This new HBO special series, which kicked off last night, is directed by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman zooms in on John Adams, and his prolific life of letters. Power of the Letter, a new seven-part Sunday night series based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, uses John Adams correspondence as the basis for a first-person account of the founding of our nation as well as a telling window into his personal life and relationships.

Read more about Power of the Letter here and find out details about each episode here.

The Academy of Art in San Francisco, CA, states the statistic: "100 million trees are expired for junk mail in the United States every year." The Academy is paying homage to the environment and trying to raise awareness about the amount of paper invested in mail that just ends up in the garbage again as a resource for making beautiful things. BFA and MFA students in sculpture at The Academy held Junk Mail: From Debris to Design featuring structures --including fashion pieces --utilizing junk mail with the hopes of exhibiting how mail can be re-utilized for a positive purpose.
The Academy has been a ring leader in San Francisco’s commitment to the environment and sustainability, actively incorporating green concepts into their curriculum. The show is being displayed at 79 Gallery (79 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA)

For tips on how to reduce junk mail, please click here.

We’ve featured many letterpress artists here at The Modern Letter, and if you’d like to try your hand at this old-fashioned technique, the San Francisco Center for the Book offers a series of classes for people in the area.

SFCB’s printing curriculum teaches the basics of letterpress printing and has classes for beginners as well as more experienced printers. Upcoming sessions include:

Letterpress Cards and Handmade Envelopes with Megan Adie
Fri Dec 14 9am-6pm
$130 plus $20 materials fee
Produce an impressive pile of cards, postcards and unique envelopes – all in a handmade portfolio. You'll print up to 20 cards and postcards, using varied colors, media, and techniques (wood type, linoleum, and photopolymer plates) on the Center's Vandercook presses. Finish the cards using our corner rounder, perforator, and more.

Letterpress I with Mary Laird
Mon Dec 17 9am-6pm
$130 plus $15 materials fee
Learn the basics of setting type using the Vandercook. Mary teaches how to determine paper grain, use a pica ruler, mix ink, ink the press and print. After deciding on a theme, students pair off to produce either a broadside (a one-sheet poster) or a chapbook (including a colophon, text, title and half-title page). We'll pull proofs, make corrections and print multiple copies; then we'll distribute type and spacing, and clean up. For the chapbook, we'll also cut and wax thread and sew one book as a sample for finishing the edition at home.

Letterpress II with Megan Adie
Sun Jan 06, 2008 9am-6pm
$130 plus $15 materials fee
This workshop gives you more working time on the press. You'll set your own text and print a collaborative project, delving deeper into the complexities of lockup and registration, learning how to make sure the job stick is squared, setting roller height, and printing from photopolymer plates. The class also covers the subtle nature of line spacing, word spacing and all-caps spacing; goes further into the inking process; and ends with sorting and distributing type.

A full list of letterpress workshops can be found here and you can register by calling or faxing in an enrollment form.

We've discovered that mail and postal art offers many opportunities in galleries around the country. Here is information on a great one below at Niagara Community College Art Gallery, along with details on how you can submit your own mail art and the format of the show.

Where: Niagara Community College Art Gallery
3111 Saunders Settlement Road, Sanborn, New York 14132-9460
Deadline: postmarked by February 14, 2008

Description: The making of mail as art, "mail art" has a history stretching back at least to the 1950s. Mail art has in the past rooted in a rejection of the commerce and exclusivity of the gallery show. The making of mail art, "mail-art" continues to be a common practice in an age dominated by electronic communication. This exhibition will continue to break down the division between the mailbox and the gallery. To that end, Niagara County Community College Art Gallery is seeking submissions for an upcoming exhibition, aiming to display the myriad manifestations of mail art. Artists working in all media are encouraged to participate. The topic and content of each piece is solely the choice of the artist. Artists are asked to produce one piece of mail art and send it to guest curator Becky Moda. Your work will be displayed in a cataloged group exhibition in the Spring. After the exhibition closes, each participating artist will receive via mail the work of another artist. "Senders receive," as mail artists say. The mail art movement is uniquely populist and non-commercial, involving non-traditional distribution methods and the potential for global reach. Let's breathe new life into this fascinating movement, which predated and in some ways predicted the artist networking boom enabled by the internet.

It is asked that the artists adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Please send one piece of mail art to: Mail Art, NCCC Gallery, Niagara County Community College / 3111 Saunders Settlement Road / Sanborn, New York 14132-9460 by February 14, 2008.

