How to Live Like a Monk by Danièle Cybulskie

In How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life, author Danièle Cybulskie discusses “how medieval monastic practices—with their emphasis on a healthy soul, mind, and body—can inspire us to live fuller lives today.” The book was designed by Misha Beletsky with illustrations by Anna Lobanova.

Misha shared these comments about the typography:

For a book on modern lifestyle that takes some cues from medieval asceticism, we needed a text type that feels current yet would hearken to earlier times. The restrained calligraphic feel of Jesse Ragan’s Study based on lettering of Rudolph Růžička, added a flavor of a scriptorium yet was not overtly Renaissance-inspired like other calligraphic text types such as Robert Slimbach’s Brioso or Jovica Veljović’s Agmena. To make it a perfect match to our subject matter, the squared-off curves echoed the structure of black letter without copying it.

For display we used the black weight of Fine Gothic—a friendly blackletter, reimagined by Michael Harvey and Andy Benedek in the spirit of Rudolf Koch.