The Vernacular Returns: on Alastair Johnston’s Book the Trip

For this post in the current series on books, Daniel Elkind reviews Alastair Johnston’s Book the Trip. Daniel’s thoughts are accompanied by some of Alastair’s favourites from the 700 photos that straddle the globe and proliferate across the publication’s 236 pages. Their captions are taken from the book itself.The Vernacular Returns: on Alastair Johnston’s Book the TripBy Daniel ElkindThe work of publisher, photographer, designer, and all-around polymath Alastair Johnston has never been centred merely on the typographic. Spanning semiotics, anthropology, nostalgia, and the myriad variety of manifestations that comprise the cultural Vernacular, Johnston’s projects always amount to a personal exploration of what the ancient Greeks meant by technology: craft, skill, applied artistic expression, the artefactual. His latest, Book the Trip: A Tour of Folk Lettering Worldwide, is no exception. The culmination of more than four decades of travel and patient collecting, this ramble through the…