2011 Legacy of Letters Tour Leaders

Paul Shaw is widely known and respected as a guide to urban lettering. With Garrett Boge he co-founded and led the original Legacy of Letters tours of Rome, Florence and Tuscany from 1997 to 2000. On his own he has led regular walking tours of lettering in New York City since 2005 for the Type Directors Club and other organizations. He has also led similar tours of Boston, Buffalo, Atlanta and Los Angeles for SoTA (the Society of Typographic Aficionados).

He has been a calligrapher for over 40 years and has designed 18 typefaces, most of them for LetterPerfect. Paul is the principal of Paul Shaw / Letter Design and teaches calligraphy at Parsons School of Design and the history of typography at the School of Visual Arts. In 2002 he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has written about calligraphy, lettering and type for Letter Arts Review, Print, Eye, Baseline, AIGA Voice and other magazines as well as his own slow blog called Blue Pencil. Paul is the author of Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story.

Alta Price runs an editorial consulting and translating business specialized in art and architecture texts. She has translated texts on subjects ranging from Caravaggio to contemporary sculpture, Egypto-Armenian photography, and the vertiginous nature of list-making. Fluent in Italian and well- versed in German, Spanish, and French, she has also acted as coordinator for international art-related congresses.

Alta became enamored of epigraphy, paleography, and lettering of all sorts while living in Rome. She holds a BFA in Printmaking and Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. Her artistic practice ranges from paper and watermark-making to collage, stop-motion animation, and book objects. She is currently based in Long Island City, and occasionally joins Paul to explore some of the more oddly lettered corners of New York City. She is also a guest columnist for the website 3 Quarks Daily.