This is currently a pre-order item. Orders containing in stock and pre-order items will be held until all items can be shipped together. If you’d like titles currently in stock to ship immediately, we recommend placing separate orders. 

Since 2011, the Velvetyne collective has been dedicated to creating and distributing typefaces under open-source licenses. Its members advocate and promote an uninhibited typographic practice, guided by political principles and aesthetic risk-taking.

This monograph celebrates a generous collective creation—pioneering and recognized on the international scene—that continually questions and reinvents itself. Velvetyne Saved My Life reveals the distinctive workings of this unconventional structure within the contemporary type foundry landscape, its commitment to free-culture and open-source principles, its singular editorial policy, and its pedagogical practice.

The book is structured around a polyphonic interview conducted by Sandra Chamaret with the members of the collective, a series of in-depth articles on emblematic typefaces from the foundry, as well as an exhaustive catalogue of the more than 70 fonts published by nearly as many international authors.

Halfway between text and type specimen, this book is both a story to read and a manifesto to see.

Edited by Sandra Chamaret and Olivier Bertrand
Translated by Aubrey Birch

Designed by Lucas Le Bihan

Published by Surfaces Utiles, 2026
Bilingual, in English and French

Softcover, 304 pages, 5.9 × 9.5 inches

ISBN: 978-2-93-111015-7