Just What Is Re(un)Covered?

“Why did you rub the lamp that contains me?” 🧞

Joe and Bethany cover what you’ll be hearing on Re(un)Covered, what is archival recovery, some feminist history, and how knowing a more inclusive past can help us make a better future. Also: dinosaurs 🦖🦕🐓. 

Season 1 of Re(un)Covered talks about women who designed typefaces in the hot metal type era (late 1800s to 1950s). For each episode Bethany and Joe will talk about what we know (and don’t know) about one or two of these women type designers, then Bethany will chat with a special guest about the designer and/or the episode’s broader theme. If you want to see hot metal type in action, Monotype and Linotype technologies are good places to start.

PSA: everything important has not been digitized. Don't be fooled.

References  (we love citing sources here) 📚

Foundational research on women metal type designers:

• Club of Printing Women of New York, Antique, Modern & Swash: A Brief History of Women in Printing (1955)
• Laura Webber, "Women Typeface Designers" (MA thesis, RIT, 1997)
• Gerda Breuer and Julia Meer, eds, Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 (Jovis, 2012)
• Alphabettes, “Women in Type Bibliography” (2020)
• Yulia Popova, How many female type designers do you know? I know many and talked to some! (Onomatopee, 2020)
• Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie, and Dr. Helena Lekka, Women in Type (2018–2021)
• Lauren Elle DeGaine, "A Woman’s Type: Early Women Type Designers in 20th-Century Book History," (MA thesis, University of Victoria (B.C.), 2021)

Also props to these folks for their ideas about how history works, archival gaps:

• For critical fabulation as a concept, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. 
• Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Northwestern, 2020)
• Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2005)

Episode credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

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