Many apologies to anyone who has been trying to find this website in the last few days. Our provider had put it on a new server – with essential elements missing, and nothing showed. But now we’re back.

Our office is now closed for the Christmas and New Year holidays. Any orders made on the website will be gratefully received during this period – but the books/CDs cannot be posted to you until the first week of January. Greetings of the season!

David Wild recently wrote a brief note on the history of the collages that he has been making over 35 years. We give it here, with the examples to which he refers.

We have sold the last copy of Peter Burnhill’s book Type spaces. Our North American distributor, Princeton Architectural Press, still has some copies left.

Any book seems to have its appropriate, though inevitably temporary, resting place. Here we see a copy of E.C. Large’s Asleep in the afternoon in the Mast second-hand bookshop in Manhattan’s East Village. This location bears out the prediction of a sales manager that E.C. Large would be taken up by ‘hip young people’ – and hip enough to know the virtues of alphabetical order. The democratic, plain-writing Large is sandwiched by Ring Lardner and Stieg Larsson: neighbours who seem somehow exactly right for him.

A 30-minute film about Karel Martens and his work is being shown on Canvas, the Belgian TV channel, on Sunday 13 November at 20:15. Watch the trailer

Is there still a ‘Swiss typography’. That is the broad theme of the first Tÿpo St.Gallen conference, running from 18 to 20 November. Contributors include our authors Jost Hochuli, and – giving a rare public lecture – Gerrit Noordzij. Bruno Monguzzi is among other speakers who appear only rarely at typography conferences. As well as the talks, there are visits to the main libraries and archives in St Gallen, and a reception to launch Hochuli’s Das ABC eines Typografen, the latest in the series of Edition Ostschweiz pamphlets.

Coltrane in Chicago (photomontage)

An exhibition of photographs and photomontages by David Wild opens this week at the Beardsmore Gallery in Kentish Town, London, and runs until 10 December. Publication of Jazzpaths, his ‘American photomemento’, which includes all these images and much more, is set for 1 December.

On 13 October in Antwerp Fred Smeijers spoke some words of introduction at the opening of the exhibition ‘The Most Widely Read Man in the World: Matthew Carter’, on show until the end of the year at the Catapult gallery. We are glad to publish the text here, both for its homage to Matthew Carter (son of Harry Carter) and in its own right, as a piece of writing. If you like this, you may also enjoy Smeijers’s meditations on ‘what is a classic typeface?’. (For their advice and help in publishing this, thanks to Fred Smeijers, Matthew Carter, and Eric Kindel.)

Diana Souhami’s good account is in The Guardian today.