News / Publishing

In many ways, graffiti is letterform innovation in its purest form. Its practitioners—known as writers—are constantly inventing new ways to depict the alphabet and its combinations, developing intensely personal styles while pushing the boundaries of legibility. Similar things are said about calligraphy, lettering, and type design—all of which fill design collections—and yet graffiti is commonly separated from these traditional crafts, and often ignored by museums except for work broadly defined as “street art.”

In addition to our beautiful full-length titles, Letterform Archive Books has worked to bring our collection to you with a variety of delightful gift and stationery products created for lovers of great design. For our newest series, we scoured the stacks for objects that deserved to be reinterpreted in a truly special way. Crafted with the same care and rigor as our vibrant facsimile editions, our collection of Creative Papers adapts works by key figures from design history for use in today’s creative endeavors.

Letterform Archive is home to all who love great design. The Archive is also home to all of us who love letters, art, and books, and nowhere is that more apparent and alive than in our publishing program. I joined the Archive’s team as Revenue Director last June. Since then, it’s been a pleasure for me to learn not just about our immense collection, but about the exquisite books we publish. As a lay person new to the world of publishing, I’ve learned so much from our knowledgeable and talented Letterform Archive Books team, led by Lucie Parker.

With cutting-edge fonts based on the bitmap as well as digital revivals that transcended the screen, Emigre Fonts pioneered type design in the early days of the pixel. But it was their formidable commitment to print that documented—and helped affirm—their contributions to twentieth-century visual culture.