Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate

Today's post is on Marcel's Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man's Fate by Carolyn Porter. It is 352 pages long and is is published by Skyhorse Publishing. The cover is like a postcard with the title in the font named after Marcel. There is some mild foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. The intended reader is someone who is interested in World War 2 history and fonts. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- A graphic designer’s search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man’s fate during World War II.
Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters—they were in French—but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II.
As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel’s letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuzé, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war.
Marcel’s Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn’s increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man’s fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.

Review- This is a moving story about the past and present intersecting. Porter bought the letters at a flea market because the hand-writing was beautiful. For years she just studied the hand-writing without thinking about what was written on them. This the story about Porter's adventure into who Marcel was and what his life was like. The writing is good, the story is engaging, and the ending is gratifying in a way that rarely happens in the nonfiction. I teared up at times over the course of the narrative as we learned more about Marcel and his time working in a Nazi camp. When we discovered that he had lived, returned to France, and his loved ones I had tears. This is an up-lifting story about hope, surviving, and learning about others. I recommend this book.


I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.