The Story Behind the Typeface

As a former art director, I knew exactly what I was looking for — and, more to the point, what I wasn’t. I wanted a designer capable of true collaboration: someone secure enough not to be threatened by my vision, and curious enough to make it bigger and better.

I found him in Xavier Comas of Coverkitchen.

It became clear early on that Xavier wasn’t simply designing the book — he was listening to it. Many designers work from a sample chapter and a synopsis. Xavier read deeper into manuscript before he chose anything, beginning with the typeface.

What he found there surprised us both.

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

Guyot is named after François Guyot, a 16th-century French punchcutter — the craftsman who cut each letter by hand into steel — who began working in Antwerp in 1539, alongside some of the great names of European typography. In his own time he was considered second rank. His letterforms survived only in obscure specimens, never celebrated, never widely revived. He waited 477 years — until 2016, when the Argentinian type designer Ramiro Espinoza found something alive in his work that everyone else had overlooked, and brought him back.

We chose Guyot because its story answers the questions your memoir asks on every page: What does it mean to see what others don’t? To find the sacred in what the world calls ordinary?

Espinoza recognized something essential in a forgotten punchcutter. You recognized the same thing throughout your own life — and put it in your poems: in the marinara sauce and the I AM, in the moist grip of a ballet barre and the Call to Prayer. And the line your mother leaves you with brought everything together — it’s the line that led me to this typeface.

“Everything in its own time.”

For François Guyot, that time took 477 years. The typeface that carries your book was always going to be his.

— Xavier Comas

I’ve waited a lifetime to tell this story. We’ve both had to wait for the right time.