a safe now
an artist book, flip book, poetry book, & type specimen
a safe now
a safe now is a hand-animated, riso-printed flipbook — my second artist's book.
The work takes up safety and its illusions, queerness and toughness, communion with natural elements, and the dangers and fascinations of the ocean. Across the book's recto pages, hand-animated text moves in and out of the ocean's waves. The hand animation was completed while in residency at Ray’s Shack, a historic dune shack outside Provincetown, MA which the Peaked Hill Trust maintains on the Cape Cod National Seashore.
The verso pages carry two further bodies of work.
The first is poems written during the animation's making at set in Rays No Con, a typeface I built from rub-down transfers of the modular type system Super Tipo Veloz.
The second is a type specimen for Rays No Con — designed in collaboration with the artist Nelly Kate — comprising the full alphabet, a set of astrological symbols, and a handful of recipes.
choices made
This is my second artist's book. While making my first, Break Your Voice (2018–2019), I learned the particular magic of hand-typesetting: when you're forced to choose every character one at a time, you slow down dramatically. I'd find myself rewriting a sentence mid-typesetting — by the time I'd set the first half, I'd already found a more efficient second half.
In 2020, I was introduced to modular typographic systems, which slow you down even further — where ordinary metal type gives you one complete letterform per piece, a modular system builds each letter out of interchangeable parts, so that setting a single character means combining several small pieces rather than reaching for one. I met Super Tipo Veloz at Letterform Archive, in the last months before the pandemic, and spent lockdown itching to typeset with it.
I wanted to work with the physical forms by hand. With a grant from the Dedalus Foundation in 2021, I custom-ordered full sets of all 555 Super Tipo Veloz forms as rub-down transfers — more commonly known by the proprietary name Letraset. The text of the animation in this book came from those rub-downs.
I spent a week alone at Ray Wells's dune shack at Peaked Hill Trust, on the sand dunes outside Provincetown, MA, where the poems in this book were written. When the residency ended, I drove straight to Providence, RI, for a week-long riso residency at Snake Hair Press, where I printed the animation.
Experimental, text-driven film is what brought me to typography in the first place, and I think of books as a time-based medium in their own right. Making animation, I've always felt a little sad that a viewer doesn't get to sit with each frame the way I do while making it. Setting modular type, I've felt the same sadness that a reader doesn't get to sit with each letter the way I do while building it. A flipbook made with modular type felt like the obvious next step; it hands a reader control over their own sense of time, to linger or not, wherever they choose. I bound the book with a screw post so that if someone falls in love with a single frame, they can take it with them.
Title: a safe now
Format: flipbook
Dimensions: 2.5" x 5" x 1.25"
Page count: 108 pages
Printing:
Recto: two-color risograph, fluorescent orange & pine
Verso: risograph, pine
Cover: risograph, mist
Binding: Chicago screw
Typefaces: Rays No Con & SVT_Semi-asemic, both created by sair goetz
Edition: not yet editioned, approximately 250 copies
Printed on the riso printer "Dolly" at Snake Hair Press (Providence, RI), 2026, during their residency program.
Animated and written at a Peaked Hill Trust residency (Ray's Shack, near Provincetown, MA)
About the type
This book is set in Rays No Con, a typeface that started as the 17 characters I needed to animate the recto text. I built them at Ray Wells's dune shack with rub-down transfer letters using the no contrast forms included in the the modular type set Super Tipo Veloz.
I think of myself as a modular typesetter, not a typographer; so I have no interest in charging for this typeface. Check back here soon to download!