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Edward Fella: Letters on America
Images and artwork by Edward Fella; designed by Lorraine Wild; essays by Lewis Blackwell and Lorraine Wild; photographs edited by Lucy Bates Princeton Architectural Press, New York 184 pages; illustrated; $50
Reviewed by Steven Heller
Graphic designers are packrats. We hoard all manner of stuff in an effort to fill our minds, if not also our walls, shelves, flat files, and other receptacles with inspirational stimuli. Call it an obsession: I haven't a clue as to why we're so obsessed, though I'm acutely aware of my own interest in exhibitions and books that reveal other people's obsessions. My most recent fascination in this regard is a book that has so totally captured my attention that I've repeatedly pored over it since receiving a copy.
Edward Fella: Letters on America is a collection of hundreds of Fellas own Polaroids of hand-drawn signs and graphic minutiae seen and recorded in his travels across America. Interspersed throughout this wealth of photographic material are spreads and single pages featuring Fella's ingenious hand-lettering, which has earned him a following as an artist, designer, teacher, and progenitor of the new expressive typography.
But isn't this just one more compilation of nostalgic or vernacular memorabilia and found artifacts? Well, yes and no. Technically, Fella's book fits into the genre inhabited by John Baeder's Sign Language: Street Signs as Folk Art
(Harry N. Abrams, 1996), a photographic collection of the artifacts of rural American culture, and Arnold Schwartzman's...