Publishing

There’s no place more inspiring to create art-centered publications than Letterform Archive. The in-house publishing team is deeply grateful for access to our collection. In our bookmaking practice, we seek out collections materials that exemplify or transcend longstanding editorial, design, and production processes.

As the publishing team’s mission is to tell the story of our collection in print, many of our books are directly based on items we’ve discovered in the stacks. For example, The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930 documents a fully illustrated twenty-four–volume compendium chronicling transnational trends in early twentieth-century advertising design. And the upcoming Lettres Décoratives: A Century of French Sign Painters’ Alphabets includes chromolithographic plates from the Modèles de lettres: Extraits du Journal-Manuel de peintures portfolios, which feature stylized alphabets referenced by signpainters in nineteenth-century France.

Just as important as these histories are the ways in which they are told: not just with words but with the tools of book design and production. Dutch book designer Irma Boom’s 2013 No. 5 Culture Chanelvisually recounts the story of the luxury brand’s iconic No. 5 perfume with a unique blind emboss on each of its 300 white pages. The result is a tactovisual homage to the intangibility and invisibility of fragrance. Design triumphs like No. 5 demonstrate the poetic possibilities of information design and mass manufacturing.

Each and every object at Letterform Archive is a portal into the rich narrative of human creativity, and each of our projects is a cross-generational collaboration with our peers in print.