Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate

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An IPPY Gold Medal Winner. Paris Book Festival Winner. Finalist for the Minnesota Book AwardA graphic designer’s search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man fate during World War IISeeking 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 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 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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