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Lädt ... Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fatevon Carolyn Porter
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Carolyn Porter's fascination with typography and fonts began at an early age. She majored in graphic design. After abandoning the corporate graphic design work, she went to work for herself. She wanted to design her own font. Inspired by French letters found in an antique shop in her home state of Minnesota, she began this challenge. She found it was a lot more work than she anticipated. She eventually had the letters translated. She found he worked as a turner for Daimler in Germany during the war, but she knew he missed his family back home in France. She thirsted for more information about the man and his family and became obsessed with finding Marcel's outcome. This compelling story captivated my attention from the beginning to the end. When graphic designer Carolyn Porter found a selection of French WWII letters in an antiques shop in Minnesota, she knew immediately she had finally found the sample she wanted to fulfill her dream of designing a font. Purchasing five letters, Carolyn spent years painstakingly working on her font without really looking at the source material after tracing individual letters of interest. But one day while looking at the original letters again, Carolyn is suddenly struck by the desire to know what the letters say and try to find out who their author, Marcel, really was. This initial impulse leads Carolyn down a path of research that yields a story no one could have imagined. The joys of ordering non-fiction for my library is that sometimes I discover gems like this book. I'm already a typography and history nerd and this book fed both interests. While Porter very clearly and with just the right amount of detail recounts her struggle designing her font, the primary focus of this book is her quest to discover who Marcel was and what happened to him. The story is utterly compelling and Porter beautifully balances the history with descriptions of her efforts to discover it and the effect of her search on herself and her relationships. A compelling read that I finished in just under a day, I highly recommend this one if the description intrigues you even slightly. Zeige 3 von 3 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
"A graphic designer's search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man's fate during World War II. Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters--they were in French--but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II. As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel's letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuze, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war. Marcel's Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn's increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man's fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family"--Provided by publisher. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)940.54History and Geography Europe Europe 1918- Military History Of World War IIKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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Porter admits that her inexperience in font design resulted in inefficient processes. The same thing is evident in her research into Marcel and his descendants. After several months of mostly unsuccessful attempts to find Marcel on the internet, she eventually connected with a genealogist who was able to use the information that Porter had gleaned to find Marcel’s family within a week or so. However, Porter’s time and efforts weren’t wasted. She connected with several people along the way who provided useful information and suggestions for further research, and many of these individuals became as invested as Porter was in locating Marcel and learning his fate.
Porter’s methods may have been slow, but they were thorough. Her analysis and description of the physical letters particularly impressed me. I read this book for its genealogical angle, and the typography content was an added bonus since it’s a field I need to learn about for work-related reasons. ( )