Scott Ellwood
I got swept into the world of rare books by taking a seminar my first year of college, “History of the Book from Archimedes to the iPad." It introduced me to a broad range of book history and bibliography and led to my work in special collections. I'm most drawn to the visual, material, and cultural aspects of books. Format, typography, illustrations (and more) shape our thinking around every text, and those dynamics come into sharper focus in works that speak across cultural lines. These are the kinds of books I can't help but collect and learn more from the longer I live with them.
Josué Rivas (Mexica and Otomi). Standing Strong. [Amsterdam]: FotoEvidence Book Award with World Press Photo, 2018.
Josué Rivas’s photobook documents the Water Protectors, who gathered in 2016 to protect the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers from the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline, at the border of the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation. Rivas and his editor Régina Monfort devised a unique structure of two facing textblocks for the work. Reading becomes an experience of swimming through diptychs of photographs, churning the narrative into a “vortex” that expresses Rivas’s conception of indigenous memory and futurity.
Khajag Apelian and Waël Morcos (type director Mike Abbink). براندو عربي [Brando Arabic]. Eindhoven and The Hague, Netherlands: Bold Monday, [2018 or 2019].
Khajag Apelian and Waël Morcos (type director Christian Schwartz). Graphik = غرافيك. New York, Commercial Type, 2017.
These type specimens present Arabic and Latin font families with harmonized letterforms for multilingual uses. Though they convey a sense of optimism for globalization, their historical precedents trace back to the Arabic types of the French colonial Imprimerie nationale du Caire. The Brando Arabic specimen, by sampling from The Heart of Darkness, almost begs the question: can a typeface be a tool for decolonization? The Graphik Arabic specimen seems to answer by using the Egyptian جماعة الفن والحرية (Groupe Art et Liberté) manifesto—“Long Live Degenerate Art.”