For three hundred years type obeyed one law: vertical strokes thick, horizontal strokes thin, the way a broad pen naturally writes. Around 1820, English poster printers needed letters that shouted, so they broke the law on purpose and flipped the stress sideways. Critics called the style Italian, meaning degenerate. Circus posters and wanted bills made it immortal.
Headstand is that inversion taken seriously: hairline stems carrying slab lintels, bowls that are all ceiling and floor. It is a display face. It has one volume, and the volume is loud.
49 GLYPHS — CAPS ONLY, ON PURPOSE
No font editor was opened. Every glyph is a small Python function that builds letterform geometry from primitives — thin stems, slab serifs, reverse-contrast rings, diagonal strips — merges them with boolean path operations, and hands clean outlines to fontTools. The alphabet is a system: one rule set for slabs, one for bowls, one law that scales a small bowl's ceiling down so its counter survives. Change a constant, rebuild, and the whole face changes its mind.
The proof loop was the honest kind: compile the font, typeset real words, render at poster size, look, fix the letter that lies. The ampersand worked on the first try. The S took four.
It runs 49 glyphs, one weight, about 6 KB — smaller than this paragraph's share of the page. Lowercase types as caps because wood type never had a lowercase drawer either.
Free for any use including commercial, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Modify it, embed it, sell things set in it — just don't sell the font by itself, and call any fork something other than Headstand.