Delirium

A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure is a toolkit for writing and remembering queer and trans histories. Expanding on Nat Pyper’s series of fonts whose letterforms derive from the life stories and printed traces of countercultural queers of the last several decades, this new book showcases overlooked biographies alongside previously unseen archival materials, as well as Pyper’s unique approach to designing fonts as containers for memory.

The book debuts a new essay by Pyper, and includes contributions from Paul Soulellis, Claire Star Finch, Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Rosen Eveleigh, and G. B. Jones that offer vital perspectives on queer archival practices, language lineages, design as protest, and love as the basis for research. Part reader, part type specimen, part love letter, these fonts foreground the politics of queer memory while opening up new avenues for writers, designers, and curious readers.

Dear writer,
A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing.
I began making these fonts in order to rapidly document and disseminate the work and ideas that they cite. I pack these histories, or part of them, into fonts for a couple of reasons. First, font files are durable. OpenType fonts (.OTFs) have persisted in their ubiquity since the late '90s and maintain their utility as a nimble and reliable format. Second, fonts have the capacity to contain a hefty amount of information within a tiny package. In under 100 kilobytes, an entire alphabet! In the font’s metadata, a manifesto! Fonts then function as a useful format for ferrying information from one place to another.
I am using these fonts as time machines. These machines take me back—to Robert Ford and Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in early 1990s Chicago; to the Lesbian Alliance, a socialist-feminist enclave in 1970s St. Louis, Missouri; to G.B. Jones and queer punk filmmaking in 1980s downtown Toronto—but they also take me forward to unknown futures through the act of writing itself. In use, these fonts engage the past as a provocation. They engage the past as a verb.

Is this romantic? Yes.

Love,
Nat

Les diagrammes, cartes et visualisations de données ont conquis le domaine de la recherche en arts, lettres et sciences humaines. Pour certains chercheurs, ces formes graphiques consistent à exploiter des données quantitatives jusqu’ici délaissées, pour d’autres, elles offrent la possibilité d’explorer les relations discrètes qu’entretiennent des corpus hétérogènes. Mais sur quels fondements épistémologiques reposent ces opérations techniques et intellectuelles ? Dans le cadre de la production du savoir et de son interprétation en régime numérique, est-il possible de dépasser le simple effet d’affichage des données, certes bluffant au premier abord, et d’envisager autrement les interfaces et les logiciels ?

Considérée aujourd’hui comme l’une des plus importantes théoriciennes des humanités numériques, Johanna Drucker livre dans cet ouvrage, spécialement rédigé pour la collection, une alternative aux formes dominantes de la visualisation de l’information. Héritière de la tradition humaniste, elle propose une approche qui réhabilite l’idée d’un sujet situé et incarné qui expérimente et conceptualise les connaissances par le prisme de la représentation graphique.

4SPIKE & howawfulallanis, Alex Less, Alice Royer, Alligataure, Amelie Clicquot, Anjol, Arañada, Axel Fievet , Axelle Bourguignon, Baron & Tosma, Charlie Cooper, Charlotte Sallan Gémard, Délora Abbal, Elliott Sanchez, Erimoczi, femo, Fleur Douglas, Gaia Bergelin & Inès Camrla, Justine Bouvet, Kara, Kiara Patry, Lilian Magardeau & Elisa Grondin, Loreleï, Lucile Moreau, Manon Souza, Marie Martin Design, Mira, Migraine, Nathan Peron, Nathanael Brelin, Nomaison, Ema Tomas, Othilie Jourde Ledoux, Piquico , Rémy Bellariva, Séraphin Degroote Ferrera et Arthur Diguet, Syan Fischer, Tanikawa Sari, Vanessa Kintzel, Virginie Contier, Viviane Le Borgne, Zoé Vincent. 

Clara Istlerová: A Life Among Letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). A trailblazer in her field, Istlerová was one of the few women in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. This publication introduces readers to Istlerová’s renowned book designs, particularly highlighting the analog processes she utilized to create one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Švácha, Rostislav. From Modernity to Functionalism (Odeon, 1985).

The publication features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by editor Anežka Minaříková, accompanied by work from Istlerová’s personal archive alongside discussions detailing her creative process. Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, the publication unveils the Czech design narrative of the twentieth century to English-speaking readers, highlighting Istlerová’s lasting impact and central role.

Design by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka

Tense is a never-realised publication, written and composed by Lucy Lippard and Jerry Kearns in 1984, that only now has been released in a very limited run on our imprint. The book accompanied the exhibition Top Stories, which took a closer look at the 29 issues of the prose periodical with the same title, founded in the late 1970s by Anne Turyn.

Top Stories was dedicated to fiction by emerging women artists and writers from that time. Tense was originally intended to become part of the series as well, but never made it to print. It was only recently – during the making of the exhibition at Amsterdam’s Kunstverein – that the original mock-up was retrieved from the editor’s archives and finally sent off to the printer.