Magus. The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton

Magus: The Art of Magic in the Renaissance from Faustus to Agrippa is the latest book by Anthony Grafton (b. 1950), an American historian of early modern Europe. It was first published by Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, in 2023:

A revelatory new account of the magus—the learned magician—and his place in the intellectual, social, and cultural world of Renaissance Europe.

Jaya Miceli designed the book jacket, with art direction from Tim Jones. The typeface she chose is called Typographer Rotunda. The origin of this Gotico-Antiqua, or “greyletter”, is unclear to me. The font was released by Dieter Steffmann in 2002, without source information. Virtually all fonts by Steffmann are digitizations of vintage typefaces and alphabets, or improvement and extensions of early freeware digitizations by others. As far as I can tell, Typographer Rotunda isn’t based on a foundry typeface. My guess is that it’s derived from an alphabet showing found in a lettering manual, probably by an artist from the circles around Rudolf Koch, compare his Wallau.

The book was published in the UK by Penguin’s Allen Lane imprint, with the same design.