The Mystical Story Behind the Typeface

As a former art director, I knew exactly what I was looking for—and perhaps more importantly, what I wasn't. I wanted a designer capable of true collaboration: someone secure enough not to be threatened by another person's vision, but curious and passionate enough to make it bigger and better.

I found that designer in Xavier Comas—Coverkitchen.

As we collaborated, it became clear that Xavier wasn't simply designing the book—he was listening to it. While many book designers never can read an entire manuscript, Xavier took the time to understand what Lamps Without Shades was really saying before making many of the design decisions, specifically the typeface.

What he discovered surprised both of us.

In Xavier's Words

"The type is called Guyot, and its story feels like it belongs in your book.

Guyot is named after François Guyot, a sixteenth-century French punchcutter who worked in Antwerp alongside some of the great names of European typography. He was considered second rank. His letterforms survived only in obscure specimens—never celebrated, never widely revived. He waited 477 years until Argentinian type designer Ramiro Espinoza found something alive in his work that everyone else had overlooked and brought him back.

We chose Guyot because it answers the question your memoir asks on every page: What does it mean to see what others don't see? To find the sacred in what the world considers ordinary?

Espinoza recognized something essential in a forgotten punchcutter. You recognized that same quality throughout your own life—in the marinara sauce and the I AM, in the moist grip of a ballet barre and the Call to Prayer. It's there in your poems, and your final line brought everything together. It inspired me and connected, almost magically, with this typeface.

"Everything in its own time."

François Guyot's time took 477 years.

The typeface that carries your book was always going to be his."

— Xavier Comas