Publi Fluor, Letter Business in Brussels

A collection of misprinted sheets originating from books designed by graphic designer Manuel Raeder: a “behind the scene” project, which documents the early stage of book production and its conventions.

Makulatur, a German word that derives from lat. maculatura “something stained”, refers to misprinted paper that is discarded at the beginning of the printing process as use- and worthless. In 2010, the graphic designer Manuel Raeder started to collect and preserve misprinted sheets of all the publications he designed not only for his own publishing house Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite but also for fellow artists and institutions.

This waste paper that shows all difficulties arising in the early stage of production—trails, testy or stains—he combined to a new volume as a compilation of maculae “stains”. Thus, he dissolved the spoiled material from the realm of invisibility and displays it to the public whereby he reveals and reflects on the conventions of a book.

Graphic designer Manuel Raeder lives and works in Berlin.

Natural Enemies of Books is a response to the groundbreaking 1937 publication 'Bookmaking on the Distaff Side', which brought together contributions by women printers, illustrators, authors, typographers, and typesetters, highlighting the print industry’s inequalities and proposing a takeover of the history of the book. Edited by feminist graphic design collective MMS, the publication includes newly commissioned essays and poems, conversations with former typesetters Inger Humlesjö, Ingegärd Waaranperä, Gail Cartmail, and Megan Downey, and reprints of the original book and other publications.

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

This ambitious book brings together a wide international selection of new and recent writing by educators and practitioners who question the rules and hierarchies of graphic design education today. It holds a vivid mirror up to the ways in which graphic design is imagined, taught, received, and reproduced. Edited by two designer-educators (Brad Haylock and Luke Wood), 'One and Many Mirrors' provides an urgent overview of the field of contemporary graphic design education for all those concerned with its past, present, and possible futures.

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam.