easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

When I googled the name “Zapfest,” to find something I had written about the 2001 San Francisco celebration of calligraphic type, I was startled to find a link to something called “Zapfest 2008.” It turned out to be a one-day music festival in Oxford; it also turned out to be, for reasons unexplained, canceled. (Well, these things happen.) I don’t imagine the reasons had anything to do with possible confusion with a typographic festival that took place seven years ago, but it’s an odd juxtaposition. Clearly, for the organizers of the Oxford music event, the name breaks down into “Zap” plus “fest”; the combination “Zapf” would have been a coincidental one. But for those of us who know and admire the work of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf, it’s hard to imagine not immediately thinking of them and their work upon seeing such a name.

Incidentally, the book that came out of the original Zapfest exhibition is still available.

Categorized as culture, events, letters, type designers, typography |

If you’re in Seattle this Thursday, don’t miss the opening of an exhibit of brilliantly creative letterpress printing by the late Chris Stern, at the Design Commission (121 Prefontaine Place S., near 4th & Yesler). Chris and his wife and partner, Jules Remedios Faye, formed Stern & Faye, Letterpress Printers, and founded their “printing farm” in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. Each of them was a fine, and unusual, printer and artist before they met, and their work together has been amazing. When Chris died of cancer a year and a half ago, many of us lost a friend and we all lost an original talent.

The exhibit is in several parts: in addition to Chris’s printed work, there will be photos and artifacts from the printing farm, and prints produced by friends, colleagues, and students of Chris and Jules’s, inspired by their work. Much of this will be for sale, to benefit Jules and help pay off Chris’s outstanding medical bills.

The opening runs from 5 to 10 p.m. (this is “First Thursday,” Seattle’s monthly arts walk in Pioneer Square). If you can’t make the opening, the exhibit will be accessible during business hours at the Design Commission for the rest of the month.

Yes, the exhibit includes a copy of the magnificent volume that Chris created from my little story “Roman Seattle.”

Update June 6:

I’ve posted a few photos from last night’s opening.

Categorized as book design, culture, design, events, letters, printing, typography |

If you’re in Seattle, the city whose name is notoriously hard to kern, note that Northwest Film Forum is showing Gary Hustwit’s film Helvetica tonight and Thursday night, as part of ByDesign08, co-sponsored by the Seattle chapter of AIGA. It’s a film well worth seeing, not only for its portrayal of the typeface but for its investigation of how type is part of our everyday visual experience, whether we notice it or not.

Categorized as events, fonts |

In Mexico City a couple of weeks ago, when we had lunch with members of the local type community in the café of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, I met Marina Garone, an Argentinian typographer who lives and works in Mexico. She told us about the exhibition and lecture series she had just organized, “Las otras letras: mujeres impresoras en el mundo del libro antiguo,” about the traditions and history of women printers, and how they embodied the “professional, intellectual and economic life of women.” The opening, which Eileen and I would dearly have loved to be able to attend, was to take place on March 8, in Puebla.

The lecture program is taking place this week, at the Lafragua Library and the Palafoxiana Library, which are co-hosting the events.

“With this exhibition we want to present an aspect of the history of books and printing which is practically unknown in the Iberoamerican world: prints in which the professional, intellectual and economic life of women is reflected. In this exhibition, a total of 63 works printed by Spanish, Mexican, Flemish, and French women, undertaken between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, will be presented.”

At lunch, Marina gave Eileen an impressive book, Casa de la primera imprenta de América: X aniversario, published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in 2004, celebrating the earliest printshop in the Americas, which includes her essay “Herederas de la letra: mujeres y tipografía en la Nueva España” (heirs – heiresses, literally – of the letter: women and typography in New Spain). This is clearly a fertile area for investigation.

When I asked Marina whether the exhibition would travel, she named a number of cities around Mexico and also in Spain where it was scheduled to be shown; and I hope it will come to the United States sometime as well. I think it should. Certainly I know many women printers in this country – and those who appreciate them – who would be glad to see it.

Categorized as culture, events, printing |

We just got back last weekend from Mexico City, where I went to meet people and research potential venues for next year’s ATypI conference. (This year’s, as noted below, will be in St. Petersburg.) Although Roger Black, who has been the key figure in making this happen and was going to meet us there, had to cancel at the last minute because of a sudden dental emergency, we met with Ricardo Salas – director of the design school at Anáhuac University, very well-known graphic designer, and the driving force behind local organizing for the event. Ricardo organized a whirlwind tour of museums and theaters in the Centro Histórico, all of which seemed promising. He knew the principals of all the venues; indeed, he seemed to know virtually everyone in the city.

