In his book A84 ,artist Cyprien Desrez tells a story about a three-week journey on foot, with a tent and backpack, along the Autoroute des Estuaires from Rennes to Caen. The book also features a selection of photographs by the GANG collective (Jérémie Dru & Antoine Séguin).

During a ten-month backpacking trip from Cuba to Argentina, Catamarca-based writer and traveler Juan Francisco Uriarte wrote chronicles collected in the book Lo cierto es que uno respira (“The Truth Is That One Breathes”).

Published by Biblioteca Los libros de la Borges in Catamarca, the book, designed by Aylén Avilés, is entirely set in Amster, with generous leading which gives air and breathing room to the brief entries in this work. Amster was designed by Francisco Gálvez Pizarro and is available from PampaType.

Cover art by Mauge Suárez. Printed by Sudamérica Impresos, Rosario, Argentina.

Photobook design for the artist Rudi Weissbeck, featuring a travel journal and a short story, the book questions the essence of a classic road movie, while also embracing it. It is inspired by a journey along the American West Coast in 2015.

Mon nom est Billy des nuages by Éva Offredo is a beautifully illustrated children's book about Billy, a young boy expected to become a cowboy. However, he dreams of exploring the world and embarks on a journey through diverse landscapes like the taiga, fjords, and mangroves. The book is divided into three parts: an adventure story, a travel journal with sketches and observations, and a documentary-style section about nature. A complementary soundtrack by Artuan de Lierrée enhances the reading experience. The book is a poetic and educational ode to exploration and wonder.

Published by Maison Georges, the book uses Tarnac, a typeface designed by Marc Rouault. He describes his design as a particularly French style of slanted Égyptienne. Its wonky proportions and flat-interior bowl shapes are an intractable aesthetic element of French culture and even the French countryside itself – as featured in many of the Panneaux Michelin road signs. The typography also features the monospaced Pachinko Italic by French designer Émilie Rigaud.

Всем Иран (Vsem Iran; “Iran For All”) is a non-fiction book by Nikita Smagin. The softcover was designed by me, Maxim Balabin, and published by Individuum.

About the book (translated):

In this revelatory and deeply human exploration, journalist and political analyst Nikita Smagin offers a rare insider’s perspective on a nation often misunderstood. Living in Iran for several years, Smagin pulls back the curtain on a country grappling with contradictions: a government that rails against Western influence while its citizens navigate an underground world of rave parties, contraband iPhones, and samovar-brewed hospitality.

With sharp political insight and intimate storytelling, “Iran For All” captures the tension between an authoritarian regime and the vibrant, resilient spirit of its people. This is not just a story of a nation—it’s a portrait of humanity, striving to thrive against the odds.

D’Aventures. Kind of a Party, But not Really is a collective publication by the fourth-year students (class of 2018) of the École européenne supérieure de l’image (ÉESI). This book, the fruit of their experiences and explorations during the course of their mobility, bears witness to their journeys, encounters and reflections during this pivotal period in their artistic training.

French graphic designer Céline Chip used Basetica designed by Matthieu Cortat and distributed by 205TF.

Esmeralda Cabral is a Portuguese-Canadian writer living in Vancouver. Her book How to Clean a Fish describes “an extended family stay in Portugal, full of food, adventure, and the search for home.” To quote from the jury comments made at the SCWES Book Awards for BC Authors:

It’s a book that draws the reader in, with its inviting cover, reminiscent of Portuguese tiles and mosaics, and provides a simple map to give us a sense of where Costa da Caparica is in relation to Lisbon, mainland Portugal, and the author’s birthplace on the Azores. Brief chapters set within larger sections named for the seasons of the extended visit help to orient us to the shifts in weather and so on.

The book was designed by Alan Brownoff, designer at the University of Alberta Press. His typeface choice for the cover draws on the topic of reporting from a journey. It’s Olympe, a monospaced script designed by French type designer Émilie Rigaud and released in 2022 through her foundry A is for. Rigaud mentions that her typeface is a revival based on a style found on an Olympia Traveller Deluxe typewriter.

The original went under the name of Olympia Typestyle 69. Contrary to what one might assume, “69” doesn’t refer to the year 1969. The design is older than that, and is shown already in 1962 in Alan Bartram’s article “Typewriter type faces” for Typographica no. 6. There, it’s one of just four styles listed in the Script category. The style was previously digitized by Brett T. Johnson. His Typewriter Olympia SM8 (2016) is rather crude, with letterforms that look autotraced. Rigaud’s interpretation is smoother. In addition to the Regular – which is based on the original, and which is used here – she also added a second lighter weight.

Compared to this typewritten sample of Olympia Typestyle 69, Rigaud smoothed out the connections and closed some of the gaps: pairs like “Nr” and “ic” join up, while others like “Mi” and “ro” maintain the artefacts caused by the technical limitations of the original.

Detail from Alan Bartram’s article “Typewriter type faces” in Typographica no. 6, showing the four styles in the Script category, including Olympia Typestyle 69. The article with its seminal overview of mid-century typewriter styles was reissued in Footnotes A.

Published by Hutchinson, 1977, printed by The Anchor Press and bound by Wm Brendon & Son, Tiptree, Essex; jacket photo by Paul Wakefield; designer uncredited. The typography brings together Melior schmalfett (bold condensed) (H. Zapf, Stempel 1953), sold in UK by Arnold Cook Ltd, with Algerian, a Letragraphica revival of a Stephenson Blake design from before 1908. The interior (not pictured here) is set in Monotype’s Spectrum 556.

From the inner flap:

After the publication of his first novel, Sandel, Angus Stewart went to Tangier to escape ‘orthodox Western living’, and, with very little money, plunged immediately into a captivating alien world.

His Tangier is not the picturesque town of the tourists, nor indeed the superficial scene of squalor and deprivation sometimes observed by journalists. Instead he shows how within their own terms the people of Tangier live, and how their individual customs and perceptions have been shaped out of a decidedly tortuous history.

The publication chronicles an artist's expedition to the Fourth Pole, presented as a multi-script diary typeset in four different languages: English, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. The lavishly designed book includes an introductory text, a detailed diary, and several imaginative pole drawings by the two artists Julia Wirsching and Gabriel Hensche.

The publication has two identical starting points – front and back. English and German, read from left to right, begin on the left side of the book, while Arabic and Hebrew, read from right to left, begin on the right side. This design ensures that each language system leads the reader toward the center, where the four languages converge at the pole.

Through this innovative format, the book opens up a space of the imagination defined less by national boundaries than by topographical and autobiographical coordinates, offering a unique and immersive reading journey.

The Fourth Pole was published by Edition Taube.

This zine was made for a trip to Bolivia in May 2023. Besides being a special memento of the trip itinerary, we wanted the zine to be a practical item that would facilitate access to information (such as phone numbers, addresses, and reservation numbers) in remote places during the trip, where we might not have internet signal to look them up online (which indeed happened frequently).

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Leo Tolstoy once wrote that every happy family is alike, whereas every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. Likewise, every perfect book is perfect in the same way. This book does not belong to the category of perfection. Indeed, it is imperfect in numerous ways.

The text above is from the back cover or our book Imperfect. It is in many ways a curious book. It lacks covers, but comes in a box. When opening the box the reader first finds a single leaf note printed on one side. This note serves as an instruction as to how to handle the book so that reading is possible. The first words on the note tell the reader: “You will need a knife”.

The reason for such a strange mandate stems from the fact that the edges of the books are not trimmed. Meaning that in order to enjoy the contents of the book the reader has to cut open the pages themselves. Now at first this might seem like unnecessary attempt at making something different only for its own sake, but this would be a mistaken notion. In our books we always look for some reason for choosing a particular form, and Imperfect is no exception.

To explain why this form was, if not essential for the book, then at least beneficial for telling the story I will however need to take you on a small detour first. But in the end I promise that everything will be clear(er).

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

In a previous post I shared with you how we tried (and failed) to gather funds for a bike trip across the United States. But even despite our much lacking financial acumen we managed to make it to New York City. On the 3rd of June 2016 our great bicycle adventure began from the corner of the 17th St. and 2nd Ave. Our destination was the Pacific Coast, though at this point we didn’t dare tell anyone about it. We just said we were on our way to Delaware, and even then we were met with ill-hidden skepticism.

If you think that riding a bike across a continent wouldn’t be difficult enough by itself, we decided to raise the stakes and combine it with an art project. We had previously written and published books about our adventures, but these books had been conceived of and made after the journey already had ended. One example of such a book is Tour d’Europe in which we told the story of us cycling from our hometown Porvoo in Finland to Nice by the Mediterranean Sea.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

The project we now envisioned was different, and in a sense simple enough – each day we would send out a postcard. In these postcards we would document our journey, where we went, how we felt, who we met, and what we thought about. Kaisa would illustrate and write the cards, whereas I would hop into the post offices to get the stamps cancelled by hand, as to provide the artifacts with yet another level of information.

The recipients to the cards were my young niece and nephews Alwa, Edwin, and Wilhelm, who at the time of our trip were 3, 6, and 8 years old and lived in Helsinki, Finland. Our reasoning was that the kids were at this point too young to understand or even care about the antics of their old relatives, but that in the distant future they might wish to learn about what we had done.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

That we called our book Imperfect was born out of the fact that in making it we had to give up much of the control a graphic designer takes for granted. This is to say that there was a built-in randomness into the process. There was no chance to edit the already sent pages. Nor did we know what would happen the next day. Or even which cards would actually make it across the ocean. Making the book was for all intents and purposes an analog live-streaming of our adventure.

The more we thought about postcards, the more miraculous they began to appear to us. A postcard is not restrained by the same boundaries that control us: It crosses not only spatial borders, but temporal ones as well. Postcards speak to us in a voice that is simultaneously static and dynamic. Their voice is static inasmuch that which is written with ink on paper stands, but dynamic in the sense that their voice will have a different tone and meaning when read fifty years from now, compared to being read today. Which is to say that the meaning of the postcards will grow along with the kids.

The cards took their own road. We rode on ours. Fields of green turned into prairie, and prairie turned into mountains, forests and desert. Then one day in August we stood on the shore of the Pacific Ocean. And just a few days later we rolled over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. Against all odds we had crossed the continent. Our expedition was now over.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

The next adventure was turning all this into something publishable. Our experiment of documenting our journey had been a success, at least as far as we were concerned. So why not share it with the world? First we sought permission from the kids, it was after all their cards we wanted to publish. To our great relief they granted us permission. Or at least cared too little to actually forbid us from moving forth with our book plans.

But you are really here to hear about the typography, right? Well, we’ve got you covered! The typeface we chose for our book is Cheltenham. It is a roman influenced by the aesthetic sensibilities of the Arts and Crafts movement, and drawn by Bertram Goodhue and Ingalls Kimball in 1896 in New York. It is a well-known typeface, and one with a fair share of idiosyncrasies. Characters that have, while much loved, also been at the receiving end of some criticism. The venerable American printer and historian of typography Daniel Berkeley Updike wrote: “Owing to certain eccentricities of form, [Cheltenham] cannot be read comfortably for any length of time.”

We could think of no typeface better suited for our book than Cheltenham. It is far from perfect but makes up for any such deficiency with a most charming personality. The missing old style figures for the typeface were drawn by our trusted lettering artist Teo Tuominen in the fall of 2016. He is also the person to credit for the beautiful script on the back cover post card.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Along with the instructions on how to handle the book, the book block itself and the box it came in, we also included a map. This map depicts our slow progress across a continent, with statistics underneath to further illuminate what took place and where. But the main thing we sought to convey with the help of the map was all the kindness and help we received throughout our journey. While it might seem bleak at times, this trip imbued the two of us with a strong conviction that there still is hope for humanity, even when it doesn’t always feel that way.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Postscript

Once the book was published we hosted a party to celebrate in its honor. The posters shown below advertised the event. The images depict our feelings regarding the journey: The underdog who took a serious beating but still remains standing, and the strong pioneer lady who is prepared to fight for what she believes in. In the third one you can see young Alwa being held by me. (She got to participate as the representative of the kids, as the brothers had already made their appearance in another project of ours. But that is a story for another time.)

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Moscow 1937 by Lion Feuchtwanger, German Jewish novelist and playwright, more prominently known for novels Jud Süß (Jew Suss) and The Oppermanns. This edition was published by the Viking Press and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press in Binghamton, New York, in 1937.

The cover uses just one typeface, Keynote, flush left in black and white, with a black band on the left hand side assumingly to mimic the look of a journal or notebook. Sadly, no designer credit can be found.

Personally, the ribbon-like movement of uppercase M and L drew me to the cover.

Detail

Detail

Tori Amos wrote the concept album Scarlet’s Walk (2002) while on tour in the US in the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Taking on a character of her own creation named Scarlet, Amos explores American identity in the form of a road trip across the country. The album is illustrated with photographs of Amos as Scarlet, which were taken in Montana by Kurt Markus, some of which peek through the blocks of text comprising the lyrics and credits. Album and song titles are handwritten, while the printed text is a combination of Son Gothic and ITC Goudy Sans Italic. On Scarlet’s map, Tori’s name is set in Profil, and the map legend in Belen. Art direction is by Sheri Lee and Dave Bett.

[More info on Discogs]

A map linking the songs on the album to the journeys of the character Scarlet.

Lyrics for the songs “Amber Waves”, “A Sorta Fairytale”, “Wednesday”, and “Strange”.

Lyrics for the songs “Scarlet's Walk”, “Virginia”, and “Gold Dust”.

Album credits, with extensive examples of Son Gothic and ITC Goudy Sans Italic.

Back cover of the CD, featuring the handwritten song titles.

4th printing, 1975

From Wikipedia:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974. It is a work of fictionalized autobiography and is the first of Pirsig's texts in which he explores his concept of Quality. […] Pirsig received 121 rejections before an editor finally accepted the book for publication – and he did so thinking it would never generate a profit. It was subsequently featured on best-seller lists for decades, with initial sales of at least 5 million copies worldwide.

Bantam’s paperback edition was first printed in 1974. One of the copies digitized by the Internet Archive mentions 39 printings through November 1989 – 26 by Bantam through November 1980, and subsequent ones in Bantam’s New Age imprint from October 1981. While the typographic cover design with all-caps Benguiat Montage was maintained throughout the years, the book came in various color variants.

Unknown printing

5th printing, 1975

14th printing, after 1975

Unknown printing, 1985

The Suitcase book by Jiating Shi mixes Holise with Neue Helvetica and Ryumin Pr6N.

Description by Jiating Shi:

This project discusses how community boundaries shape the identity of international students. Boundaries are a double-edged sword for international students. We international student receive emotional security of a “border” from our own community, but we are rejected or even disrespected by the “border” of another community. Caught between two cultures, international students under cultural conflict are vulnerable to marginalization.

I record the addition and discarding of items in the switching of apartments before and after going abroad. Aside from this, also discussing how I gradually accept the new culture and change my understanding of my native culture by observing the changes in the value of items in my hometown during the move. It belongs to the state of integrating culture.

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover featuring lettering based on DIN 1451, Bodoni, and Narrow Roman Stencil JNL

Please note!

Given the abhorrent war Russia is engage in in Ukraine this project is of course cast in a different light than when it was first conceived.

Like many neighbouring nations, Finland too has a troubled past with Russia. At the time of our journey our aim was to try to cast aside past wounds and try to get to know the people. But some three years later old fears and prejudices have unfortunately resurfaced and been proven valid.

For this we are truly sorry, as the people we met during our voyage were anything but the rabid warmongers we now encounter in the daily news. But let us be clear, we do, in no uncertain terms, condemn the unlawful and completely senseless occupation of Ukraine that Russia is presently absorbed in.

Despite this less than cheery disclaimer we hope you can appreciate this project for what it is – an attempt to build bridges instead of burning them. Something we feel the world is in dire need of.

*

It was not a very well thought out idea, but very few adventures start with being meticulously planned. At least our adventures. But at least we had a rough outline of what we would attempt to achieve:

Our aim was to paddle from the small town Kem located on the shore of the White Sea all the way to St Petersburg.

These two places are connected by a number of locks, rivers, and lakes to each other, and upon learning that it was at least theoretically possible to kayak from one to the other we decided it was well worth trying. On the 9th of June 2018 we set sail southward.

But enough about the background, you are here to read about fonts. And we’re getting there. Just one quick thing we need to mention first:

During our voyage Kaisa kept a diary in which she recorded what happened during the trip. When we reached St Petersburg seven weeks later she had filled four small journals with drawings and text.

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Title page, with the custom digitization of Secession’s Cyrillics and LTC Remington Typewriter

In 2020 we published these diaries in book form under the title Русские Дневники (Russian Diaries).

