This year’s lettering walk will explore the East Side of Manhattan from 34th Street up through the 40s.

For Creative Week in New York Cit, Paul Shaw’s tour will include such iconic New York lettering venues as the Empire State Bulding, the Chanin Building, Tudor City, and the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. But it will also look at the mundane and often overlooked examples of lettering in the city such as door handles, house numbers, and manhole covers. There will be Gothic, Art Deco, and script letters; blackletter and classical roman capitals.

Paul Shaw is a designer and a design historian. He has been leading lettering tours of New York City neighborhoods for 10 years and of other cities, both here and in Italy, since 1997. As a designer he specializes in letterforms from calligraphy to type design. Paul has designed or co-designed 18 fonts, including Kolo, Donatello and Old Claude. As a historian he has written or lectured about Bartolomeo Sanvito, W.A. Dwiggins, Oswald Cooper, Frederic W. Goudy, George Salter, Phil Gruskin, Hermann Zapf and others.

Meeting place and itinerary will be emailed a few days in advance of the tour.