News / Collections

When Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko donated the Emigre papers to Letterform Archive not long after we opened our doors in 2015, we were spoiled for all collections to follow.

It wasn’t just that their archive was rich with material that defined an important era in design—one in which the new digital tools of the 1980s and ’90s created a surge in independent publishing and type design, with VanderLans and Licko’s innovative Emigre magazine and digital foundry at the forefront.

The big wall in Letterform Archive’s reading room now serves as a display case for small, short-run exhibitions. Our first pop-up opened in January to celebrate Lunar New Year. Curated by members of the Archive exhibition team, Jen Dao (姚逸雯) and Sherry Chou (徐雪俐), Good Luck explores the rich cultural heritage and modern interpretations of the holiday through a blend of custom red envelopes, holiday ephemera, and celebration event posters.

Among the contemporary pieces in Good Luck are four large screen prints featuring complex, stylized animals intertwined with letterforms. The posters come from the hive mind of Omnivore, a graphic design studio formed by “second-generation Asian-Americans, working mothers, design educators, small business owners, food lovers, justice seekers, and friends.” Alice Chung (Brooklyn), Karen Hsu (Portland, Oregon); and Julie Cho (Los Angeles) have been collaborating since 2002 and often think of themselves as a three-headed monster. Their firm is M/WBE (Minority- & Woman-owned) certified.

From Rarified to Commonplace:  A Brief History of Hashibukuro

The chopstick sleeve originated in the Imperial Court of Japan sometime during the Heian period (8th–12th century). Ladies-in-waiting are thought to have wrapped chopsticks in scraps of silk or other fine fabrics as it was considered impolite to pass unwrapped objects from one hand to another. Hundreds of years later, hashibukuro (“chopstick envelopes”) graced the banquet tables of shoguns, and by the Edo period (17th–19th century), establishments in the Yoshiwara red light district furnished hashibukuro to their regulars. 

At Letterform Archive we’re always looking for stuff that shows the way a designer thinks, and reveals how their work was made. People visit us not just to see final works on paper — books, ephemera, posters — but also to see all the other artifacts produced along the way to the final piece, including  sketches, proofs, and variations that never made it to print. That’s why we were so thrilled in 2018 to accept a donation from Michael Doret that includes about half of his working archive. (The other half went to the Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union in New York where he got his start.)

In the North Indian city of Meerut, not far from the national capital of New Delhi, there was once a thriving wood type manufacturing scene. The industry there continued to operate much later than in other parts of the world, churning out letter blocks until the turn of the millennium, and contributing significantly to letterpress printing in the region and beyond.