The Eraser Family

When you’re a child, you believe everything has a soul. You understand that objects should be treated with respect, and should never be tossed aside and be forgotten. I believed that objects got lonely, sad and hoped to believe that they led lives once the lights were turned out.

As a kid, I had a few toys, but it always felt like they were a random oddball collection—of lesser toy brands and objects that were appropriated to be playthings.

Stationary was of no exception, particularly stationary that was in the shapes of animals–erasers that perched on the top of your wooden pencil as you wrote, but those places could construe the pencil perchers to be functional objects, which is no good, especially if you gave them names and personalities.

The sophisticated fox’s name is Sasha, the mild mannered porcupine, Godfrey, and Felix is the handy-dandy beaver. They number nine in total, and dwell inside the back of a pink wicker duck who wears a cloak of green felt. Purchased from the Schoolastic Book Fairs that came to my elementary school every year, they enacted the stories and dramas my other playthings could not adequately portray as a collective community.

Today, they sit visibly at the front of one of the shelves in my closet. They join the ancient stuffed animals and space-consuming Harry Potter books, their background, an old grade school painting. There, they’ve become a part of a larger family, and dwell with others from their era.

Over the years, I’ve been battling myself to purge the unnecessary and irrelevant things I’ve amassed, but it never occurs to me to get rid of the things on that shelf, and I’ll probably hold onto the figures that live in the plastic duck as long as I can. An oddball family, where the bear would get along with the woodpecker and beaver, while the porcupine couple would get along with the fox couple, they are the realization of a kind of utopia for me where every animal could get along without conflict.

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This is the text I will be working with for my next Typography assignment. It is inspired by other meaningful objects written about in Design Observer–objects people keep around for one reason or another that may or may not be understood by other people.

The task is to arrange just the text over a two page spread in a way that over time, reveals the story. Below, is what my in class exercise work looked like at the end of class.

If you were paying attention to the story, and looked back at the image above, there are actually more than nine of them, and there are more objects that belong to this ‘family’, but for simplicity’s sake for my Type assignment, I was referring specifically the ones who are in the forms of animals and the ones where you could place on top of a pencil. I am also unfortunately missing Lydia the woodpecker

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