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Event

Lecture

A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate

  • Date
  • Time
  • Lead By Carolyn Porter
  • Where SFPL Main Library, Koret Auditorium

During the depths of World War II, Frenchman Marcel Heuzé mailed letters to his wife and three young daughters from a labor camp in Berlin. His beautiful looping cursive carried tender words of love along with testimony about day-to-day survival inside the camp. Sixty years later, graphic designer and type designer Carolyn Porter found Marcel's letters at an antique store in Stillwater, Minnesota and began to transform his handwriting into a modern computer font. After having his letters translated, she became obsessed with finding answers to the questions: Who was Marcel? Why had he been imprisoned in Germany? Why were his precious letters for sale halfway around the world? And most importantly: Did Marcel survive?