2. The mail art can take any shape, in two or three dimensions. Pieces can expand when opened, but must be easily re-mailed for less than five dollars.

For more information regarding submissions please email beckymoda@gmail.com or visit nccmailart.blogspot.com.

We're late on this one, but hope you New Yorkers can still catch The Mailed Paintings, a solo show by conceptual, German artist Karin Sander at D'Amelio Terras Gallery which is up through Saturday, November 3rd.

In the press release, the gallery writes,

"The Mailed Paintings along with Gebrauchsbilder (pictures for use) are projects that are part of a larger body of work titled The Patina Paintings. In Gebrauchsbilder the paintings start out as blank canvases and autonomously create themselves by absorbing the patina of the environment where they are installed for a period of time, such as a coal cellar or deck of a ship. In a similar way, the Mailed Paintings collect patina from handling and the exposure to the elements along their postal route and are considered done when they arrive at the gallery.

The monochromatic white surfaces act as self-writing diaries that record the journey of the work. This process embraces chance and risk and points to the larger conceptual practice of Karin Sander, who always operates in the extended field of painting by putting an emphasis on the environment of the exhibition and the circumstances surrounding it, like in her well-known polished wall pieces. The collected patina exaggerates and mirrors the effect of the passage of time on the surface of the painting, and her installation in the gallery is reminiscent of both Suprematism and the ready-made."

We hope you'll take a look. (525 W. 22nd Street. 212-352-9460)

As Sofia wrote, a person’s handwriting can reveal certain personality traits, but what does a font choice say about you? When you see a letter written in Times New Roman, do you think that person is old school? What is your favorite typeface? I confess that I liked the cutesi-ness of Comic Sans when I was young, but now I favor the simplicity of Arial.

One font that may be most ubiquitous of all is Helvetica, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Companies that use the typeface in its logos include Apple, American Apparel, and Panasonic. According to devotees and graphic designers quoted in the BBC News Magazine, Helvetica conveys a range of feelings, ranging from efficiency and reliability to blandness.

There’s even a documentary on the typeface, titled Helvetica. Director Gary Hustwit speaks about his interest in the font:

Why make a film about a typeface, let alone a feature documentary film about Helvetica? Because it's all around us. You've probably already seen Helvetica several times today. It might have told you which subway platform you needed, or tried to sell you investment services or vacation getaways in the ads in your morning paper. Maybe it gave you the latest headlines on television, or let you know whether to 'push' or 'pull' to open your office door.

Since millions of people see and use Helvetica every day, I guess I just wondered, "Why?" How did a typeface drawn by a little-known Swiss designer in 1957 become one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words fifty years later? And what are the repercussions of that popularity, has it resulted in the globalization of our visual culture?

Screenings of Helvetica will be held in England, Georgia, and Denmark in November and is showing at the IFC Center in New York City until tomorrow, October 30th. Click here for listings.

It is thought that Vincent Van Gogh wrote over 800 letters in his lifetime, mostly to his brother Theo. But of this collection, 22 were to the artist Emile Bernard, a colleague of his fifteen years his junior, who he is thought to have met when he himself was 33. Nineteen of these letters, and one additional, alongside 22 related paintings, drawings, and watercolors by both artists are the subject of the newest exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum titled Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh's Letters to Emile Bernard, which runs through January 6, 2008.

Van Gogh's words inspired Bernard artistically--introducing Japanese prints, discussing artists' issues--and was often critical of Bernard's paintings, which are widely considered to be mediocre. What's interesting is the expression of Van Gogh's thought process during a time when he, often considered to be emotionally volatile and indecipherable.

From the NY Sun:

"Van Gogh's letters, like his pictures, reinforce that art is visual, expressive, and intuitive; yet they also emphasize the fact that art is ordered, logical, and rational. The making of art, like the experience of art, is a titillation of the mind no less than the senses. Van Gogh's writings cannot explain or replace the experience of his paintings and drawings; but there is something reassuring about the power of the artist's word when, standing before a work of his art, words fail us."

The Morgan Library & Museum is located at 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008. Click here for information about visiting.

Live in New York and itching to make your own letterpress notecards? Breck Hostetter & Matt Heindl of Sesame Letterpress in Brooklyn, NY will be teaching a Monogrammed Notecards course in DUMBO, Brooklyn in October.

