Last weekend I stumbled on Helvetiki, this witty marriage of the ubiquitous hei-tiki of New Zealand and Helvetica of the world by Matthew Moriarty at Crawlspace gallery. Created in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the type face Helvetica and the release year of the Helvetica film that looks at the larger conversation about the way type affects our lives, Helvetiki had me wondering what is New Zealand type?

I could point you to the magnificent type specimens from Kris Sowersby and Joseph Churchward, and note that New Zealand type often looks like it’s subtly growing, organic, alive, like koru unfolding. And I’m excited to learn more at the Printing Types: New Zealand Type Design since 1870 exhibition (at Objectspace in Auckland 25 July – 12 September 2009) curated by Jonty Valentine to “remedy the invisibility of type in New Zealand,” featuring work by Joseph Churchward, Robert Coupland Harding, Tom Elliott, Mark Geard, Maarten Ideema, Narrow Gauge, Warren Olds, Bruce Rotherham, Shabnam Shiwan, Kris Sowersby, Luke Wood, and Jack Yan.

Furniture Typeface by Cody Haltom, created for High Fashion Home in Houston.

I had been seduced by a terroirist network known as New Zealand Artisan Honey, made up of passionate beekeepers producing honeys in small, quality batches from specific varietal sources among some of New Zealand’s most spectactular locations.

Sadly, most bees and beekeepers are not having such a romantic experience. I had noticed my previous honey brands losing their organic status as the varroa mite has spread south through New Zealand. There is evidence that CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) has arrived in New Zealand, and it’s likely due to the strong neonicotinoids, a class of systemic insecticides which France, Italy and Switzerland have banned because of its effects on bees.

Coming from a deep natural aquifer to the surface in Whakatane, New Zealand, Antipodes has real mouth appeal. It’s less aggressively carbonated than my usual brew, San Pellegrino, and it’s easy on the eyes too.

Dressed in classic Mrs. Eaves, Antipodes complements any table without overpowering it. The oviform bottle echoes the round beads streaming up when opened. It’s a happy thing to hold.

I know, I know… you have issues with bottled water. I do too. But a girl’s gotta have a vice, and until I can pour sparkling from the tap, I’ll order the bottle. (When out… technically I could make my own at home.) If it makes you feel any better, Antipodes is the first premium water to be certified carbon neutral in production and export, and they plan to be carbon neutral to any table, hotel room or home anywhere in the world by 2008.

Antipodes is currently served only in hand-picked great restaurants around New Zealand, hence their restaurant list is a good guide to the restaurants I want to try. You can order Antipodes by the case for home delivery in the United States through New Zealand Natural Goods, but at $60 for 12, I’d have to consider it a design element to justify it. Oh, wonderful! Oprah already did.

My day started off with some of the brilliant skits and songs that instilled in me an early and abiding love for letters, letterforms and language: Lower-case N, Standing on a Hill from Sesame Street, Easy Reader and the Adventures of Letterman from Electric Company. I love learning that was Morgan Freeman, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. I’m feeling the urge to indulge in an extended experience. (Thanks, Panopticist!)

Not long after, I discovered Hyperwords, an excellent FireFox extension that lets you select any word and translate it, look it up in a dictionary or thesaurus, shop it, search it, blog it, slice it through a tin can and still apply many more commands than I have time to explore right now. One especially handy feature is being able to select any currency amount and convert it on the fly. (Despite how painful it is to convert prices in [any currency] to U.S. dollars now.)

Do you engage with pleasure, curiosity, fun and celebration (with time for naps) in the face of the tragedy of the day? Do you want to? This is the book for you.

Maira Kalman’s delightful new release, The Principles of Uncertainty, turns out to be a heavy book. Mostly physically. Kalman says it’s because the book is extensively inked: “all the colors are in there.” Even if you’ve been following this year-long illustrated journal at the New York Times, the high-resolution images of her gouache paintings are undeniably gorgeous in print. (Even more so in person at the Julie Saul Gallery through November 24, 2007.)

Aside from the inherent pleasures of the portable printed format, the book offers a few bonuses to those already familiar with the images:

• A pull out “Map of the United States” by Kalman’s beautiful mother, Sara Berman, with instructions to: “Either put it on the wall or put it back in the book. If you put it back in the book, it may one day fall out when someone browses through the book and it will become a thing that falls out of the book.”



• An appendix filled with “things that fall out of books” and a fabulous collection of numbers in the wild. (Kalman would love the Numbers fonts by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)
• Luscious liner page images of mosses of Long Island.
• An index that’s amusing on its own, featuring laughter, love (as a guarantee of sanity), finding self, forgetting, forgiveness, hairdos, dreams (bad, fragment of, good, malaise after bad, no answer to), and even happiness. One thing you won’t find in the index is “inner peace” (p. 245-6), a phrase that seems to trigger its opposite for Kalman. (What is that about?)

Kalman celebrated the release of the book at the New York Public Library with a 37.5 minute conversation with Paul Holdengräber, followed with 3 songs composed by Nico Muhly, and cake instead of questions. Instead of questions from the audience, that is. All Maira’s works wrestle with the eternal existential dilemma: “We are here now, and we are not going to be here at a certain point, so what is that about?” and the natural corollary, “What would we do all day long, forever?”

I don’t know what we’ll do forever, but I highly recommend checking out how Kalman observes the world, “making sense and then nonsense” out of it with grace, gratitude and joie de vivre, today.

• The Principles of Uncertainty book on Amazon
• The Principles of Uncertainty blog on NYT
• NYT’s video highlights of the celebration at the NYPL