It all goes back to Rolling Stone. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, the body copy of RS were set in Cloister, an exquisite Venetian Jenson-style face designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Its almost (but not quite) spiky eccentricity within the Garalde-Jenson type sphere appealed to me immensely, and it became the hallmark of RS’s typography to me, as vivid as Dennis Ortis-Lopez’s condensed slab-serif heads and Roger Parkinson’s definitive wordmark….
In the late 80s, when I depended on AOL for online connectivity, I happened on a digital version of Cloister made by a user who called himself ‘Uncle Goot’.* I used the daylights out of that slightly condensed digital Cloister, as I couldn’t afford the professional versions offered by URW or Elsner + Flake. (Cloister Black, the prevalent usage of ‘Cloister’ in the free font/bootleg font world, is a blackletter offshoot of the original Cloister family.)
After I acquired some professional typefaces and some good open-access type, I drifted away from Cloister — not out of lack of affection, but because it lacked some glyphs, and the kerning was a shade amateurish, and (if I recall correctly) Uncle Goot only released Roman, Italis, and Bold — a good basic family for many uses, but sometimes one just wants a bold italic, or some other offshoot, and in the Unicode OpenType era Cloister seemed… limited. I had acquired Monotype Centaur, a similar typeface that draws on Jenson’s Venetian type, and that was close enough as makes no difference to most users.
But a couple of months ago, I was reading Wikipedia pages on typefaces (as one does), and I clicked from Cloister to Centaur where I saw the sentence, ‘At least two open-source digital typefaces, Museum (by Raph Levien) and Coelacanth, are based on Centaur.’ I knew of Raph Levien’s Museum project, which the multifarious imagination of the estimable Mr Levien has left unfinished, but I had never heard of Coelacanth. You probably hadn’t; now you have. I perked up my… well, my eyes, both at the possibility of an open sourced iteration of a Jenson venetian, and because my childhood love of dinosaurs has never dwindled away.
Browse and be amazed. Where Centaur runs on the thin side, Coelacanth is sturdier (though its ExtraLight weight can supply all the undernourished look you might want). Vast character sets, including Hebrew and polytonic Greek (and yes, Kelvin, it has an ð), with several different optical weights depending on the work you want it to do. Rich, sweet, and amazing.
* Sadly, it appears that Uncle Goot has vanished without a searchable trace. If you are Uncle Goot, or know Uncle Goot, I want to thank you (or ‘him’) wholeheartedly. Feel encouraged to make yourself known!