Both a feat of production and a feast for the eyes, Hotel Retro reproduces exquisite twentieth-century steamer trunk labels as hundreds of full-color stickers that readers can actually peel off the page and adhere.
Letterform Archive wraps up a banner year in publishing. Here’s the latest on our final releases of 2024 — plus a limited-time deal for members.
At Letterform Archive Books, the team has the honor and the privilege of crafting books that tell the story of our collection. This year, we have been delighted to deliver up a dozen beautiful titles — ranging from an entertaining and visually splendid autobiography by lettering artist Michael Doret to a dynamic facsimile edition of Piet Zwart’s famed 1928 catalog for a Dutch cable company to Letter Love, a pleasing sampler of letterforms presented in a pint-sized postcard booklet.
Letterform Archive’s monograph of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., packs a lifetime of letterpress achievement into an ecstatic meditation on the power of print.
I do not want to put blackface on so-called “fine printing.” I want to print negro. To use printing to express negro culture. To do to printing what the blues and spirituals did to music.
So begins Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s Citizen Printer, a compendium of works spanning the 35-year career of a storied letterpress printer and righteous maker whose practice demands justice while delivering joy.
In 800 full-color reproductions, divided into chapters on social justice, shared wisdom, and community, Citizen Printer immerses readers in Kennedy’s bold and colorful output. Armed with salvaged ink and type, the self-described “humble negro printer” layers his audacious calls to action over dense typographic or geometric backgrounds. Sourced from civil rights activists across U.S. history, ranging from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, Kennedy’s chosen messages revive the ongoing fight for abolition and ensure that its lessons still reverberate today.