Finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book AwardA graphic designer’s search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man’s fate during World War II.Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive … beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the lettersthey were in Frenchbut she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II.
As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel’s letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuzé, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war.
Marcel’s Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn’s increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man’s fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.
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So interesting! I thank the author for sharing this stunning story!
This was a very interesting book. I never realized what went into the creating of a print font. The story about the letters that inspired the writer made the book twice as interesting. The history about the French workers and world war two is one I never heard before and I have read many books about this war.
Great story
Very different. Learning about old letters, WW II and fonts.
a bit too much was written about lettering, etc. I would have liked more of the story if “caligraphy ” was left out.
Marcel’s letters is a story about what happens to a woman who starts to care about someone she doesn’t know. It’s a story about relationships, intimate and distant. It’s an inspirational story about how what one person does can change other people’s lives.
This book is excellent in so many ways. If you do any research, have any curiosity, or can sympathize with anyone who develops an incredible focus on a seemingly impossible goal, you will love this one.