MacGuffin: #12 | The Letter

With each issue based around a single object, MacGuffin magazine is a platform for fans of inspiring, personal, unexpected, highly familiar or utterly disregarded things. Widely recognized as a fabulously designed and immaculately researched design & crafts biannual, it is an indispensable resource for all those who want backstage information about the life of things.

In this issue:

‘The Letter’ does not relate to the alphabet alone but to language, to code, to gestures, to media, and more. The letter is a magical symbol, and at the same time a very ordinary thing. It is embedded in specific culture and dependent on the reproduction technologies available at the time. The context is what makes it interesting: the letter is created, used, discarded, forgotten, and (sometimes) revived. Find out about the history of Scrabble, embracing graffiti, how humans perform letters, the culture of protest letters, the meaning of memes, typography that resists the domination of Western typefaces, the narrow binarity of the French language, the left-handed experience, and more.

224 p, ills colour & bw, 21 x 28 cm, pb, English