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A graphic designer's search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man's fate during World War II.
Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters-they were in French-but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II.
As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel's letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuzé, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war.
Marcel's Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn's increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man's fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.
Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters-they were in French-but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II.
As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel's letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuzé, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war.
Marcel's Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn's increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man's fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.
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Reviews
"Marcel's Letters deftly portrays how a curiosity can grow into a search, and the search into an obsession. Having developed a profound sense of responsibility for one man's lost history, Carolyn Porter follows the clues scattered in his letters to his family. Her story bursts with the excitement of discovery and culminates with the indescribable honor of returning fragments of a forgotten history
Glenn Kurtz, author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family
"Carolyn Porter takes us on her offbeat quest to solve a transatlantic history mystery and unearths an intriguing pocket of our past along the way."
Megan Smolenyak, author of Who Do You Think You Are?
"Quirky, heartfelt, and compulsively readable. Marcel's Letters is an inventive combination of memoir and amateur historical sleuthing. An unforgettable story."
Theresa Kaminski, author of Angels of the Underground