IM Fell English

Try IM Fell English

Weights and styles

• Regular 400IM Fell English Regular Italic

About IM Fell English

IM Fell English is a serif typeface that brings one of the Fell Types into digital form, in a roman and an italic. The Fell Types are the punches and matrices collected by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, who from 1668 built up a scholarly press, bought type from France, Holland and Germany and employed the type-founder Peter de Walpergen. Fell died in 1686 and willed the collection to the University of Oxford, where it was kept together. Igino Marini made this digital version. In the specimen the outlines are deliberately irregular, like type printed on damp paper, the figures are old-style with ascending and descending forms, and Q and R end in long sweeping tails. The two static files hold 377 glyphs in a Latin character set, including the letters for Polish, Czech and Turkish. There is no bold.

Where IM Fell English works

Historical and literary titles

The 17th-century source and worn outlines give book titles and chapter openings the look of early printing.

Quotations and epigraphs

The italic sets a quoted passage apart from the roman in the same antique texture.

Period-style menus, labels and invitations

Old-style figures and swash-tailed Q and R add detail to dates, prices and names.

Short passages of antique text

Regular and Italic are enough for a paragraph or two that should read like a page from an old book.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with IM Fell English

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use IM Fell English on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "IM Fell English";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/IMFellEnglish-Italic.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "IM Fell English";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/IMFellEnglish-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "IM Fell English", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves IM Fell English with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=IM+Fell+English:ital,wght@0,400;1,400&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Roman and italic only

IM Fell English has one weight in two styles. There is no bold.

The rough edges are intentional

The irregular outlines reproduce the printed look of the original type and show clearly at large sizes.

Old-style figures

The numerals in the specimen vary in height and depth, so they do not align like modern lining figures.

FAQs

Collections with IM Fell English

• Old-style and revival serif fonts for books

  Digital revivals of Renaissance, baroque and later book types, and new designs in the old-style tradition, most with italics, for novels, essays and fine printing.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts