Late last night I was too tired to read much of anything but needed the comfort of a book. I forget where I got this book … it may have been a garage sale and I had forgotten about it till last night. The book is called, Free-Hand Lettering: A Treatise on Plain Lettering from the Practical Standpoint for Use in Engineering Schools and Colleges by Victor T. Wilson, M.E. This book is a first edition from 1903 with a print run of a thousand and it is in very good condition.
The beauty of hand-lettering has always been something I love to look at and appreciate, to imagine the hands creating them carefully and lovingly. I am also enjoying Wilson’s pragmatic and precarious writing style … this book will be lovely to search with … erasures … the poems that I know are hidden within this gorgeous book.
There is something so very inspiring about this book. The alphabet has taken on another meaning and beauty to me … the skeletons of language, the atoms and neurons of it. The constant potential for truth. Image.
In “A Point of Age” from Berryman’s collection, The Dispossessed, there’s this: “Images are the mind’s life, and they change.”
We should all try our hand at lettering … marrying language to image, image to language … creating the amorphous images for the lives of our minds.
Go ahead and try it … nothing ever bites hard enough to keep us from trying.
