I had a discussion with my wife the other day: “Why do I keep collecting letters?”. I post things on facebook asking for non-paper letters. I get excited when we find a letterset in second-hand stores. I even perk up a bit when we go to the local Plantin-Mauretus museum where there are a bunch of ancient letter presses.
Well, one of the arcs in this ever unfolding epic story of the rearranged book, is to create a work of art that takes the letters of the source book and make it into something completely new. So I’m collecting letters from wherever I find them. I find it quite therapeutic in a way to have this interest. I keeps pulling me back to the essence of this project: thinking about how we use language. Plus, it’s something tangible that I can collect, which is nice.
So why not jump to the end?
Of course I could go on a bulk store website and invest in loads and loads of letters. But I feel like that would be cheating. Along the way I have met people that I normally wouldn’t because I went to collect some letters from them. Also, it’s a nice though project in itself, to find as much different permutations of those letters.
What’s next?
I’ll keep collecting the letters until I have them all. At the moment I have a broad idea of how many letters I would need to finish this part of the project. But I’ll keep working on the calculation and post it to this site. In the meantime, I’ll create posts for any letter sets that I got of note.
“Can I help?”
I’m very glad I asked for you: For the moment, you can always contact me if you have letters that you want to get rid of. Just to be sure, there are a number of stipulations.
- No paper letters: It an be any semi-non-degradable material. Since I want to do something creative with it, I should be able to handle them with relative ease and not have them break down while manipulating them.
- Western alphabet: I need to set some borders, so my own standard alphabet that is used in the book is easiest.
If I have more rules, I’ll post them here.