Best known as the author of Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White suffered debilitating Alzheimer’s. This presentation of his collected letters makes visible this decline, the progress of the disease paralleled in the book’s increasingly distorted typography.
Dementia is a diminishment of the mind through forgetting, but also mis-remembering. To replicate this process a script was created that interfaced with Google’s translation tools, feeding selected words through several languages and then back into English. These ‘mis-remembered’ words appear with increasingly frequency throughout the book, obscuring the barely perceptible traces of their original.
The design of Letters of E.B. White is a poetic meditation on fallibility, not only of human memory and perception, but of the software algorithms that increasingly regulate our lives. Its innovative combination of digital techniques and experimental typography extend conventional approaches to publishing.