In 2021 our small book was included in the collection of the most beautiful books of the year in Finland. It also received the Hopeahuippu prize (silver) in the annual Finnish design competition Vuoden Huiput.

As for the typefaces, we came upon the Cyrillic version of Secession in an old type specimen book in our library and felt it fit our purposes perfectly. The problem was that we couldn’t find a digitised version of it.

Here our friend Teo Tuominen came in the picture. As an accomplished type designer it took him little time to render beautiful versions of the needed letters from a scan we provided him with.

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

The specimen book on which Teo Tuominen based his digitization

As for the body copy we went with LTC Remington Typewriter, a nice typeface that also came with the much needed Cyrillic characters.

For more information about the project and our journey you can pop over to the project website.

Alongside with the book we also made a poster in which we posed with our expedition flag. It was a horribly cold and miserable photoshoot (you can see the frost on the rocks in the foreground!) but the picture itself turned out really nice. At least we think it did.

(Oh, and for all the real maritime design nerds out there: On the cover of the book, as well as on the poster we spell out “Русские Дневники” in the Soviet Signal Alphabet. Admittedly not a font, but still interesting for letter lovers.)

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction of an illustrated spread in the original diary, with lettering

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction of an illustrated spread in the original diary, with lettering

Source: www.absolutetruthpress.com Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster showing the mounting of our expedition flag, as well as the title “Русские Дневники” spelled out in the Soviet Signal Alphabet

Zine documenting a road trip from the Bay Area to the Cascades in Washington and back.

Over the summer, Joseph and I drove Rancher, a bright yellow camper van, from the Bay Area up north to the Cascades in Washington and back. The drive spanned nearly 2000 miles as we stopped in Portland, Mt. Rainier, and Seattle. This zine documents the trip through photographs I took along the way, incorporating forms that reflect and highlight the jagged peaks and organic landscapes of the Cascades. The zine uses Arial Narrow and Apple Garamond – both condensed takes on common fonts – as well as Neue Haas Grotesk Text, to complement and contrast the imagery and forms.

Aden, Arabija is a Slovenian edition of Paul Nizan’s Aden Arabie (1931) with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. It was translated from the French by Marko Crnković, designed by Domen Fras and published by Totaliteta.

The cover design includes Spektra, a variable typeface designed by Type Salon (Alja Herlah & Krista Likar), using upright and italic style. Signifier by Klim Type Foundry is used on the cover with its italic style. Its roman is used as the body face.

Spektra and Signifier work well together as a combination of dark, yet soft letter shapes with robust, brutalist forms.

Ballinger and Spectral used together for a book series conceived and designed by Karl Toomey (KTOOMS). In the author’s own words:

If you’ve ever wondered how far it is to Tipperary, I may have the book series for you. Created during lockdown, and using the 1912 hit tune It’s a Long Way To Tipperary as inspiration, this is an eight-part walking tour cobbled together from home using Google Maps and Wikipedia. Kicking off in London (home to both myself and the song’s fabled homesick Irishman), our tour heads west across England, Wales and the Irish Sea before plodding inland to our final destination, Tipperary in Ireland.

The images show the first realized volume, “Stage 01: London to Oxford”, with seven more in the making.

Spin-O-Rama pressing ft. Filmotype Hunter.

Filmotype Hunter for the title of Hawaiian Interlude, a record of Pacific music recorded by Jonnie Aluani and his Orchestra, as released around 1957 by Spin-O-Rama Records (shown above).

This “musical travelog in Tru-Sound” was “issued on at least 10 labels, and credited to artists Terry McKee and His Band, Willie Alunuai And His Band, Harry Kaapuni And His Royal Polynesians, Jonnie Aluani And His Orchestra, Luke Leilani & His Hawaiian Rhythm, or Alan Makara And Orchestra (and possibly others).”

The images below show two other pressings featuring the same photograph and other Filmotype faces. The one by Pirouette Records has Quota, a variant of their extrabold geometric sans serif Free, with rough contours. The track names are set in bold caps from Vogue.

The version by Parade Records (1957) shows red caps from Adam, one of the many casual brush alphabets in the Filmotype library. The record here is credited to Willie Alunuai and his Band, and instead of “Tru-Sound”, it’s “High Fidelity”.

[More info on Discogs]

Pirouette pressing ft. Filmotype Quota.

Parade pressing ft. Filmotype Adam.