I Mean You Know

by Warren Lehrer

Winner AIGA book award and Type Directors Club award. In Tate Gallery and many other collections. i mean you know takes place within a few hours of one day inside the minds of seven characters who co-inhabit the same building. This musical/theatrical setting juxtaposes disparate characters (sasha the artist, violone confined to a wheelchair speaks only through her violin, myron the mystic millionaire, disk jockey ace monroe, little tracy the toddler, angelica the house painter, and the chronically inebriated and unemployed trombonio) in various arrangements; solo, duo, trio, quartet, sextet, and septet. The book further developed my approach to using typography as a means of creating psycho/acoustic translations of voice and thought within the space/time capsule that is a book. The result functions as a book to be read quietly alone, read aloud, or used as a score for performance.

150 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Warren Lehrer is a writer and artist/designer known internationally as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His work explores the vagaries and luminescence of character, the relationships between social structures and the individual, and the pathos and absurdity of life. His books are acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page.

Lehrer has received many awards for his books and multimedia projects, including the Brendan Gill Prize, the Innovative Use of Archives Award, three AIGA Book Awards, The International Book Design Award, a Media That Matters Award, and grants and fellowships from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Rockefeller,
Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. Lehrer is a professor at the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, SUNY, and a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Together with his wife Judith Sloan, Lehrer founded EarSay in 1991, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. Over the last few years, he has been setting stories and text into animation, video, and interactive media. His latest novel, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, is on sale now.