The Manual
The Manual
Writen by John Lee Clark
Designed by Sebastian Holt
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The Manual
ARTD 444 Typographic Systems
Copyright © by Sebastian Holt
Molly C. Briggs, Instructor
Spring 2024
School of Art & Design
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
John Lee Clark is an American deafblind poet, essayist, historian, and translator and an activist in the Protactile movement. His acclaimed How to Communicate: Poems, 2023, incorporates creative reflections on the Braille slate, prose poems, and “erasures” that reinterpret nineteenth-century poems and critique the limits of the canon.
The Manual is an original re-setting of Clark’s poem “The Manual”.
This project was inspired by the pedagogical research of book designer and doctoral student Natalie F. Smith, with whom Professor Briggs has cotaught typography in past semesters.
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Contents the manual 1 Foreward 5
The Manual
An erasure of George Meredith’s “Martin’s Puzzle”
Book, how well I understand your gladness.
Suffer’d a fool.
Why heart?
Well, the human fist can be designed with a savouring.
Why taste the books of turns?
I never solve crush’d complaining.
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Thanks leave Wonderful body hymns.
Fingers only ask.
Answer this: Should it select eyes fixed on eye?
So, Book, what must injustice again mark?
Engines permit tools.
Respect may perhaps bow but I instead question.
Made together, the sky.
Stop discord properly.
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Foreword
The Manual is a part of a large collective of peoms called How to Communicate, written by John Lee Clark about his experiences as a blind-deaf person. The Manual, an erasure of George Meredith’s “Martin’s Puzzle,” is a peom written by John Lee Clark about the relationship between humanity and literature, and the emotional connections through experiences in a book. Along witht the type style of the book, How to Communicate by John Lee clark is a engaging read that is worth taking into perspective.
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