Have You Ever Thought About Hebrew Fonts?

Flickr user Nir Tober

OK, probably not.  But you probably have thought about English fonts, at least a little.  When you start a new document or a new e-mail, what font do you like to use?  Perhaps there's a font that you absolutely can't stand.  Perhaps there's a font so excellent, they should make a movie about it.

There are some classic Hebrew fonts you might recognize: There's the square script of the Torah scroll.  There's the "Frank Ruhl" of many prayerbooks.  But there aren't many clean, modern options.

All of this is to introduce this great video about the creation of a new Hebrew font.  The artist, Scott-Martin Kosofsky, has attempted to digitally replicate the hand-cut Hebrew type from a 16th-century Bible.  The process is fascinating, and the result is beautiful.

And if you want to see for yourself, Kosofsky's font, "Le Bé," is used in The Selected Poems of Yehuda Halevi, a free e-book from Nextbook Press.  It includes just 35 poems, a great introduction to one of the most important poets and philosophers in Jewish history.  And if the poems spark your interest, I highly recommend Nextbook's Yehuda Halevi, by Hillel Halkin.  Halkin is a distinguished scholar, and the book is a very accessible introduction to its truly exciting and underappreciated subject.

(For now, the official font of this blog is Georgia.)