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Hot off the Press: New Books, Just in Time for the Holidays
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.
But we aren’t done for the year! Below are our last publications hitting the shop in 2024, with a 20 percent member discount offered on these new releases through Wednesday, November 27. Not a member yet? Just add a membership to your cart to get your discount. Act fast while limited supplies last.
Season’s Greetings
First up, we are pleased to publish Season’s Greetings: Charming Holiday Cards from Paul Rand. Based on a treasure trove of illustrations made and signed by the twentieth-century design legend in the mid-1950s, these 24 folded notecards feature scenes of holiday mirth — from Santa surprised in a snowball fight to a small child trying Santa’s bearded mask on for size.
Letterform Archive houses these one-of-a-kind artworks, which include paint and collage on artboard, as well as printer’s samples of the few cards that appear to have made it into production. Their provenance is mysterious — we know only that Rand undertook a few as small-scale commissions for friends, while others he presumably made for personal use.
With the whimsy characteristic of Rand’s illustrations for beloved children’s books I Know a Lot of Things (1956) and Sparkle and Spin (1957), these notecards will add a warm touch to any winter correspondence.
Introducing the Type By Series
Letterform Archive is proud of its collection of more than 4,000 type specimens from the early to mid-twentieth century. Beautifully designed and produced, these examples of print ephemera helped foundries sell their typefaces around the globe.
To give design-lovers, students, and scholars access to these often rare artifacts, we’ve created the Type By series: a suite of portfolios brimming with facsimiles of specimens for some of the greatest type design hits of the last century. This first trio includes promotions for faces by Lucien Bernhard, Roger Excoffon, and Aldo Novarese — three luminaries whose work spans from the 1910s to the 1960s, and whose styles (from Bernhard Negro to Excoffon’s Choc to Novarese’s Eurostile) helped define the look of the modern era.
Issued in their original trims and reproduced in full color, the facsimiles collected in the Type By series preserve the typefaces’ original details in various weights and sizes, as well as their creators’ ingenuity in marketing them in print.
This series’ novel production values include exposed binding inside a magnetized trifold portfolio (as well as a pocket for additional loose specimens), with a blind-debossed cover hit with gloss, making each title a handsome, collectible, and inventive edition in its own right.
Emigre Fonts
Last but surely not least, Letterform Archive Books is thrilled to announce the limited preorder availability of Emigre Fonts, 1986–2024, a compendium of typeface specimens issued by the legendary digital type foundry and publishers of Emigre magazine.
We were happy to partner with Emigre creators Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko on a reissue of their first volume of type specimens, an ample tome (a.k.a., “a brick”) first published in 2016. But this time, we nearly doubled its already impressive extent to more than 1,200 pages and added new texts by Letterform Archive associate curator Stephen Coles and longtime Emigre collaborator Jeffery Keedy. In addition to specimens not included in the first volume, Licko and VanderLans also revisited their type design process files to create a special behind-the-scenes section, offering readers a look at their photos, sketches, and hand-written correspondence.
These process materials have had a place of honor in our stacks since 2016, when VanderLans and Licko donated their work to Letterform Archive. The collection includes a complete run of Emigre, mechanical markups for the magazine, and the full catalog of their type specimens. We’ve always been proud to share these materials with researchers, and now we’re equally proud that Emigre fans can take a part of the Archive home in the form of this vibrant and comprehensive desk reference.
Many thanks to the Letterform Archive community for its enthusiastic support for this year’s publications. We can’t wait to share what’s in store for 2025.
— Lucie Parker, Publisher, Letterform Archive Books