Men of Letters and People of Substance

Graphic artists recognize genius when they see it, and most acknowledge that de Vicq's website and book, "Bembo's Zoo," was a milestone in creative design. In his new effort, de Vicq takes the designs of type and ornaments (known affectionately in the trade as "dingbats") and common linecuts to form the faces of his literary heroes. In the second part he combines type ornaments and icons to suggest a face with singular attributes: pride, fear, fanaticism, and surprise. But these are not drawings; they are images arranged from the combination of specific and discrete graphic forms. They are created on a computer and not in a composing stick. They are the face, and faces, of the future.

Printed throughout in two colors, often displaying the various letters, sorts and ornaments that make up the whole, this is our typographic offering of the year wholly original, totally inventive. In these typographic assemblies transformed into ingenious portraits, de Vicq has managed, in the prose of Prose, "to make the alphabet sing." With a preface by Francine Prose