Mexican type designer Manuel López Rocha was exploring old books when he fell for a Schulfraktur, the blackletter that set German schoolbooks in the 19th century. He named his revival Gorgias, after the title of the book where he first found it, and kept it faithful to the original while adding new glyphs, ornaments, and a full set of period initials. Regular and Black come in solid and open versions, so it can read like a library shelf or loom like a ledger in a locked attic. Required reading, preferably by candlelight.

Leather is Canada Type’s digitization of Imre Reiner’s 1933 Gotika, a design so far ahead of its time that metal printing couldn’t keep up. The thin serifs and delicate inner bars kept snapping off the press, and the typeface spent decades as a footnote. Screens don’t have that problem: what’s left is a blackletter uppercase simplified into clean geometric bars, grid-based curves, and just enough Bodoni-thin serif to look dangerous rather than decorative. Some designs just needed the right century to come back in.

Hannes Famira, the designer behind this list’s honorable mention, keeps a stranger stash of letters in his Jetsam Collection, six oddities that include a digitization of his father’s IBM Selectric typewriter. The one to reach for this month is Basilea, a distressed blackletter whose shapes came off a shipping box of T-shirts from Egypt. Its uppercase is solid and bold, while the skinny lowercase fizzles out at the bottom, two moods in one font. It looks like a warning stenciled on a crate nobody should open. Some cargo is better left overboard.

John Roshell drew Dusk Till Dawn for the night the vampires rise from their graves, and Comicraft’s own pitch reads like a survival guide: grab the wooden stakes, silver bullets, and garlic capsules, and hope the farmyard animals make it to morning. The foundry describes it as gothic chic, exhumed and lightly dusted in dry earth for your convenience. Four styles cover everything from tombstones to midnight movie posters. Comicraft calls it a font worth dying for, though it makes no promises about coming back.