Gill Sans (designed by Eric Gill) is one of my favorite fonts. This photo is marked ‘Part of a drawing for Gill Sans C D G O Q dated 20.12.32. The original is in pencil and colour wash on graph paper and measures 11″ wide by 14.5″ high.’ Reproduced in: The Monotype Recorder, Volume XLI No. 3, Autumn, 1958. Read more about Gill Sans. Photo found here.
This is about the time I start looking around for holiday gifts for my friends and family. I ran across these little (2 3/4″W x 4″L) letter trays the other day that would be perfect for one of my type-obsessed friends.
For this year’s Codex, through Instagram, I got to see some books in progress before the fair. Calligrapher Suzanne Moore has a new book called “A Musings,” a book of all embellished A’s. Jessica Spring of Springtide Press letterpress printed one page and posted pictures of the lock-up and printed page — before Suzanne worked on it. Jessica told me she didn’t recognize the pages after Suzanne finished with them! Suzanne laughed when I told her that. The finished book is beautiful — I couldn’t find a snap of the page Jessica printed, but I did find a few other spreads. They are below, after Jessica’s. I asked Suzanne if she was going to do the entire alphabet, and again she laughed and said she’s considering only one other letter: Q.
Codex was awfully inspiring. I’ve been planning a book with curved type for quite some time, and now I can do it in metal thanks to the kit I got from Jessica Spring at Springtide Press. That’s the coaster she sent me as an example along with her furniture kit. Get it here.
At Codex, Donna Seager had an intriguing piece by Lisa Kokin called Facsimile Two. Kokin says
I began to make faux pages and page spreads using the trimmed-down zippers that I had snagged at a fabric give-away months before. The first pieces were generic book pages, small, even, single-column blocks, made of just zippers and thread, with no reference to specific texts. After several months, the work entered the realm of specificity when I decided to work from particular books and to incorporate fabric as a substrate.
Below are 2 pieces, and detail on the first. You can see more about how she made them and why here.
