In February 2016, Alphabettes contributors opened their minds and hearts to create the Love Letters series.
«Sol Loves Antique Rubber Stamps»
You can see my original studio contribution here.
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This project resonated deeply with me, and I recently revisited it for the upcoming book Alphabettes Soup: 2015–2025, which celebrates ten years of feminist-based approaches to type research, design, and creative community-building. My new text will be published as part of that collection.
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Since I was a child, stamps have been a constant presence in my life. When I visited my parents at the bank where they worked, I was fascinated by the way they marked documents with date and signature stamps. That imprint of ink on paper turned the ephemeral into something permanent—a simple action that said, “This happened. This exists.”
When I started making my own sketchbooks and diaries in elementary school, stamps became more playful. I had stamps of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Little Twin Stars. Some had short phrases that sounded cool at the time—stamps that left small declarations of identity on my notebooks, without me thinking too much about their meaning. Later, I discovered more technical stamps, the kind where you assembled words letter by letter with tweezers, like a puzzle.
As the years passed, my relationship with stamps changed. As an avid traveler, I began collecting letter stamps, passport stamps, train station stamps in Japan. They were proof of movement, records of transit, silent witnesses to places I had belonged to, even if only for a few hours. Moving to Berlin brought a complete 180-degree turn to my life, and I dedicated myself entirely to type design. That’s when my friend Eike gave me a collection of stamps with different typefaces. I had never seen anything so beautiful. Of all the varied styles, one in particular captivated me: italics. These always seemed special to me, with that slant that adds a more dynamic rhythm—a way to stand out without demanding attention, to differentiate with elegance.
Maybe that’s why, one day, I decided I had to stamp a love letter. A letter that, interestingly, was not my own, but Frida Kahlo’s to Diego Rivera. A love that, like ink, was chaotic, uneven, full of marks and smudges. In the letter, Frida wrote:
"I love you more than my own skin, and even though you don’t love me the same way, you love me anyway, don’t you? And if you don’t, I’ll always have the hope that you do, and that’s enough for me."
As I stamped each word, I felt the texture of the ink on my fingers, the familiar chemical scent that reminded me that love, like manual printing, is never exact. There’s always a margin of error. You can press too hard and end up with a smudge. You can apply too little pressure, and the mark won’t be legible. But it remains, regardless. Maybe that’s why I keep using stamps—because they remind me that some things need to be imprinted by hand, with the imperfection of a human touch, with the certainty that, even if the mark isn’t perfect, it remains. Persistent. Irreplaceable. Indelible.