On Tuesday the 14th of May I’ll be taking part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations”. It’s a showcase for a set of posters inspired by St Bride and its collections, and I was lucky enough to be paired with the talented Tom Etherington, a book designer at Penguin, to help produce one of those posters.
As mentioned previously, a couple of months ago my fiancée and I visited New York City. Not only had I never visited the city, but I was also eager to meet some of the people who have been involved, in one way or another, with the Shady Characters book.
Last weekend I took the bus from Edinburgh to Innerleithen, a small town in the Scottish Borders, for a one-day letterpress workshop at Smail’s Printing Works. The more I appreciate the impact that printing has had on the marks examined here, the more I want to try my hand at printing itself: it seems disingenuous to discuss the death of the pilcrow at the hands of Gutenberg’s press, or to explore the epic struggle to automatically hyphenate and justify text, without ever having lifted a piece of type in anger.