Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate - Paperback

by Carolyn Porter (Author)

An IPPY Gold Medal Winner. Paris Book Festival Winner. Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award

A 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 pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters--they were in French--but 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 words of love combined with testimony of survival inside a labor camp transformed Carolyn's curiosity into an obsession to find out 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.

Author Biography

Carolyn Porter is a graphic designer, typography geek, and founder of the graphic design company Porterfolio. She designed the font P22 Marcel Script, which garnered five awards, including the prestigious Certificate of Typographic Excellence from the New York Type Director's Club. She lives in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.