Stone Butch Blues Book

Graphic design and typesetting for the Swedish translation of Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinburg.

Translated by: Ylva Emel Karlsson

Published by: Dock Haveri, Stockholm.

Distributed by: Page 28, Malmö.

Dearest Reader,

As a graphic designer, I come into a book project quite late on in the process but it has been a joy for me to see and hear about Ylva's process of making sense of and shaping the Swedish version of this text, to honour and preserve Feinberg's words. I wanted to do the same. I wanted the design to reflect the weight of the words in this book. The dark cover aims to mimic this in its blackened, stone-like form. The worn leather is a reference to Rocco's old jacket that Jess gets from Edna. It is a suit of armour. The leather jacket photographed on the front and inside of the cover is my own. A 90s racing jacket, the first leather jacket I ever owned. Someday I will pass it on to the next queer youth to carry on this legacy. When you unfold the flaps of the cover, you can see the inside of the jacket, a reflection of the intimacy and care of this story.

The title on the front is an ode to the original 1993 edition of Stone Butch Blues. The font used on the spine and for the headings inside the book is called “Black Trans Lives Matter”. It is a protest font by BeOakly constructed from photographs of protest signs held at the Brooklyn Liberation March in June 2020 at the Brooklyn Museum. The event was organised by Black trans organisations @theokraproject @mpjinstitute @glits_inc @forthegworls and @btfacollective. The font was created to honour and celebrate Black trans lives each time it is used. The page numbers are set in the font Chandler42. A font that references the old letterpress fonts that Jess worked with in the printing houses. The uneven offset edge on the pages is intended to mimic the imperfections of the printing process and is also a way for me to play with queering the form and avoiding straight lines. I have made the margins wider than in a regular book format so that you will have space to fill them with all your thoughts, reflections and notes. I hope you have gotten as much out of this book as I did when I put its text on these pages. I want to leave you with a final quote from the book, a passage that I had in mind when I was working on the design process: "At work, when everyone else is at lunch, I’ve been typesetting all the history I’ve found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That’s what I want to leave behind, Ruth—the history of this ancient path we’re walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity." (page 359).

Love & Resistance,

Rasmus Eo Clarke

October 2024