Even though Licko had started creating new fonts for Emigre magazine since its inception (1984), Mrs. Eaves was her breakout role. There are two reasons why Mrs. Eaves was created: 1. Emigre had started to publish more essays and 2. She needed a type that would be fitting for the pioneering magazine and be set in large bodies of content.
Baskerville is a transitional serif typeface designed in 1757 by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, positioned between the old style typefaces of William Caslon, and the modern styles of Giambattista Bodoni & Firmin Didot. The Baskerville typeface is the result of John Baskerville's intent to improve upon the types of William Caslon. He increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serifs sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. The curved strokes are more circular in shape, and the characters became more regular. These changes created a greater consistency in size and form.
The perfection of his work seems to have unsettled his contemporaries, and some claimed the stark contrasts in his printing damaged the eyes. Abroad, however, he was much admired, notably by Pierre Simon Fournier, Giambattista Bodoni (who intended at one point to come to England to work under him), and Benjamin Franklin.
So when Licko created Mrs. Eaves in 1996; while there were constant revivals of Baskerville she questioned how it would look if it was a little bit heavier and give it a bit more character. She reduced the contrast while retaining the overall openness and lightness of Baskerville by giving the lower case characters a wider proportion. She then reduced the x-height relative to the cap height to avoid increasing the set width. It is such a unique type with its imperfection but is still pleasing to look at and fun to read. Mrs. Eaves does have her shortcomings like her limited “loose” spacing and when the letterforms are by themselves they look a little awkward. The top three suggestions to resolve some of her “flaws” are: greater space economy; the addition of a bold italic style; and the desire to pair it with a Sans-serif design. So to help resolve the issue of limited space, Licko created Mrs. Eaves XL. In XL, the x-height is 25% larger than in the classic. And o f course, a bold italic was added to the family, and a Mrs. Eaves Sans will be released soon.
Mrs. Eaves was Zuzana’s answer to the designer’s dilemma of needing a type that could do it all and still have the unique ability to bring freshness to typesetting large amounts of text with ample space and be used to display headlines or even music covers like Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. In Licko’s mind, it was possibly a natural thing for her to see Baskerville and appreciate it for its design, see how easy it was to use in literature, asked herself why not create a modernized version of Baskerville.
