While looking for inspiration for a font design, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across several letters in an antique store. Porter selected five letters to purchase based on the penmanship and the variety of alphabetic characters and numbers in the letters, leaving the rest behind. The letters were written in French by a man named Marcel, and were sent from Berlin to his family in France in the early 1940s. After working on the font for nearly a decade, Porter became curious about Marcel, and she decided to have one of the letters translated into English. As she learned more about Marcel and about the reason he was in Berlin and separated from his family during World War II, her desire to know Marcel’s fate drove her to spend more and more of her time trying to find Marcel and his family.

Porter admits that her inexperience in font design resulted in inefficient processes. The same thing is evident in her research into Marcel and his descendants. After several months of mostly unsuccessful attempts to find Marcel on the internet, she eventually connected with a genealogist who was able to use the information that Porter had gleaned to find Marcel’s family within a week or so. However, Porter’s time and efforts weren’t wasted. She connected with several people along the way who provided useful information and suggestions for further research, and many of these individuals became as invested as Porter was in locating Marcel and learning his fate.

Porter’s methods may have been slow, but they were thorough. Her analysis and description of the physical letters particularly impressed me. I read this book for its genealogical angle, and the typography content was an added bonus since it’s a field I need to learn about for work-related reasons. ( )

Carolyn Porter's fascination with typography and fonts began at an early age. She majored in graphic design. After abandoning the corporate graphic design work, she went to work for herself. She wanted to design her own font. Inspired by French letters found in an antique shop in her home state of Minnesota, she began this challenge. She found it was a lot more work than she anticipated. She eventually had the letters translated. She found he worked as a turner for Daimler in Germany during the war, but she knew he missed his family back home in France. She thirsted for more information about the man and his family and became obsessed with finding Marcel's outcome. This compelling story captivated my attention from the beginning to the end. ( )

When graphic designer Carolyn Porter found a selection of French WWII letters in an antiques shop in Minnesota, she knew immediately she had finally found the sample she wanted to fulfill her dream of designing a font. Purchasing five letters, Carolyn spent years painstakingly working on her font without really looking at the source material after tracing individual letters of interest. But one day while looking at the original letters again, Carolyn is suddenly struck by the desire to know what the letters say and try to find out who their author, Marcel, really was. This initial impulse leads Carolyn down a path of research that yields a story no one could have imagined.

The joys of ordering non-fiction for my library is that sometimes I discover gems like this book. I'm already a typography and history nerd and this book fed both interests. While Porter very clearly and with just the right amount of detail recounts her struggle designing her font, the primary focus of this book is her quest to discover who Marcel was and what happened to him. The story is utterly compelling and Porter beautifully balances the history with descriptions of her efforts to discover it and the effect of her search on herself and her relationships. A compelling read that I finished in just under a day, I highly recommend this one if the description intrigues you even slightly. ( )