I released Ebenezer on October 20, 2008. The design grew out of seeing my Goldburg typeface used on the movie poster for Sweeney Todd, where it was set in a jumbled, engraved style. That gave me the idea to create a dedicated horror version of Goldburg. Ebenezer uses the same capital letterforms but rearranged and textured, designed strictly for display.

For the textures, I created large seamless tile bitmaps by blending centuries-old medical engravings—skeletons, organs, and similar imagery—into composite patterns. These were then used in a layered system that shifted automatically at different offsets and rates to avoid obvious repetition. The engravings are barely legible at text size, but they add a subtle density and irregularity that pushes the design further into grotesque territory.

The name came from Ebenezer Burling, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe whose unusual name seemed fitting for a horror-inspired typeface. To add variety in use, I built in OpenType ligatures so that common character pairs would substitute with custom versions, helping text look less mechanical. The project was technically difficult; the complex geometry and ligature programming caused frequent software crashes.

I updated Ebenezer on June 18, 2021, by removing deprecated characters, adding accented forms into lowercase slots, adjusting vertical metrics, and correcting the handling of spaces. On October 29, 2024, version 1.103 added a section sign and included minor vector corrections. Ebenezer was always intended only for display and has not seen notable use, but it reflects my interest in adapting an earlier design into a darker, more ornamental direction.