type + tech + teaching
is a typographer and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. When he’s not teaching at Carnegie Mellon University, crafting letters, and/or tinkering on a press, you’ll most likely find him hanging out with his cats.
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① Recent Projects
Variable
teaching
Gravity Racers typeface + tool
Labore VT
typeface
Emmett Till Memory Projectdesign advisor
Coterie Babylogotype + monogram
Melting Metalpublication
Second Shift Autowerksidentity
Meagertypeface
Letter Mattersprogramming
Dead Bird Letterstranscription + setting
Cards for Loved Oneslettering + illustration
Ameri-Candied Dreamssupergraphics
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Dead Bird Letters
transcription + typesetting
A series of typographic transcriptions of Alice Sheldon’s Dead Bird Letters. Brittany Nelson commissioned this research and publication as a gallery accompaniment for her show 10,000 Light Years From Home at Patron Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.
Alice was an American science-fiction writer who cloaked her sexuality in the 1970s by writing male-driven narratives under the male pen name of James Tiptree Jr. Working with Nelson and Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, in Amsterdam, digital scans of a series of hastily handwritten letters from Sheldon were obtained titled Sheldon’s handwriting itself as, ‘Tiptree’s Dead Birds.’ Writing the letters as Tiptree, Sheldon details all the women who rejected her in her lifetime. They read as an epitaph to a lifetime of queer isolation. With the original documents subsequently lost, the scans were captured by Nelson as glass plate reflective holographs to replace the physical form of the letters and a booklet of typeset transcriptions were provided as a window into Sheldon’s alternative universe.
My role included researching and working Phillips and the University of Oregon’s Special Collections (which houses a wealth of Sheldon’s work and records) to transcribing the nearly illegible original letters hastily hand-written by Alice (writing as Tiptree), which often included decoding pen names used for Sheldon’s close confidants. The final booklet typesets the letter transcriptions, including Alice’s corrections, omissions, and other annotative marks faithfully.
The following shows a side-by-side comparison between Alice’s original letters* and the typographic transcriptions.
* All rights reserved. University of Oregon, Special Collections
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