Type West

Applications Open June 1

Applications for the 2019–20 Postgraduate Certificate in Type Design are open June 1–30. We’re launching the application period with an open house for prospective students. Pick the brains of Type West and Type@Cooper West grads, and see highlights from the Archive collection that will be on hand for next year’s course. All are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

Open House at Letterform Archive
Sat, Jun 1, 2019
5:00pm–7:00pm

On the Road

The Archive at LetterWest and Typographics

We’re thrilled to be part of LetterWest, June 6–8 in Salt Lake City, where we’ll show a small exhibit, The Art of Lettering Instruction: 1716–2016. We’ll also have a few vintage lettering books from our shop, so you can take a bit of the Archive home with you! The following week we’ll host a table at the Typographics Book Fair, June 15–16 in New York, selling duplicates from our collection of type foundry ephemera. We hope to see you there!

Letterform Lecture

The Chinese Typewriter: A History with Tom Mullaney

Chinese writing is character-based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Over the past two centuries, the script has encountered presumed alphabetic universalism at every turn. After more than a century of resistance against the alphabetic, not only have Chinese characters prevailed, they form the linguistic substrate of the vibrant world of Chinese information technology. In this talk, Stanford historian Tom Mullaney will show how this unlikely transformation happened. Tickets are free.

Lecture at SFPL Main Library, Koret Auditorium
Tue, Jun 18, 2019
6:00pm—7:30pm

Salon Series 17

DADA and Surrealism

Dada was the most iconoclastic, mercurial, and insolent of the European avant-gardes — until its “funeral” in 1922. Surrealism, which rose from dada’s ashes, attempted to marshall its revolutionary energy into a systematic artistic and spiritual program. Collections Assistant Hank Smith will lay out the ambitions and contradictions of both these movements by focusing on their eclectic printed materials, including the magazines Dada, Merz, Mécano, Minotaure, La Brèche, and Bief.

Salon at Letterform Archive
Thurs, Jun 27, 2019
6:30pm—7:30pm