There are typefaces I respect and typefaces I love. Mrs Eaves I love because of the ampersand.
Look at it properly. The italic ampersand in Mrs Eaves is not really an ampersand. It is the Latin word Et in cursive, painted as a single gesture, the E leaning into the t with a grace that has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with calligraphy remembering itself. You could set one letter of this typeface, that letter, and it would still be the most beautiful thing on your page.
The woman
Mrs Eaves is named after Sarah Eaves, who lived and worked in eighteenth-century Birmingham and whose life is more interesting than anyone with "Mrs" in front of their name usually gets credit for.
Sarah was married to a man called Richard Eaves. Richard abandoned her and their five children. Sarah took work as a housekeeper for John Baskerville, a typefounder and printer whose ambitions for paper, ink, typeface design, and the physical object of the book were reshaping English printing. Baskerville was self-taught and obsessive. Sarah was employed to run his household, and she ended up running far more than that: she assisted in the foundry, set type, mixed ink, and worked across every part of the practice she had walked into as a domestic.
Richard Eaves eventually died. John and Sarah married in 1764. They had already been living and working together for sixteen years. When John died in 1775, Sarah inherited the foundry and continued the business. She sold the punches and matrices to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French playwright and printer, who used them for his landmark Kehl edition of Voltaire's complete works.
Baskerville's typeface outlived him because she kept it alive. You can argue about how much of it she cut herself. You cannot argue that his work would have survived without her.
The typeface
Zuzana Licko designed Mrs Eaves in 1996 for Emigre, the Californian foundry she co-founded with Rudy VanderLans. She took Baskerville as the starting point and then did the thing most revival designers do not do: she refused to flatten the weirdness of the original.
Baskerville in the eighteenth century was printed on dampened paper, letterpressed with heavy impression, and read at generous sizes. The letters on the page did not look like what you see when you set Monotype Baskerville in a modern word processor. They were softer, wider, more generous, more ink-bloomed. The letters had room to breathe because the printing process gave them room.
Mrs Eaves approximates the physical printed letter, not the punch. Licko lowered the x-height significantly, so the letters feel smaller on the page at a given point size but have dramatically taller ascenders and more room above the baseline. She widened the body of each letter. She softened the stroke contrast. She kept the diagonal stress of a broad-nibbed pen. The result is a typeface that looks like a beloved book rather than a specimen sheet.
The capital Q
Mrs Eaves inherits Baskerville's long, sweeping Q tail, but Licko redrew it with more curve and more commitment. The tail swings out to the right and continues beneath whatever letter follows, like a signature flourish left on the page by the person who just signed it. It is extravagant in the same way Baskerville's was extravagant, but it is extravagant in a 1996 accent.
The ligatures
This is the part everyone who loves Mrs Eaves talks about, and there is a reason.
Mrs Eaves ships with one of the largest ligature sets in any commercial typeface. Beyond the usual fi, fl, ffi, ffl, there are over two hundred decorative ligatures, covering combinations most typefaces do not bother to draw: Th, sp, st, ct, fb, fh, fj, fk. Emigre also released Mrs Eaves Just Ligatures as a separate font containing nothing but the ligature glyphs, so a designer can switch them in where they want without carrying the weight of a full font.
The point of a ligature is not decoration. The point is that certain letter pairs produce a mechanical collision between letterforms that was visible and ugly in metal type. A ligature redraws those two characters as one glyph that handles the collision gracefully. Modern digital type avoids the collision with kerning, so ligatures became optional, then became expressive, then became a way for a designer to signal that the typeface was made by someone who still read books.
Mrs Eaves ligatures signal that loudly. The Th ligature has a crossbar that extends from the top of the T to the shoulder of the h. The ct ligature has a hairline connecting the two letters' top terminals. The st ligature connects the descending curve of the s to the top of the t. None of them are necessary. All of them are evidence of care.
Why people call it "feminine"
It is a word that gets used to mean "this looks different from the typefaces I consider the default", which is to say, it gets used to dismiss rather than describe. Mrs Eaves was the first major revival designed by a woman, and for years type critics wrote about it as if the generosity of its proportions and the care in its details were gendered properties, as if a wider body or a lowered x-height were somehow softer in a way that Neue Haas Grotesk was not harder.
The honest description is that Mrs Eaves is warmer than most Baskerville digitisations because Licko drew it with the inked page in mind, not the polished punch. It is a typeface that admits where ink and paper meet is the real site of type design, not the steel.
Where it works
Mrs Eaves is not a small-text typeface. The low x-height and wide proportions that make it gorgeous at 16pt and up work against it at 9pt body text, where the letters get too spread out and the ascenders and descenders eat too much line height. Licko acknowledged this and in 2009 released Mrs Eaves XL, with a taller x-height, tighter proportions, and a rebuilt ligature set designed to hold up at text sizes. Mrs Eaves XL is the one to reach for in long-form body text. Original Mrs Eaves is the one for the display sizes where its generosity is a feature.
The pairing with Mr Eaves, Licko's sans-serif companion released the same year as XL, is the other move worth knowing. Mr Eaves is not a Baskerville sans. It is its own creature: geometric, warm, drawn with Mrs Eaves's proportions in mind. The two together give you a full system for books, magazines, and editorial work that feels coherent without being repetitive.
Why I keep coming back
I use Mrs Eaves for headlines and opening paragraphs, for display work, and for anywhere the reader is expected to slow down. It rewards slowness. It has details that only surface when you stop scanning. The ligatures, the ampersand, the restrained italic, the Q tail: none of them announce themselves. They wait for you to notice.
Typefaces that reward slowness are not fashionable right now. A lot of contemporary body text is set in neutral grotesque sans-serifs designed for scannability above everything else, which makes sense for product interfaces and bad sense for the rest of reading. Mrs Eaves is a reminder that another direction exists.
Zuzana Licko gave the typeface a name that was a small historical correction. The English type tradition remembers Baskerville. It should also remember Sarah. Every time I set the ampersand, I think about that.