The Typefounder's Daughter
A Novel of Victorian Typefounding

About this book:

In the soot-choked warrens of Fleet Street, Eleanor Vance tends the molten heart of her father's dying foundry—pouring lead, cutting punches, and bearing the scars of a craft that refuses women. When a Whitehall agent commissions an impossible font: the lost *Romain du Roi*, smuggled from revolutionary Paris, the gold he offers saves their shop but buys their silence. The type is meant to print a satire that could topple a ministry; the foundry is meant to be erased once the work is done.

Enter Julian Carr—poet, radical, and the only man who sees Eleanor as master rather than daughter. He offers a second path: a hidden press, smuggled metal, and a chance to strike the true edition before the trap closes. But in a trade where a hair's breadth of error ruins a fount, and a single misplaced trust sends men to the Fleet Ditch, Eleanor must cut twenty-three perfect punches while her father's hands fail, the fog thickens, and the Home Office circles closer.

*The Typefounder's Daughter* is a novel of fire and filings, of letters cast like bullets and words set like traps. Here, typemetal remembers every hand that shaped it—and the wrong font in the right hands can change history.