Kinckq is a digital reanimation of a unique brainchild emerging from the pantographically distorted minds of North American wood type manufacturers. Patiently awaiting its resurrection since the mid 1800s, it enters the digital age as three static styles and a variable version ready to enchant with its charming obscenity once again.

With the advent of new typographic duties and the increasing aesthetic pressure by lithographic printers, the type manufacturers of the first half of the 19th century had no shame in literally breaking the rules of good typographic taste. Around 1838 George Nesbitt of New York introduces a peculiar specimen of this cheeky behaviour; Roman Grotesque — most probably produced by Edwin Allen of Windham, Connecticut — is a design of the Fatface genre severely fractured mid-cap-height. The idea behind this design is as simple as it is bizarre, yet it is not obvious where to place this bastard. Whether the intention was to create an Italic style slanting both ways at the same time or the angular treatment was meant to evoke a dimensional effect, we will never know.

Only about a year after Roman Grotesque’s conception a similar, yet much tamer variant shows up in the catalogue of the French Tarbé Foundry, this time cast in foundry metal and ironically called Originales. Another derivative evidently baptised Zig-Zag is displayed in the Epitome of Specimens by Vincent & James Figgins of 1845.

Naive fascination with the latter led to the design of Kink A and B as part of the Pytographic Tour-de-Farce in 2016. Dissatisfied with the shallow angle and the relatively dull shapes, the original sources were revisited, all glyphs redrawn and logically infused with the whimsical advantage of Variable font technology.

Even though the world was not waiting for a more faithful interpretation of Roman Grotesque, here it is; embrace it in all its distorted elegance.