AustLit

'Over two years, writer Nick Gadd and his wife Lynne circled the city of Melbourne on foot, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way they uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. Soon after they completed the circle, Lynne passed away from cancer. Melbourne Circle is the story of their journey, a memoir, and a stunning meditation on personal loss.' (Publication summary)

'MARTIN KERN has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. When a local printer is found dead in his workshop, his body in the shape of an X, Martin and his co-investigator, journalist Lucy Tan, are drawn into a mystery that is stranger than anything they have encountered before. Someone is leaving typographical clues at the scenes of a series of murders.

'All the trails lead back to Pieter van Floogstraten, a Dutch design genius who disappeared without trace in the 1970s, and who has since been engaged in a mystical scheme to create the world’s most perfect font, which is concealed in locations around the globe. But is he really the killer, and how are the crimes connected to his secret font? In solving the mystery, Martin and Lucy may have to expose Martin’s hero as a psychopath.

'The main plot of the novel unfolds in Melbourne, while interleaved chapters set variously in a Tibetan monastery, on the plains of Peru, in London, Naples and Amsterdam, gradually reveal the story of Floogstraten in flashback. Other characters include a noir-style private font investigator, a typographical monk from the Renaissance, a Dutch prog rock group named I Am A Dolphin, and a collective of Italian typo-terrorists.

'This novel takes the reader into the arcane world of typographers and their typefaces, of symbols, swashes and glyphs, where the difference between a serif and sans serif could mean life and death.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When I arrived in Mildura and people heard I was into sign-writing, they immediately told me:

‘You’ve got to talk to Moose. He’s painted signs all over town for 40 years.’

‘He’s old school—refuses to work in digital.’

‘Lives in the old dairy in Merbein.’

‘Rides a Harley.’

‘You can find him playing his trumpet in the mall.’

'I had become interested in old signs—often known as ‘ghost signs’—a few years earlier. I loved the way they lingered in laneways or on the side of shops, sometimes more than a century old, whispering stories in faded paint. Coming across an old sign felt like finding a forgotten letter in a drawer, or a travel ticket tucked into a book.'  (Introduction)