#mitpress

[letterlocking]

Thank you, everyone! Surprise: It’s happening! Our book is coming out. Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter by Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, with the Unlocking History Research Group. Publication date: March 4, 2025. Publisher: The MIT Press. 320 pp, 8x9 inches, 261 color illustration. Hardcover ISBN: 9780262049276, $40.00. Pre-order @mitpress @penguinrandomhouse @amazon @barnesandnoble @bookshop_org @Indiebound @indigo @booksamillion. 

Description The rich history of a centuries-old document security technology—folding and securing a letter into its own envelope for delivery—and a comprehensive guide to learning how to make your own locked letters. Before the invention of the gummed envelope in the 1830s, how did people secure their private letters? The answer is letterlocking—the ingenious process of folding, slitting, and securing a letter with a strip of paper and sealing wax so that it becomes its own envelope. The practice, used by historical figures ranging from Elizabeth I and her spymaster to Japanese samurai lords, and nearly entirely forgotten, was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes. In Letterlocking, Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith, experts who have pioneered the field over the last ten years, tell the fascinating story of letterlocking within epistolary history, drawing on real historical examples from all over the world. Letterlocking will be accompanied by a website, freely accessible scholarly articles, and instructional videos and diagrams, as well as foldable, tear-out sheets with instructions on how to fold and lock a letter. 

Thank you, @barnesandnoble for offering a pre-order discount to your members April 19, on our book “Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter” #BNPreorder 

#mitpress #letterlocking #amsr #origami #documentsecurity #letters #correspondence #fold #diy #security #seal #secret #love #write #encryption #spies #invisible #teaching #instructions #book #publication #launch #video #share 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/letterlocking-jana-dambrogio/1145200759?ean=9780262049276

Alt text: A sparkling star made of magenta and yellow. In the center the date: March 4, 2025. Blue background with white lettering that says, "Letterlocking, The Hidden History of the Letter by Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, with the Unlocking History Research Group. Pre-order now @mitpress @penguinrandomhouse @amazon @barnesandnoble @bookshop_org @Indiebound @indigo @booksamillion

Thanks to Eirene Pianeta for sharing the gif design template in Canva. 

Citation information: Authors: Jana Dambrogio and the Unlocking History Research Group. Title: "Surprise: It's Happening! Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter. Pub date: March 4, 2025, USA (2024))." Letterlocking Instructional Videos. Unlocking History number 6261/Letterlocking Unique Video number: 0304. Date filmed: April 19, 2024. Duration: 1:52. Date posted: April 19, 2024. Video URL: [Insert URL]. Date accessed: [Date].

Copyright 2024. Jana Dambrogio and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). All rights reserved. The following copyrighted material is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. Contact the MIT Technology Licensing Office for any other licensing inquiries.

To find out more about letterlocking, visit http://letterlocking.org and follow us on social media @letterlocking.

[drawdownbooks]

Ways of Hearing⁣ By Damon Krukowski⁣ Available at www.draw-down.com⁣ ⁣ Our voices carry farther than ever before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski (Galaxie 500) examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing—modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture—Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds.⁣ Designed by #JamesGoggin / Published by #MITPress⁣ ⁣ #DamonKrukowski #WaysofHearing https://www.instagram.com/p/BzQIuXeHuC7/?igshid=c3ubrjhvr1sp

[graphicbooks]

Ulm Design: The Morality of Objects by Herbert Lindinger / Design by Herbert Lindinger / Published by @mitpress / Available @pagespread * * * * * #ulm #ulmschoolofdesign #mit #mitpress #objects #productdesign #architecture #design #graphicdesign #designer #graphicdesigner #book #books #booksondesign #designbook #publication #publishing #graphicbooks #type #typeface #typography #grid #layout #designstudent #designstudio https://www.instagram.com/p/BqGUyIwhXrl/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=g1dr6xu21xvx

[worldfoodbooks]

OPEN TODAY 12-7 PM. NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: "WORK" EDITED BY FRIEDERIKE SIGLER (2017) Warhol’s Factory of the 1960s, Minimalism’s assembly-line aesthetics, conceptual and feminist concern with workers’ conditions in the 1970s—these are among the antecedents of a renewed focus on the work of art: labor as artistic activity, as artistic method and as object of artistic engagement. In 2002, the “Work Ethic” exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth at the Baltimore Museum of Art took its cue from recent art to spotlight this earlier era of artistic practice in which activity became as valid as, and often dispensed with, object-production. Revealed through this prism was “dematerialized” art’s close and critical relation to the emergent information age’s criteria of management, production and skill. By 2015, the Venice Biennale reflected artists’ wider concern with global economic and social crises, centered on exploitative and precarious worlds of employment. Yet while art increasingly engages with human travail, work’s significance in itself is seldom addressed by critics. This anthology explicitly investigates work in relation to contemporary art, surveying artistic strategies that grapple with the complexities of being an art worker in the new economy, a postproducer, a collaborator, a fabricator, a striker, an ethical campaigner, or would-be transformer of labor from oppression to liberation. Artists surveyed include Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Marwa Arsanios, Chto Delat, Alice Creischer, Ana de la Cueva, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jeremy Deller, Maria Eichhorn, Harun Farocki, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Gulf Labour Coalition, Tehching Hsieh, Lamia Joreige, Lee Lozano, Goshka Macuga, Teresa Margolles, Adrian Melis, Annette Messager, Gustav Metzger, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ahmet Ögüt, Philip Rizk, Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Tamas St. Auby, Mladen Stilinovic, W.A.G.E., Artur Zmijewski Available in the bookshop today and via our new website. #worldfoodbooks #work #whitechapel #documentsofcontemporaryart #mitpress (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

[drawdownbooks]

Muriel Cooper / Available at www.draw-down.com / The career of the pioneering designer #MurielCooper whose work spanned media from printed book to software interface. By #DavidReinfurt and #RobertWiesenberger / Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering #designer who created the iconic #MITPress colophon (or logo)—seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper was the first #designdirector of the MIT Press, the co-founder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of designers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrantly printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital. Designed by #YasuyoIguchi / Hardcover in slipcase #graphicdesign #typography https://www.instagram.com/p/BuJTXf3nWWf/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=t1nnyyzay8h6

[drawdownbooks]

Muriel Cooper / Available at www.draw-down.com / The career of the pioneering designer #MurielCooper whose work spanned media from printed book to software interface. By #DavidReinfurt and #RobertWiesenberger / Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering #designer who created the iconic #MITPress colophon (or logo)—seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper was the first #designdirector of the MIT Press, the co-founder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of designers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrantly printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital. Designed by #YasuyoIguchi / Hardcover in slipcase #graphicdesign #typography (at MIT Press) https://www.instagram.com/p/BpcJ8j7BZA1/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=10yj9ykn3k4e4

[inthenameofthebody]

On the Politics of Death

Global events such as pandemics can momentarily focus attention on a fundamentally overlooked pre-existing human condition: the sheer inequa

[ruanne-basel-log]

Translation

Reflections on the cultural and political complexities of translation in global contemporary artistic practices.

The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture. Economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles, and the plight of refugees are now superimposed upon the intricacies of ancient and modern diasporas, generations of colonization, and the transportation of slaves. This timely anthology considers translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation, empathy, and understanding disparate experiences. It explores the approaches of artists, poets, and theorists in negotiating increasingly protean identities—from the intrinsic intimacy of language, to translation's embedded structures of knowledge production and interaction, to its limitations of expression, and, ultimately, its importance in a world of multiple perspectives.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/translation