It was my first visit to Mexico City. Since I absentmindedly forgot to carry my digital camera with me on the day we trooped all around the Centro, I can’t display snapshots of any of the places we visited, such as the amazing Museo de Arte Popular (folk-art museum) or San Ildefonso with its early murals by Orozco, Rivera, and other famous Mexican muralistas. I could show you photos of a bunch of friends eating, drinking, talking, and laughing in the sun, but that would be cruel to those languishing in wintry northern climes.

Type design and typography are alive and very well in Mexico, although everyone there kept telling us that this was mostly a development of the last ten or twenty years. Yet Mexico has a very long printing history; the earliest printing press in the New World was, and is, in Mexico City. And of course design, graphic and otherwise, has been an essential element of Mexican artistic life.

Categorized as architecture, culture, design, events, printing |

We’ve finalized the dates for this year’s ATypI conference: September 17–21, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The conference theme, appropriately enough, is The Old · The New – appropriate because this is the new, ever-evolving Russia but it is also the 300th anniversary of the start of Peter the Great’s historic reform of Russian typography, when the progressive, authoritarian czar established (by fiat) a whole new style of typography for the Russian language. So there was a dramatic break between the old and the new three hundred years ago, here in Peter’s city; and today there are the ongoing effects of the political break begun nearly twenty years ago, plus the breakneck speed of technological change. It’s like wearing a pair of glasses where one eye sees the old, the other the new; but you’re constantly seeing through both at once.

Categorized as events, typography |

This has nothing to do with design or typography (except in the larger sense that we design the society we live in), but it’s topical and seems worth recording.

The Washington State Democratic caucuses were mobbed. Four years ago, before the last presidential election, they’d set a record, with about 100,000 in attendance; this year it was double that. I remember the crowding last time, when a whole bunch of local precincts met in the same large hall at a school (I think it was) somewhere across town; this year there were fewer precincts, and we met in the gymnasium of an elementary school just a few blocks away, but it was every bit as jam-packed. And chaotic. You had to push your way through the crowd just to sign in, and once you’d done that, it wasn’t clear what else there was to do, except wait.

It was hot. It was loud, though no one voice could be heard clearly through it all. There were different groups around the hand-lettered signs for each precinct — a few folding metal chairs, all occupied, and a continuous crowd of people standing or trying to thread their way through, in one direction or another. The whole thing seemed ill-planned, and unable to cope with the numbers. (Funny, that’s exactly the way it felt four years ago. Don’t they learn?)

It was unpleasant enough that when Eileen found someone who told her that, if we’d signed in with our preference and we weren’t planning on changing it, we could simply go, that’s what we did. I was glad I hadn’t done what I was thinking of at first, and signed in either as uncommitted or as a John Edwards supporter, just to make a point about how Edwards had been right on the issues; then I would have had to stick around for the discussion (if anything could be heard in that madhouse) in order to change my vote to Obama.

There didn’t seem to be any rancor; a lot of people, like me, liked both candidates, despite the news media’s efforts to manufacture a scenario of opposing camps of true believers. (I suppose there must a few, somewhere. I haven’t met any, though.) It seemed a hopeful crowd.

From local news reports, I gather than our caucus was typical; they were all over-crowded, even the Republican ones. (Though in our neighborhood, I’d be surprised if the Republicans could have filled a living room. But you never know.) I never even found out the results for our own precinct (it didn’t happen to be one of the ones picked by the news media to mention, and I hadn’t stuck around to find out first-hand), but it seems that across the state, Obama has won hands-down. In fact, in most areas, he’s won 2-to-1. (Actually, I just checked the Washington Democrats’ website; it doesn’t break the results down to the precinct level, but in our legislative district, it’s more like Obama 3-to-1.)

So that’s the caucus process. Simpler than it was four years ago, when there were more choices and I had to stay around and negotiate with people who supported other candidates, and ultimately change my own vote. This time, with only two candidates left in the race, it was just a matter of making a choice. Either one would be a good president, but Obama’s more promising.

Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, Mike Huckabee won the Kansas caucuses, so he can continue to be a thorn in John McCain’s side. “Confusion to your enemies!”

Gonna be an interesting year.

Categorized as events |

When I was in San Francisco last week – no, the week before last – at Jack Stauffacher’s regular Friday lunch in North Beach, the people seated around the table found themselves reading about…themselves. Occasional luncher Kristina Bell had brought one of the editors of Task Newsletter, and he had brought with him copies of the first issue – which included an article by Kristina about these very lunches. Actually, it was a selection of transcripts from the conversation on various Fridays, plus a few thumbnail photos of attendees. To see some of the same people intently reading, or at least browsing through, an article about themselves and their conversation some months earlier…it gets recursive, like an infinitely receding set of mirrors.

