Postcards in the Air : August 2025

It's the end of July when I look out our front window down onto the circular driveway of our building. The pavement below is wet. Since we are in our dry season, the normal summer fog has persisted all through July, but I was surprised by rain on several mornings. It wasn't a hard rain, just enough to dampen the concrete driveway and the street beyond. Some days the fog cleared by noon; other days, fog hung like wet laundry over us. It was still a treat to feel the mist on our faces as we walked up the street.

A drizzly day seems like a good time to discover an unusual museum. When I have found other small museums, they were typically dedicated to one person's obsession. One of my favorite museums in Tokyo was the Kite Museum, started by Shingo Modegi in Nihonbashi. The rooms are crowded with many beautifully hand-painted kites created in Japan and other countries. They show 300 at a time, but there are many more in their archives. Another small museum in Asakusa was the Taiko-kan Drum Museum, an interactive place that allowed me to play with most of their collection of drums from around the world. Nearby is a new interactive museum called the Samurai Ninja Museum, where you can try on samurai armor and practice ninja moves. If you have seen the TV series Shogun, you know how fierce and menacing the armor can make someone look. The Japanese still honor Takeda Shingen, a powerful daimyo (leader of a group of samurai) from Kifu, with a festival where they re-enact events in his life.

Designing a typeface

Paris is crowded with museums, but my favorite places there were the antique clock shops, such as La Pendulerie in Rive Droite, which displays extravagant, intricate clocks made for wealthy families of bygone eras, and the auction houses at Hotel Drouot at Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The auction houses allow you to view items that have been tucked away in someone's attic for many years. Just don't raise your hand while you are looking.

In our San Francisco neighborhood, we walked to the Letterform Archives, a hidden gem that began with Rob Saunders' collection of numerous examples of typography, graphic design, and lettering. In the last 10 years, the collection has grown to 100,000 items. As their website states, "We're open to all who love letters." The space is both an archive of works that emphasize type design and classrooms where students can learn how to design an alphabet/typeface. We wandered through the exhibit, "10 X 10 for 10," and found 100 examples of letterforms, including calligraphy from centuries ago and present-day protest posters.

Practice pages of different type designs

The Letterform Archives is housed in the American Industrial Center, which is a blocks-long rabbit warren of mostly small creative companies. Bill and I got lost when we got off on the wrong side of the elevator, but discovered in the building a small eatery with an outdoor patio, people busy working in a bakery's kitchen, a cooking school, a clog manufacturer with a store at the corner of the building, and a grocery store along with several architectural firms.

Saunders' inclination to collect letterforms mirrors my own decades-long collection of type and graphic design, some of which I have kept even after downsizing, just because they inspire me. What inspires you to be creative?