La Perruque 1 Publication

La Perruque is a 1 × 90 cm-long magazine publishing nonstandard type specimens printed in the margins of regular documents.

La Perruque hacks unused paper surfaces from print shop production, so they become carte blanche for type designers instead of waste.

Each issue is a specimen of a typeface. All of them together draw the portrait of a contemporary typography scene. La Perruque showcases experimental typography projects. It is also a place for type manifestos and in-progress fonts.

Besides being an online archive of the magazine issues, www.la-perruque.org also gives access to the font design processes documented by the type designers themselves.

“A ‘homer’ [«perruque» in french] is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds [perruques]. […] this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. [Perruques] shed light on a high degree of ‘complicity’ between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy.” Michel Anteby, “Factory ‘homers’: Understanding a highly elusive, marginal, and illegal practice“, in Sociologie du travail, 45, 2003, p. 453.

The magazine is now published by Surfaces Utiles, a publishing house runned with a similar mindset, trying to publish parallelepiped books through these non-standard production methods.