Zuzana Licko of the Czech Republic immigrated to the US as a schoolgirl in 1968 with her parents. In the mid 1980s she founded Émigre. Along with producing a magazine with the same name, Émigre also designed and distributed original fonts. In the mid-1990s, Zuzana created Mrs. Eaves, and Filosofia, based on the Baskerville and Bodoni typefaces respectively. Zuzana picked Baskerville in particular to revive mainly due to the amount of criticism John Baskerville received from his peers and critics throughout his life, and even after his death. A large criticism being the fact that Baskerville was too sterile a font. Zuzana believe that also much criticism was raised mainly due to jealousy and snobby critics and typographers.

However, Baskerville’s work has been classified as the ultimate transitional typeface, between old style typefaces, and the modern typefaces that followed. Zuzana worked on maintaining the overall openness and lightness of the typeface, while also addressing the critics and their concern with the sharp contrasts, by making the lower case characters a wider proportion. Zuzana reduced the x-height relative to the cap height. Hence the font Mrs. Eaves was created, and it appears to look a point smaller than the average type-face in terms of lower case letters. The typeface was named after Mrs. Sarah Eaves, the wife of John Baskerville. She completed the rest of John’s work after his death. The text was published in 1996. The set contains 213 ligatures in total. Zuzana believes the type-face is great for poetry, and elegant headlines. Wordpress uses Mrs. Eaves in their logo, and it is also used as titles in spines and covers for Penguin books.

~ Mrs Eaves ~