The Widow

There was a humor magazine called The Cornell Widow published by students at Cornell University between the 10s and 60s. I had never heard of this mag until suddenly Cam hauled 700 pounds of printing blocks used in issues of The Widow into our workshop.


It was a strange offer, difficult to refuse, and the "project" of owning these treasures/out-casts is still undefined for us. We went through three boxes and found a variety of blocks. Some skillful, absurd illustrations simply make no sense without the comedic text they were created for. Other images are so simple, like the moths, they've become icons for us already.

The caricatures are great and maintain abundant personality.



So far, the plan is to print the ones that stand out for us and maybe post scans on flickr. The call is being raised to "get the Widow off the floor!" I'm hoping that we'll get to some 1920s content somewhere in the pile like this great cover courtesy of the ephemera assemblyman.

Cam's fantasy penny farthing

At Lettre Sauvage we pride ourselves on investing long hours of toil on projects that dig us just a few more inches further into the rabbit hole. You never know when you'll turn that dark corner and suddenly find yourself in free fall through the limitless space of a colorful dream-scape. All we know for certain is that we have to keep scraping.

This Saturday Cam woke up, put on his dashing plaid pants and rubber-toed sneakers, plopped down on his black leather perch and began drawing a penny farthing bicycle.

In his words: "When people used to fall off one of these they called it 'catching a cropper" because you fly over the handlebars and go head first into the ground. They have a high center of gravity combined with a very forward seating position. In my design I tried to mitigate this flaw by sweeping the front forks back and curving the rear axle out, pushing the riding position down and back from the front axle."

Don't you want to be Cam's imaginary cyclist?! This is comfort and charm.