Hello type friends! I’m so excited to tell you all about the zines I’m making to celebrate street lettering in India. They are available to peruse and purchase on my online shop, and I hope you’ll check them out. Plus, a peek into my bookshelf as I share some books about street lettering from around the world.

If you know me, you know that I’ve been working slowly and steadily for the last decade to create a visual record of public lettering in the country. This photographic account lives on India Street Lettering, where I try to geo-tag and label each snapshot in an effort to unravel patterns and paradigms that can help tell a richer story of the letterforms we see in our everyday lives. This legwork is the foundation of type walks that I run. You’ve seen it take the form of issues of this newsletter. Sometimes it inspires essays for magazines or even a 36 Days of Type Project.

This summer, I’m finally taking the plunge to turn my typographic discoveries and theses into honest-to-God printed matter. Nothing glamourous; only pint-sized, self-published zines that each centre on a tiny sliver of public lettering in India, perhaps signs from a particular city or neighbourhood, or highlighting the usage of a certain material and technique, or maybe presenting explorations specific to a script.

I hope you’ll pick up a copy for yourself, or for a friend who always makes you stop in the middle of a busy street to photograph a beautiful sign. Your support will mean the world to me, and allow me to devote more time documenting street lettering in India and making these zines.

India Street Lettering Zines No. 1–3

So without further ado, please meet the first lot of India Street Lettering zines. The common thread that binds them together is the usage of tiles as a material for signage. It is a subject that can scarcely be covered in three zines, but we’ve got ourselves a start. From the azulejos of Panjim to tiled wayfinding signs in New Delhi and multiscript mosaic lettering, these zines show us how a material that we don’t readily associate with public lettering in India does, in fact, play its part in the making of memorable signage.

Each zine opens up like an accordion with six panels, and is A6 size when folded. They are printed offset locally at Pacific Creative Solutions (Okhla) on Arte Ultra White 190 GSM paper, and depend on TypeTogether’s Postea for making the text look good. You can tuck the zines away with your books, or better still, display the photographs by folding the accordion as you wish and pinning to a board or arranging on a shelf.

My plan is to produce a new set a couple of times a year, and build towards a collection that showcases the multiplicity of street lettering in the country, and as always, encourages others to look at the letterforms on public signage with the same curiousity and wonder that I do.

I debuted the zines at the events I spoke at in Bangalore last month — a talk about India Street Lettering, and a typographic tour of MG Road — and I was so happy to see that those who received them shared my excitement about these little publications.

These zines are a labour of love, and have been months in the making. I’ve enjoyed every bit of the process, even when it has been painful. Whether it is shortlisting themes, choosing photographs or going out to click new ones, writing texts to accompany the visuals, or working with a local printer to produce them, the process taught me more about my collection of photographs than merely looking at them ever could.

A woefully incomplete list of street lettering books

In my presentation about India Street Lettering last month, I showed some books about street lettering from elsewhere in the world. Later, folks who attended the talk requested that I put a list of those books in a less ephemeral place, and this newsletter is it.

Before I share my list, I want to share ones made by friends. You don’t want to miss Elena Veguillas’ rolling bibliography about public lettering. The list is divided into books and articles, but also contains publications that focus on particular countries and cities in Europe and the Americas. And recently, Tanya George sifted through the collections of the Letterform Archive to put together a list of books about signs in the urban landscape.

The selection of books for the talk was driven largely by the stories I was telling, so it isn’t at all large, forget comprehensive. The books differ greatly in their physical size and scope, but what interests me about them is how they take different perspectives and approaches in studying and celebrating street lettering. Something that has obviously been on my mind the last few months while I was working on the zines.

Grafica Della Strada: The Signs of Italy

Louise Fili’s Grafica Della Strada is a collection of lettering and typography documented by FIli in various Italian cities over the years. The book is a visual delight, but it also breaks down, in brief, how a newcomer to the Italian landscape, might approach the signs they see in urban environments.

Singapore Gothic

I am a huge Temporary Press fangirl, so it was only right that I showed one of the Singapore Gothic volumes published by them. Of course, there was the added benefit of being able to share a project from and focused on an Asian city. Singapore Gothic is a repository of vernacular shopfront signage from Singapore curated by Mark de Winne and Vikas Kailankaje. Last year they produced a series of four small booklets published by Temporary Press, each centering a particular theme. The booklets are riso-printed and I love how they evoke a quiet pre-digital mood.

Characters

Characters by Stephen Banham is one of my favourite books about public lettering because of how it unearths local, cultural stories about the signs it showcases. I’m envious of those who live in Melbourne, and can, through this book, learn so much about how letterforms have helped shape their city’s identity.

London Street Signs

Alistair Hall’s London Street Signs is a book exclusively about the street nameplates in the city, which he also documents on Instagram. A somewhat new addition to my bookshelf, I scored an affordable secondhand copy a few months ago. While I am on a campaign to seek out more about the tiled wayfinding signs in Delhi, finding similar signs from Hampstead in this book was a lucky surprise.

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

A thoroughly-researched fragment of design history, Paul Shaw’s Helvetica and the New York City Subway System tells the story of how the the subway system in New York city got its current signage after decades of typographic variety and developments.

Sign Painters

Sign Painters by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon is an anecdotal history of the craft of sign painting in the United States, and an accompaniment of the movie of the same name that you can watch for free on Vimeo. In my talk, I showed pages from Wagner’s Blue Print Text Book of Sign and Show Card Lettering that are reproduced in the book, alongside snippets from later Indian books that also teach lettering and sign painting (you might remember them from the issue about Devanagari TypeCooker).

Two books I shared weren’t street lettering focused at all. The first was Aksharaya’s Devanagari calligraphy manual (you may recall seeing it with its Gurmukhi counterpart in my newsletter issue about multi-script branding). The other was Jan Tschichold’s essay A Brief History of the Ampersand, published by -zeug, which I enjoyed putting in juxtaposition with a collection of ampersands from shop signs around India, as a reminder that design histories don’t begin and end in the West. That we are not passive recipients of design dogma but active participants in shaping its possibilities.

That’s all for this issue, thank you so much for reading! For the rest of 2023, I think I will send this newsletter once every two months as I get busy with work and lots of travel. I hope the rest of the year is looking up for you as well. Until next time, au revoir!

This issue was first published on July 18, 2023.