Maiola in Walsh’s A bone of fact

The Australian multimillionaire, David Walsh, a self-described “professional gambler, art collector, and businessman,” is the owner of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), in Hobart, Tasmania. In 2014 Walsh published his memoirs, entitled A bone of fact. Maiola accompanies his thoughts in titles, menus, and text.

In the “Sydney Review of Books”, Martin Edmonds writes, “This is, in fact, a sophisticated and knowing memoir, couched as the meanderings of a naive, über-lucky guy who just happened to make it rich, thanks to a combination of good fortune and good judgement. It owes as much, perhaps, to Tristram Shandy as to anything Vonnegut has written. A Bone of fact frequently assumes what might be called an eighteenth-century manner: it has elaborate chapter headings; it is full of digressions, asides, and footnotes; and the writing constantly comments upon itself and its progress toward becoming a book.”

Maiola matches this tone well in that it eschews perfected shapes and utterly smooth contours in favor of edging toward a handmade look; maybe even something carved than mathematically defined. Like the book it adorns, it is more human and imperfect, more rambling than direct, more concerned with being “real” than with what might be aesthetically sterile.

Inspired by early Czech type design, Veronika Burian’s Maiola is a contemporary typeface that is mindful of its heritage. Maiola creates a welcoming tension on the page by implementing oldstyle features and calligraphic reminiscences such as modest contrast, humanist axis, and pen-formed terminals. Maiola covers the Latin A character set with a broad set of OpenType features, which is also included in Maiola Cyrillic, and Maiola Greek covers polytonic Greek languages.