Text Appeal

Readers, writers, typographers, and printers take note. The 6th annual Text Ball—the lettered stepchild of Portland, Oregon's annual literary Wordstock Festival—will take place on October 1st at p:ear Gallery. The theme this year is In Poetic Fashion and it is a benefit for the non-profit Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland which promotes literacy through DIY publishing. There will be live music by indie-folk heroine Laura Gibson and poetry readings, word games, giant crossword puzzles, dirty limerick challenges, a silent auction and more, including a parade of well-lettered fashions and prizes for the text-dressed. Come dressed as your favorite poem, book, letter, story, or word, enjoy the letterati and support a great cause. Advance tickets for $12 can be purchased here or $15 at the door.
      The photo above is last year's grand prize winner for Best Text, Erica Hijazi. She constructed a fashionable bow from a 1939 Williamette College newpaper she unearthed while picking up a VCR purchased on Craigslist. Soooo Portlandia! Her date wore a tie constructed from the same newspaper.

Mark Anen came dressed as a Government G-Man.

Aimee Pedretti's vision of Hell was Dante's Inferno.

Runner-up for Most Literary is writer and author Myrlin Hermes, featuring the entire text of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action..."
::All photos from the last year's text-dressed are taken by Georgia Perry.

A Fountain of Blackletter Text

A very unusual title page from a German text, dated 1676. It is said to be an early example of concrete typography, and it can be yours for only $450 on eBay. 

A Play With V

A seven act play about the letter V designed and printed by Jens Jorgen Hansen. He is a self-employed printer (bogtrykker in Danish) and designer in Denmark and has a nice letterpress studio. See his website for information on workshops and his Etsy store for more of his work for sale. But what about the V for Valentine?

Essay on Sculpture

Concrete poetry by Carl Andre. This appeared in the November 1965 issue of Art in America.
::Via Airform

Flakiness

Create a typographic snowflake from any word or your name with David Hunter's interactive flake generator, NameFlake. Enter another word in the Winter Wonderland, and you get an instant snowstorm on your desktop. Almost as much fun as the real thing. From David Hunter, a designer and developer based in London. Beware of avalanche danger.

Visual Storytelling

Publishers sell stories, yet they are seldom the topics of them. This is not the case of a new British publisher, Visual Editions, nicknamed VE. Visual Editions was born in 2009 out of a joint love for books, when owners Britt Iversen and Anna Gerber wondered why there was such a large divide between text-driven literary books and image-driven art and design books. They now edition beautiful, smart and well-crafted books which are nearly theatrical experiences. They consider this amalgam of text and image as visual writing, and see a rich literary heritage of this kind of writing. Their vision is to make great looking stories—where the words and pictures meld and the act of reading becomes an experience. Here is a glimpse of Tristram Shandy, their first editioned book.



You can also see some of their favorite examples of visual writing (including some of their own) in their Flickr group.

Take a look at a short video of some reactions to VEs second book, Tree of Codes, just released in the UK on November 15th:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer - Public Reactions from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

In Tree of Codes, author Jonathan Safran Foer uses an existing manuscript and carves out an entirely new story by die-cutting out portions of the text. The original book is one of his favorites—The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and Foer claims it is a completely different story with a different arc and characters even. In the process of producing this unconventional book, Visual Editions got turned down by every printer they approached—the stock line being the book you want to make just cannot be made. Their luck turned when the Belgium printer, die Keure rose to the challenge of making a book with a different die-cut on every page. This book, or paper sculpture, defies all literary and design conventions, took over a year of writing, cutting and proto-typing and it was not without production perils. The book's designer is London-based Sara De Bondt Studio. De Bondt is also a teacher at The Royal College of Art who co-curated The Form of the Book conference at St. Bride Library in 2009. The paperback cover of Tree of Codes was designed by Jon Gray of Gray318. A remarkable acheivement all! I cannot wait to hold it in my own hands to experience the reading myself. Note to self...add to wish list. It will be available in the states soon!





Listen to what Jonathan Safran Foer has to say about the concept of his new book and the process of reading it:

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer from Visual Editions on Vimeo.

Just my Opinion Ya Know?

Typographical poetry in motion, by poet Taylor Mali.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.