I always make a point of trying to time my San Francisco sojourns so that I can make it to lunch on Friday. The café is nothing special, just a friendly place with decent sandwiches, not too crowded and not too noisy, where we can talk. To preserve the privacy of these permeable but non-public gatherings, the Task article blacks out the name of the café each time it’s mentioned, giving the piece a resemblance to something you might obtain through the Freedom of Information Act after it’s been redacted by the FBI.

Jack encourages a sort of show-and-tell from the people who come to these lunches, and you never know what people will bring. Sometimes it’s a book from Jack’s own collection, sometimes a project someone is working on, sometimes intellectual booty brought back from afar by a recent traveler. This time, Jack had brought a copy of the 1946 edition of László Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, designed by Paul Rand; I had just been looking at this very book’s title page in Alan Bartram‘s Bauhaus, Modernism & the Illustrated Book. It was instructive to see how much more effective Rand’s design was in the hand than in a tiny reproduction.

Like Jack himself, the lunches make connections: not just of people, but of ideas. I firmly believe that it’s in unpretentious exchanges like this that culture is made.

[Photos | Top: William Clauson, Jack Stauffacher. Bottom: Pino Trogu, Slobodan Dan Paich, Eileen Gunn, Kristina Bell.]

Categorized as culture, design, events |

A book project that’s nearing completion is the 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, by John Crowley. I’m designing it for Incunabula – for whom, fourteen years ago, I designed Crowley’s short-story collection Antiquities. This edition will present the definitive text, carefully edited by Ron Drummond and approved by the author, and it will marry Crowley’s prose with art by artist/printmaker Peter Milton.

These are not illustrations; they were not done for this book. They work as complements to the text; both the text and the art existed independently long before they came to be combined in one edition. Making that juxtaposition work, of course, is the hardest part of designing the book.

In June, Ron Drummond and I drove from Ron’s home near Albany, N.Y., to northeastern Vermont, to Stinehour Press, to supervise the printing of a poster that would serve as a print test for the book. Most importantly, it would prove to us – and to Peter Milton – that what we were planning and what Stinehour could deliver would do justice to his art, in a format that would still be a comfortably readable volume. We picked up the printed posters first thing in the morning in Lunenburg, and drove down to southern New Hampshire in time to have lunch with Peter and Edith Milton in their large, art-festooned old house in Francestown, where Peter signed off on our print sample (literally, as Ron prevailed on him to sign several of the posters). Then we drove west to Conway, Mass., at the edge of the Berkshires, to have dinner with John Crowley and his family, and get his approval. We covered the complete range of the project in that one day.

The project, like most labors of love, has taken a little longer than we anticipated, but it’s in its penultimate stage. This week, John Crowley was in Seattle, teaching a workshop and giving a reading at Richard Hugo House, and I had the pleasure of handing him a bound blank book, a sample of the binding. It’s a heavy object, but not unnecessarily weighty; I like to call it “the Oxford Lectern Little, Big,” and in fact the lectern at Hugo House looks a bit like something you’d read a sermon from. Hefting the book and looking at its blank pages, Crowley said, “So do I get to keep this and use it as a journal when the project is finished?” Yes, of course. When the project’s finished.

Categorized as books, design, events |

Just five days after getting back from Japan, I was off to the UK for the 2007 ATypI conference in Brighton. The theme was “Hands on,” and the series of talks and workshops dovetailed nicely with that flexible idea. The nearby village of Ditchling, where Edward Johnston had lived and Eric Gill had established one of his utopian crafts communities, came up repeatedly in presentations and casual conversation; indeed, one of the pre-conference excursions was a day at Ditchling, although I was too busy with conference organizing and board meetings to get to it.

The kick-off on Thursday night was Looking for Mr Gill, a short film by Luke Holland about Gill’s reputation in Ditchling and his effect on the village. It’s a film that I think ought to get shown in the United States; I’m going to see what can be arranged in Seattle and San Francisco.

At the ATypI annual general meeting, I was elected president of ATypI. As I told a friend who asked what extra work and duties this illustrious post entailed: “The presidential palace, of course, and the Praetorian Guard. Potemkin villages built for my benefit, every time I tour the countryside. I don’t think there are any drawbacks, though they did say something about a little ceremony they do come harvest time…”

At the Saturday night “garden party,” we announced that next year’s conference will be held in St. Petersburg – Russia, that is, not Florida. Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the creation of the “Civil Type,” Peter the Great’s dramatic reform of the Cyrillic alphabet. Since St. Petersburg was founded by Peter to be his new capital and “window on Europe,” the conjunction of city and anniversary is especially appropriate.

[Photo: the kinetic Ken Garland, one of the principal speakers at the ATypI conference, spun on his heel just as I snapped the picture.]

Categorized as culture, events |