Dear Amelia

As part of the Herb Lubalin Lecture Series Tomáš Hlava shares "Dear Amelia" which is a series of letters written by Hlava in 2024 to a typeface designed by Stanley Davis in 1963. Named Amelia, after his first-born daughter, it was submitted for the VGC Phototypesetting competition in 1965 and selected as the winning typeface; this is how the world got to know her for the first time.

Given the context of the time, the new technology of phototypesetting, and the blurred boundaries of censorship in the type design field, Amelia's strokes were copied and resold by other type foundries. Davis didn't know his typeface had been published until he saw a TV promo for the film Yellow Submarine. “That was a double whammy for an avid Beatle fan,” Davis said. “Bitstream and Linotype stole my Amelia,” he added in a rare interview in 2002.

Since 2018, Hlava has been encountering and uncovering the mystery Amelia is wrapped in. Dear Amelia is an attempt to (re)connect these personal and typographic histories through the epistolary form. In these letters he describes how people got to see Amelia for the first time, the plagiarism the type foundries committed, his first encounters with Amelia in the Czech Mountains, and the moment he got to know her name. Later, he writes about the moment he decided to go to the place where Stanley Davis lived, Saugerties in upstate New York. There, through a series of coincidences, Amelia the typeface and Amelia the person begin to blur.