Esther Cohen

For a while now I have collected the handwriting of strangers in various forms.  This started when I was very young.  My mother was a flea marketer and thrift shop fan, and I would accompany her on her frequent explorations for everything.  Need played no role.  We weren’t looking for practical objects that could do something specific.  Instead we both searched, both of us, for objects that evoked, that had something elusive, something mysterious, something magical. I found out years later that Robert Graves referred to this quality intrinsic to some objects and missing from others as Baraka.

It took absolutely no convincing for me to become enthralled with the details of other people’s lives and the objects the things they used to live. And their words.  I’ve always been drawn to other people’s words.  Collecting postcards was my beginning – not for the pictures, but for the words strangers wrote, and the way their handwriting looked – elegant, frantic, careful, indiscreet.  I loved the combination of hands and words, and still do.  What people write and how they write it has always been of my obsessions. The messages they wrote to other people  they loved and didn’t. What they said.

 A subset of my postcard collection was a group of cards with hand drawn x-s on the postcard’s front saying I Live Here or I Was Here or We Were Right Here.  This collection has arrows pointing to places, with no other descriptions necessary.

 A while ago I started buying books that readers annotated – writing what they thought about what they read.  I found books in used bookstores that were personally annotated, and those notes were often as interesting as the Famous Author’s prose.