and images of Lothar Hoffman danced in their heads.....

I was dropping my daughters off at Mapleview Mall in Burlington, ON so they could go shopping on Sunday, and I decided to stay for a while and shop a bit, have lunch and kill some time rather than go home and have to do some pressing clean up thing I didn’t want to do in the first place, so I stayed. I shopped a bit at Sears and looked around at other stores, and off I went to the food court for a Thai lunch. Afterwards, I was sent on a mission by my wife to IKEA, to get a new catalog, which of course wasn’t in stock as yet, and as they are late getting into the mail system here, so I wasn’t getting one anyway.


It was so busy and the IKEA shuffle was in full swing. This is the slow moving somnambulistic shuffle done by Sunday IKEA visitors who seem to be looking at everything. They move in a drugged stupor waiting to be moved by a Swedish vision. I was not moved and didn’t want to do this, but was interested in a $1 cone, as a treat for me for going into this madness. Don’t get me wrong, I love IKEA, just not on weekends.

When I went to find the cone in the basement food vending counter, I found my friends Will Rueter and Maureen Steuart. We sat and discussed our building and book making and printmaking for a while. As Will was telling me about calligraphy, I brought up a calligraphy story about my old friend, who called me his second best friend, Lothar Hoffman. The look on their faces was priceless, and it was altogether a bit weird. It turned out that Detroit based, world renowned graphic designer and calligrapher Lothar Hoffman was an old friend of Will’s, who he had not seen in years (I haven’t seen him myself since 1989, but that Will had a dream featuring Lothar on Saturday night and here I was discussing him on Sunday!

Following studies in Berlin, Munich and Essen, Lothar Hoffmann graduated with a degree in Graphic Design before immigrating to the US in 1964. He has worked for major Detroit art studios and taught courses at CCS since 1972. Hoffmann has lectured and conducted workshops in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Madison, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Toronto, Ottawa and other cities. His work has been published in International Calligraphy Today, Lettering Arts in the 80s, 60 Alphabets, 3:16 and many other publications. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the US and in 11 foreign countries, including Russia, the UK, Israel, Japan and Germany. Hoffmann also served as chair of CCS' Graphic Design Department from 1984 to 1996.

In 1984 Lothar wanted to go to San Francisco to see a calligraphy show and he asked me as Dean of CCS in Detroit, to find money to support his venture. I told him I’d find the funds if he made a formal request in calligraphy so that in the end the request would be worth as much as the request would grant. You can see here a copy of that request, which was funded.