Customer Reviews

Edward Fella: Letters on America

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I love books like this. I bought it after seeing some of his Polaroids in a recent issue of Dazed and Confused Magazine. He photographs and collects letters the way some do rare birds. This beautifully designed and edited book reproduces over a thousand of his snapshots as well as examples of his own uniquely personal approach to typography. It's an amazing testament to all the unseen hands that have left a mark on the American landscape.

If I hadn't been so lazy, or thought this had been done already, or thought maybe no one would care to publish this, then I might have done this book myself a few years ago. I wanted to do something similiar but didnt.
However, I don't think I would have done as good a job as Ed did here. This is NOT a bunch of random snaps. The continuity of the medium and the cropping are what makes this a discplined, artful and well-done study. Nice work , Ed!
(So-follow your dreams like Ed did)

This book is mainly a photography book. There are pages after pages of lettering of "vernacular" typography. Interspersed are a few pages of hand-drawn lettering by the author. We're talking about 8-10 pages total of typography by Ed Fella himself. I would have preferred to see more of the author's own work with fewer photographic references.

Edward Fella's book of 1134 Polaroid shots of vernacular signs gives a flavor of what can be seen in most US public places, these are the roadside typographic shouts of local commerce. Because the business of America is business signs are everywhere, usually colorful and just asking to be captured by any passing photographer. To avoid looking like other photo books of public lettering and signage the author deliberately goes for a tight shot and most of the photos only show letter parts but as Lewis Blackwell says in his introduction, Fella is not interested in what the letters say.

With the tight photo cropping and a dull layout (all the photo pages are the same: nine, three by three inch Polaroid's, including their white border, butted up to each other, no captions or page numbers) I think this ends up as a very boring looking but nevertheless intensely personal book of public typography. The best images are the ones that have been produced by sign makers, or are obviously commercially printed. Vernacular signs, where someone has painted or scrawled some letters, are mostly produced by amateurs, who given the choice (and money) would much prefer to have something that looked professional, where any repeat letters look identical, have even spacing and all sit on the same base line. Vernacular neon signs do not exist because they can only be made by professionals.

Between the photos there are twelve sections showing the author's own creative typography, loosely based on the vernacular letters he has photographed and consequently showing the same amateurish feel and more critically in my view, a high degree of un-readability. This individuality to type is also reflected in the books production. The few text pages with two columns per page appear to have been pasted up so that paragraphs do not line up, the imprint page and the cover flaps have type that is deliberately unaligned This silly messing about with the text stops short of doing anything to the back cover barcode though, commerce wins in the end!