Since I’ve been reading Johanna Drucker all semester, it seems fitting to close my comments on this blog, where we have so often discussed the challenges and surprises of making, with something Drucker says in an interview for Journal of Artists’ … Continue reading
First, I’ll tell you about the thing I did not do: I did not send a letter to my grandmother’s English cousin Beryl, who lives in Birmingham, the last, to my knowledge, of the English family that the American side … Continue reading
From top to bottom: “Yuletide Greetings”; a marriage announcement, 1902; an assortment of empty envelopes; an assortment of letters and other handwritten scraps; three hand-embellished hankies; a collection of bone buttons; a lace collar; three calling cards; a … Continue reading
I haven’t implemented a writing algorithm or made a bot yet. In the time when I would’ve normally been thinking about and working on this, I’ve had to respond to a landslide of inquiries about a North Country public memory … Continue reading
…their traces struck me not as desecration but as potential sources of evidence. —William Sherman (Books & Readers in Early Modern England 123) 1 For this first story, I have nothing to show you. This is a memory, brought round … Continue reading
Let me start by saying I never anticipated how much I would hate the nitty-gritty of font-struction. I notice typography, take pleasure in it, care about it, think carefully about how I use it—but give me a ready-made font any … Continue reading
Over the summer I acquired a black tin cash box of my paternal great-grandmother’s effects—interesting word—that had been sitting under a pile of scrapbooks in a closet in my grandparents’ house for decades. At some point in the box’s life, … Continue reading
I know typography isn’t quite on our radar yet, but we’re close. I stumbled upon this, a look at the typography of 2001: A Space Odyssey via the Paris Review tumblr, and I wanted to share it before it disappears into the … Continue reading
In her introduction to the facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems, The Gorgeous Nothings, Jen Bervin suggests that Dickinson’s collection of poems written on reused envelopes “convey[s] a sense of New England thrift and her relationship to the larger … Continue reading
Inscription is a form of intervention, into which new machinery continues to interpose. Ink is imposed on paper, while pens and keyboards intrude into the posture of hands. Grooves are incised into phonograph records, while sound echoes in our ears. … Continue reading