"Always loved letterpress? here's your chance to make your own set of 50 custom monogrammed notecards and envelopes while learning the basics of printing. Bring samples of line-art images or monograms to the lecture if you know what you might like to print; please note: this class will be held at the sesame letterpress studio in DUMBO, Brooklyn (F train, jay street station). Class limited to 6."

One 1-hour lecture; One 4-hour printing workshop (5 hours)
$220 + $40 supply fee (paid to instructor at lecture)

Session A: Tues, Oct 2, 7-8pm and Sat, Oct 13, hrs TBD
Session B: Tues, Oct 23, 7-8pm and Sat, Nov 3, hrs TBD

Visit the Make Workshop website for more information.

Thanks to all who came to the first Modern Letter Project meetup at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn last night. We had a great turn out and it was a lot of fun to match a few names to faces, have a drink, and just get to know a few of our participants. We're working on setting up meetups in other cities where we have lots of Modern Letter Project participants. If you're interested in helping us organize a meetup in your area, let us know: themodernletter(at)gmail(dot)com.

Have you always wanted to learn how to do letterpress? Book-binding? Japanese Wood Block Printing? Well, so have we.

Friend of MLP, Sahadeva Hammari passed along word of these great classes at The Center For Book Arts located at 28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY. Make your own notecards (perfect for a Modern Letter Project letter) and learn all the basics of letterpress at the CBA printshop.

Letterpress Notecards & Business Cards:
August 11-12, 2007 [Saturday & Sunday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.]
October 6-7, 2007 [Saturday & Sunday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.]
December 8-9, 2007 [Saturday & Sunday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.]

Above courses are $245 for CBA members and $260 for non-members.

The Center For Book Arts also offers fabulous classes on topics from Suminagashi Paper Decoration ($135/150) to Japanese Water-based Woodblock Printing and of course Bookbinding. See The Center For Book Arts website for more information on classes, exhibitions, publications, and to learn about the CBA.

[photos courtesy of The Center For Book Arts Flickr stream]

Letter-writer, Anna Roik let us know about the montly Letter Writing Club at Vancouver's The Regional Assembly of Text. If you are in love with their name as much as we are at Modern Letter Project HQ, then you'll want to stop by The Regional Assembly of Text on the first Thursday of each month at 7 p.m.. The Assembly is located at 3934 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, (604) 877.2247.

The Regional Assembly of Text also offers workshops, a shop featuring t-shirts, journals, quilted letters, stationery sets, and lots more!

p.s. Have the chance to stop by? Email us at themodernletter(at)gmail(dot)com and let us know how it went!

Friend of MLP, Meg Scheminske passes along word of a pen-pal finding, letter-crafting bonanza at Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center.

From this week's Willamette Weekly,

Best Place to Seal a Letter with a REAL Kiss: If seeing someone lick the back of a postage stamp turns you on, there's no better place in town than The Independent Publishing Resource Center , or IPRC (917 SW Oak St. #218, 827-0249) to meet the pen pal of your dreams. Call them traditionalists, Luddites or just plain romantics: From 6 to 9 pm in the little space above Reading Frenzy, every first, second and fourth Thursday of the month, letter-writing junkies convene to craft hand-written quixotic missives to friends, strangers and lovers near and far. Leave your iPhone and T9 vocab at the door—this is where pen, paper, markers, crayons and imagination come out to play. Add this to IPRC's already hefty collection of obscure printing devices like the Japanese Gocco (an old-fashioned letterpress) and its pumped-up Apple G5s, featuring enough Adobe to build a sun-dried house in New Mexico, and you've got all the tools to put to paper just about anything your free-thinking cranium can conjure up.

The IPRC sounds to us like the perfect place to craft your Modern Letter Project letters and meet some fellow letter-writing fans while you're at it.

Come join us for a meet-up of the Modern Letter Project and celebrate our 6th month of correspondence! We have chosen a Brooklyn location since that's where we're based, but we welcome letter-writers from all parts of the globe.

Union Hall Bar
702 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215 [map]
Thursday, August 16, 7:30PM

Directions: M,R to Union Street (closest); B,Q to 7th Avenue; 2,3 to Bergen Street; F to either 4th Ave/9th St or 7th Ave & 9th St (a bit of a walk)

RSVP to themodernletter(at)gmail(dot)com. If you are interested in attending, but not yet a member of the project, please send us an email!

[image via Union Hall]