Font prices will drop dramatically this year, for several reasons:

1. slowdown in the US economy
2. increased competition
3. ongoing effect of “filesharing/pay-what-you-can is good promotion” scam

4. Widespread availability of delicious cake.

I’ve not seen any of this cake yet Haley. ;^)

5. Those designers who once licensed their fonts through ITC are now realizing they can get more than ITC’s paltry royalty when selling on their own, even if the retail price is cut in half.

Where is he selling them from?

http://www.stonetypefoundry.com/

For what it is worth, I have used the old Cycles a fair bit. My only grumble is that is is a bit thin with direct-to-plate printing, which is quite understandable given that Sumner made it in the repro days. I have the new Cycles in various sizes, but have not used it so cannot confirm my impression it will still be a tiny bit thin with DTP printing. But I have this complaint about lightness-when-printed with a lot of fonts; other may find it just to their taste.

Have also used Stone Print for a long text. Wonderful font if you don’t specify the measure too long. You can really pack in the characters, to either save space (book length) or increase margins.

San Francisco Public Library looks very interesting, in between Cycles and Stone Print in terms of how condensed it is. There is a fair need for slightly condensed fonts, and SFPL looks like it might fit the bill for this.

I have been using Magma Compact for a few books now, and like that too. I’ve used it paired with Quadraat, and for a companion display sans, like it better than Quadraat sans.

As to ITC — Sumner once remarked that he had to license the Stone “clan” (Stone regular, sans, and informal) back from ITC in order to sell them, even though he was the designer.

All in all, I think there are some good bargains here on some pretty darn good fonts.

Thanks James.

I can hazard a guess why Stone’s font site is becalmed. The older serif text faces have been around a long time and nobody needs to acquire them here. But the newer ones, which ought to be flying off the shelf on merit alone, offer deal-breaking problems of incompleteness and formatting.

SFPL, very attractive, lacks a bold italic. What happens when some Bay Area librarian wants bold italic? Does her boss reply, “Mister Stone said you won’t need it&#82