Doctor, what does it mean if you dream of creating a font of Freud’s handwriting?
This is exactly what German typographer Harald Geisler has in mind, and, in the spirit of self-actualization, he’s funding the project on Kickstarter. His charisma is such that he’s already raised over eight times the original $1500 goal that will allow him to travel to Vienna, where he will create the typeface in a borrowed apartment within walking distance from Freud’s former home at Berggasse 19. That address is now home to the Sigmund Freud Museum, where the romantically-minded Geisler plans to visit the hard copies of the eight letters from which his alphabet will be assembled.
Don’t let the project’s fully-in-the-black status keep you from visiting its fundraising page. In addition to being an inadvertent tutorial on the elements of a top-notch Kickstarter campaign, it also provides some interesting information with regard to penmanship, font creation, and the difference between Kurrent, the German-style script Freud learned as a schoolboy, and the Latin-style cursive that was standard among his North American patients.
Geisler says it cracks him up to imagine someone jotting a note to his or her shrink in Freud’s handwriting. Perhaps those of us not currently under the care of a psychiatry professional could use it to write our mothers.
Related Content:
Sigmund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Recording of His Voice, 1938
Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)
Sigmund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Private Life
Ayun Halliday has never regretted her childish decision to ape her mother’s highly idiosyncratic hand.
There’s a Twilight Zone dimension to this. What if a writer decided to take over Dickens’ or, say, Emily Dickinson’s handwriting?
I’d say there’s a risk of being haunted.