Buying fonts is generally a fairly functional affair: you do your browsing, click through the various registration and payment forms, get confused by a Verified by Visa screen that looks dodgy as you like, and then download a zip file. And that's it.

Obviously you then have a (hopefully) lovely typeface to play with, but when you've just shelled out a sizeable stack of cash, it can feel a tad... soulless.

So we were particularly chuffed to get a little package of loveliness in the post from Jeremy Tankard, having recently bought his delicious The Shire Types set of fonts. The pack contained the fantastic TypeBookTwo, follow up to the equally tasty TypeBookOne, as well as a CD master of the font, which is really welcome considering how often hard drives crash and burn.

The Shire Types "consist of six fonts in one weight... inspired by a time when England's middle counties were changing [they] bring together a heavy, solid notion of the Industrial Revolution mixed with ideas about specific localities". Which isn't bad.

Check out Tankard's typography.net site for more of his fantastic designs.

FOOTNOTE: We just want to apologise for the frankly haphazard nature of the spacing between images and text on this blog. It's some sort of Typepad glitch that springs up when you compose a post, and we're doing our darnedest to work out how to get round it. Any tips gratefully received!