks at MVB Fonts found the distinctive quirks of the roman letterforms and the eccentric stress of the italic interesting enough to embark on developing digital fonts based on the engraved samples. As the captions were hand-lettered, there was a great degree of variation, making a direct “revival” impossible, so Alan Greene interpreted the characteristics of the letterforms into a workable typeface design.

The challenge was to retain a rustic quirkiness to the forms, yet have a typeface that was useful for more than display. The solution was to make optical sizes. The “Six” faces are full of character, but strong and open for clarity at small sizes. The design of the “Text” faces is more subtle, so that they can be used for passages of text, but retain the feel of their model. MVB Sirenne “Eighteen” and “Seventy Two” are for display use.

Type Designer

MVB Fonts

MVB Fonts is a digital type foundry established in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1991 by type designer Mark van Bronkhorst.

Licensing Information
The full Adobe Fonts library is cleared for both personal and commercial use.

As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for:

Design Projects

Create images or vector artwork, including logos

Website Publishing

Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website

PDFs

Embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing

Video and Broadcast

Use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content

And more…

Visit the Adobe Fonts Licensing  FAQ for full details

Visit MVB Fonts to purchase additional licensing and services, including:
Mobile Apps: Embed fonts in your app UI
Self Hosting: Host web font files on your own server
Custom Services: Request modifications or bespoke fonts directly from the foundry
Volume licensing: Use the fonts across your whole organization
Select font style

How to Use

You may encounter slight variations in the name of this font, depending on where you use it. Here’s what to look for.

Desktop

In application font menus, this font will display:

{{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_family_name}} {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_subfamily_name}}

Web

To use this font on your website, use the following CSS:


font-family: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.family.css_font_stack.replace('"', '').replace('",', ', ')}};
font-style: italicnormal;
font-weight: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.font.web.weight}};
        

Glyph Support & Stylistic Filters

Fonts in the Adobe Fonts library include support for many different languages, OpenType features, and typographic styles.