I released Typewriter Spool on January 14, 2021 after years of considering a serious typewriter project. The idea was sparked by an old Underwood No. 5 from the 1920s that had been given to me in the late 1990s. The machine was beyond repair, but it became the basis for a large-scale font family that aimed to cover the full range of typewriter textures in a digital format.

The result was a collection of 122 fonts grouped into four main styles: CLN (clean), SFT (slightly misaligned), XRX (mimicking repeated fax or photocopy generations), and RUF (worn ribbon and heavy misalignment). Each came in multiple weights and widths, and instead of italics, I provided underline options, since real typewriters never had italic styles. The family was developed for both display and text use. I named it Typewriter Spool after the ribbon spools, also making sure the word “typewriter” was part of the name for search visibility.

Developing the family required extensive research, especially to find authentic samples of Greek and Cyrillic typewriter output and unusual symbols. I consolidated those references into a cohesive style, and to speed up production I even used a Super Nintendo controller to navigate thousands of glyphs during manual editing. From the start, Typewriter Spool was a commercial release and was never distributed for free. The first version of this book was set in Typewriter Spool, though I later switched to a system font to reduce file size.

On February 28, 2024, I made a minor maintenance update, fixing a missing underline on one variation of the numeral 7 in the Soft Extended ExtraBold Italic style. Beyond that, the family has not been revised, and it hasn’t been used in notable projects.