Yesterday afternoon was an unexpected pleasure. Frank Romano visited Mike. Frank got his start at Linotype but has built a wonderful career in various typographic endeavors, currently as President of the Museum of Printing in Andover, MA and Professor Emeritus at RIT School of Print Media, College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. Frank is writing a book about Merganthaler Linotype's history. I received an education by listening to Frank ask Mike questions (and I recorded all.) Frank offered to help me in any way because he, too, feels Mike's story must be told. To quote Frank " So many of the famous type designers got their start working for Mike on one of his Linotype font projects, yet he does not get the recogmition."
I also received a very supportive email from Ron Reason, whom I have not seen since his days at Poynter Institute as Director of Visual Journalism. He's been busy for years with his own firm Design with Reason. he offered to help me get promotional articles published in the "right" periodicals.
Since I was married to Mike, met his friends and heard the stories, I think of him as the Typographic Bill Graham to the type designer Rock Stars in the sixties and seventies. Always in the background, the catalyst in the brew....
Some of the reading I am doing to support the biography are Longitude by Dava Sobel, Salt by Mark Kurlansky, the memoir by Norman Mailer's wife, A Ticket to the Circus (not my cuppa' tea) and now -just arrived- my eagerly awaited copy of Lyndall Gordon's controversial bio on Emily Dickinson Lives like Loaded Guns (personal friends will recognize why I find this germane and oddly comforting).
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