The Most Difficult Letter
May 30–June 28, 2026
Print Gallery Tokyo
Ř is the letter every Czech child battles before they can graduate from a cute kid to a fully functional human. It is a letter and a sound (phoneme and grapheme) that exists almost nowhere else, a tiny hook that can trip you mid-sentence, and the reason many of us spent hours in speech therapy repeating “tři sta třicet tři stříbrných stříkaček.” Later in life, the struggle continues: ř is avoided in thousands of fonts online, quietly replaced by a .notdef box because the designer didn’t want to spend time drawing it.
This exhibition at Print Gallery Tokyo treats ř with the affectionate frustration it deserves. Part typographic study and part childhood flashback, it looks at how “the most difficult letter” has shaped us as designers and as people.
The exhibition is organized by Anežka Minaříková & Marek Nedelka (Letter Books), together with Hiro Abe (Print Gallery), and is held under the auspices of the Czech Centre Tokyo.
Reception: Saturday, May 30, 6–8pm
Letter Books announces an open call for Letters as Characters: An Anthology of Short Stories. We are seeking short fiction where language, writing systems, letterforms, or typography are central to the narrative.
The stories may be poetic, speculative, surreal, humorous, or grounded in everyday life, or something else entirely. The call is genre-agnostic: fiction, creative non-fiction, research-based storytelling, horror, romance, sci-fi, or anything in between.
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools, 384 pages, 110×180 mm, Fourth edition, 300 copies, ISBN: 978-80-11-03522-8
National Letters is the first book published by Letter Books. National Letters travels through the episodes of the past in which letters, languages, and scripts played an important role in creating nation-states and national identities. Through four case studies (Turkey, Israel, Georgia, Ethiopia), the main body of the book explores four languages and nations which were each, against all odds and for various reasons, able to develop and maintain their writing system throughout their entire history, up to the founding of their nation-state.
Edited and Designed by Marek Nedelka
Contributions and texts by Rusudan Amirejibi–Mullen, Ivo T. Budil, Birol Caymaz, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Marek Nedelka, William Safran, Emmanuel Szurek
Postcard letterings by Jan Horčík, Seb McLauchlan, Anežka Minaříková, Jan Novák
Translations by Ian Mikyska and Sam Mackay
Copy-editing and proofreading by Aren Ock
Co-published with UMPRUM (Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague)
Mysterious Letters: Language, Science, and the Voynich Manuscript, 168 pages, 110×180 mm, First edition, 300 copies, ISBN: 978-80-11-03523-5
Mysterious Letters is a private investigation into the unsolved mysteries surrounding the Voynich Manuscript. The manuscript is considered to be a “UFO of a book world” as it was written in an unknown language and script, in an unknown location in the 15th century. The book features interviews and essays from various experts in different fields, all pondering the question of what it means to encounter something that remains beyond our comprehension in a world where all information and knowledge seem to be readily available.
Edited and Designed by Anežka Minaříková & Marek Nedelka
Essays by Anežka Minaříková, Arnošt Vašíček
Interviews and Conversations with Ivan Zelinka, Vladimír Matlach, Barbora Anna Janečková, and Reed Johnson
Copy-editing and proofreading by Aren Ock
Letter Books is a publishing imprint founded by Marek Nedelka in 2019, focused on language, writing systems, and typography.
If you are interested in purchasing books for your bookshop or want to inquire about workshops and presentations, please feel free to contact me at info@letter-books.com or Instagram.
Past events:
Letter Books as an Extension of a Design Practice
Presentation at Pratt Institute
November 2024
The Book as a UFO (Mysterious Letters)
Presentation at GHMP Art Book Fair 2024, Prague
September 2024
Mysterious Letters: Language, Science, and the Voynich Manuscript
Launch and Presentation at Molasses Books, New York
November 2023
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools
Presentation at Type@Cooper, New York
November 2023
Imagining Letters: Languages and Scripts as Emancipatory Tools
Presentation at ENSBA, Lyon
March 2021
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools
Presentation at Printed Matter, New York
April 2020
National Letters: Languages and Scripts as Nation-building Tools
Launch and Presentation at Inga, Chicago
March 2020