About Albertus Nova

Albertus Nova is part of The Wolpe Collection of typefaces, and takes the best of the original Albertus design and expands the original character set with multiple weights, a set of small capitals and a number of alternate and original characters. The Wolpe Collection celebrates Berthold Wolpe’s outstanding body of work, and includes five iconic typefaces, digitized and updated by Toshi Omagari of the Monotype Studio.

In 1932, Monotype commissioned Berthold Wolpe to create the Albertus typeface. After World War II the City of London adopted Albertus as the font for all their street signs. Since then Albertus has been used on Sainsbury’s packaging, in cult-classic TV series, The Prisoner, on album covers of New Order, Coldplay, The Smiths and The Beach Boys, and on the crest of Liverpool FC.

In the Albertus Nova typeface, Toshi Omagari has revived a number of alternate capital letters created by Berthold Wolpe that have been unavailable in the existing digital version. This includes the uppercase M, W, J, E, R and Q. He designed five weights - light, thin, regular, bold and black- as well as Greek and Cyrillic characters.

His main focus, though, has been on righting the wrongs, as he sees them, of the digitally available lowercase version of the Albertus typeface. The crude internal angles and planed-off curves of some lowercase characters, Toshi discovered, were introduced to compact Wolpe’s letterforms for metal typesetting and these decisions were carried into the existing digital format. Toshi has designed the Albertus Nova typeface for modern applications.