I am becoming less and less of a shopper. Probably because I am in a serious decluttering mode. And shopping eventually leads to more decluttering. But I could not resist this Souvenir de Paris deskset. The little box in the front is an inkwell. This treasure was accompanied by this sweet note from Jill. You can visit her tempting etsy store at JBBPensPaper.

My new font, Dear Rae, is coming along rather nicely. By the end of the week I hope to have all the letters drawn and in the font program. Now I have about 350 characters. The above pen is what I am using for this font. And ink, of course.

I just discovered vintage postage at Jim's Coins at Hilldale here in Madison! I spent some time going though pages and pages of stamps and bringing many of them home. Since I write to people weekly this adds a little something special to my notes. And while I did buy enough that they gave me a discount it is just postage and will get used up.

This book is every bit as good as everyone says. It is 500 pages and I both cannot put it down and know I will hate it when I've finished it.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris in June of 1940, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure’s.

Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of multiple characters, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. - anthonydoerr.com

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; winner of the Australian International Book Award; a #1 New York Times bestseller; the 2014 Book of the Year at Hudson Booksellers; the #2 book of 2014 at Amazon.com; a LibraryReads Favorite of Favorites; named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review; a best book of 2014 at Powell’s Books, Barnes & Noble, NPR’s Fresh Air, San Francisco Chronicle, The Week, Entertainment Weekly, the Daily Beast, Slate.com, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, the Oregonian, the Guardian, and Kirkus; and a #1 Indie Next pick, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.

This weekend I had serious fun attending Crystal Kluge's modern penmanship class in St. Paul. You can see her fonts here. I also enjoyed the rare chance to talk shop with another type designer!

This is Crystal's lettering. Oh how I love those flourishes.

And here are my hen scratchings. But in my defense I didn't take the class to be a bad version of Crystal but a better version of myself.

I learned a lot. Very beginning things like how to hold the pen and not to go so fast. I was easily the worst in class. Everyone else put their nib in their holder and started doing beautiful calligraphy. But then it was a talented bunch.

I got to do a lot of thinking in class and ponder a possible 4 new alphabet fonts. I would really like to make a font that looks like my new logo. I used a folded nib to get the above lettering.

A really great class for both beginners and professionals alike. And as you can see from the first photo she has another class coming up in March. If you are in the area I think you would enjoy it.

Since this was a lettering kind of weekend my friend Laurie, who I look the class with, gave me this oh-so beautiful real sable brush pen for my birthday. So now I have another tool that I don't know how to use. But it makes me happy just to hold it. This is a Kuretake Japanese pen.