Today’s the day: my new book, Fine Specimens, is out! Well, kind of. Technically, today’s the US release date and UK (and elsewhere) bookstores won’t officially get the book until Thursday, but pre-orders seem to have been landing all over the world way ahead of the actual pub date(s), so let’s just go with it. Besides, tonight’s the night I’m having the release party at Bookhaus in Bristol.

Intended to act as both a picture of contemporary type design and also as a home for promotional graphics that might’ve otherwise got lost in the never-ending scroll, I hope that you’ll find Fine Specimens inspirational and — thanks to the six essays by John Boardley, Ellen Lupton, Erik Spiekermann, Laura Meseguer, Min-Young Kim, and Veronika Burian — educational, too. It’s available from anywhere you choose to buy books and, if you can, please consider supporting your local bookshop instead of Amazon. Here’s what it looks like:

Order the book

The release party tonight is actually just the beginning: stop number one on a five-date book tour. This is possibly a terrible idea, but I felt compelled to celebrate this book in-person and to do so more than once. Here’s the full tour itinerary:

📍 Bristol   🗓️ 10th March   🔎 Bookhaus
📍 Brussels   🗓️ 1st April   🔎 Waterstones
📍 Düsseldorf   🗓️ 27th April   🔎 beyond tellerrand
📍 London   🗓️ 14th May   🔎 TBA
📍 Paris   🗓️ 30th May   🔎 Now26

Also, because apparently I love making extra work for myself, I’m also going to be documenting the whole tour via my travel-focused pop-up newsletter, Notes from a different (type)setting.

Subscribe to the tour pop-up

If you haven’t followed previous editions, you might — quite understandably — be wondering what on earth a pop-up newsletter is. Craig Mod put it best in his excellent article, Pop-Up Newsletters are the Greatest Newsletters:

“A pop-up newsletter is a superpower — readers tend to be more excited to subscribe to something that ends, and writers tend to be more motivated to commit and bring their best self knowing that it doesn’t drag on forever.”

Here’s how it’s going to work for the book tour pop-up:

• I’ll be writing about my journeys to, experiences at, and journeys home from the five stops on the book tour;
• there’ll most likely be five emails in total, each sent out a day or two after each event;
• the list for the pop-up is totally separate from my ‘regular’ newsletter, Typographic & Sporadic, so there’s no auto-subscribing or anything like that;
• there will be no online archives (i.e. you can only read the newsletter in your email client, nowhere else); and, finally,
• the list will be deleted entirely after the last issue’s been sent.

It might seem (actually, no, it definitely is) contrary to conventional list-building wisdom, but it lends a nice sense of immediacy to it all. An exercise in being ‘in the moment’, as it were — at least as much as that’s possible with email, anyway.

Be sure to check out my ‘books’ page for more details on Fine Specimens itself and please consider lending me your email address for the pop-up. And I’ll hope to see you on the road — either virtually or in-person.