One of my happiest projects when I went to college was to help buy, move and operate a Chandler-Harris printing press for use by our poetry club (yes, a club) to create chapbooks. Our first book, published in 1978, was a child/adult fable written by Tony Crunk, a 1995 recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Ever since then, ever since I had the absolutely kinesthetic joy of laying hands of type, setting the register of type on the page, and watching raptly as the cyclic sound of a multi-ton press clanked and cranked out magic font-filled pages. Ever since that moment I have been a sucker for all things typographic. This stop-motion animation is no exception.
Ben Barrett-Forrest spent 140 hours of his life constructing this animated history of typography from 2454 photographs. It seems like I could do more than just say, “This is so charming.” I think that what I will do with this digital objet d’art is to use it and the accompanying interview in my classroom to demonstrate the kind of persistence and time that are the ingredients of quality work. Maybe what Barrett-Forrest accomplished here and articulated in this interview will inspire us all to do better work, to persist, to create with passion, and to make the world a wider place to play in.