Just What Is Re(un)Covered?

“Why did you rub the lamp that contains me?” 🧞

Joe and Bethany cover what you’ll be hearing on Re(un)Covered, what is archival recovery, some feminist history, and how knowing a more inclusive past can help us make a better future. Also: dinosaurs 🦖🦕🐓. 

Season 1 of Re(un)Covered talks about women who designed typefaces in the hot metal type era (late 1800s to 1950s). For each episode Bethany and Joe will talk about what we know (and don’t know) about one or two of these women type designers, then Bethany will chat with a special guest about the designer and/or the episode’s broader theme. If you want to see hot metal type in action, Monotype and Linotype technologies are good places to start.

PSA: everything important has not been digitized. Don't be fooled.

References  (we love citing sources here) 📚

Foundational research on women metal type designers:

• Club of Printing Women of New York, Antique, Modern & Swash: A Brief History of Women in Printing (1955)
• Laura Webber, "Women Typeface Designers" (MA thesis, RIT, 1997)
• Gerda Breuer and Julia Meer, eds, Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 (Jovis, 2012)
• Alphabettes, “Women in Type Bibliography” (2020)
• Yulia Popova, How many female type designers do you know? I know many and talked to some! (Onomatopee, 2020)
• Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie, and Dr. Helena Lekka, Women in Type (2018–2021)
• Lauren Elle DeGaine, "A Woman’s Type: Early Women Type Designers in 20th-Century Book History," (MA thesis, University of Victoria (B.C.), 2021)

Also props to these folks for their ideas about how history works, archival gaps:

• For critical fabulation as a concept, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. 
• Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Northwestern, 2020)
• Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, 2005)

Episode credits
Creator and Producer: Bethany Qualls
Editor: Joe DeGrand
Original episode artwork: Trifoxatops aka Jenna Mauro
Social Media Whisperer: Elizabeth Giardina
Music: "Sneaky Feet" by geoffharvey

Transcript

Re(un)Covered Podcast

Season 1, Episode 0: Just What Is Re(un)Covered?

Release date: 5 October 2025

Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved. This text may not be published online or distributed without written permission. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

 [intro music]

00:00:08:19 - 00:00:13:12

Joe

Here we are. Episode zero. Damn it! It's finally happening.

00:00:13:13 - 00:00:43:12

Bethany

So I'm Bethany Qualls, and I am the producer creator, and maker for Re(un)Covered. And I am a teacher. I'm a researcher. I'm a writer. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is looking into the things that we think we already know, finding stuff that maybe has been overlooked, and then seeing how putting that in conversation with often the now or what we thought we knew changes the story.

00:00:43:14 - 00:01:02:01

Joe

I'm Joe DeGrand, I'm the editor for Re(un)Covered. I'm a documentary filmmaker and documentary editor. Most days I edit all the sounds on the show. And Bethany, what is this show? What are we doing here? Why have you summoned me here?

00:01:02:03 - 00:01:02:21

Bethany

Like a genie?

00:01:02:23 - 00:01:05:05

Joe

Why did you rub the lamp that contains me?

00:01:05:11 - 00:01:43:00

Bethany

We uncovered is coming from this idea of like, when we go back to the archives. Often what we find changes conventional narrative and history. So, for example, I spend most of my time in literature and there's the feminist archival recovery movement of the 1970s and 80s. Scholars went and like literally went into libraries and looked at old books and found all this work by women that had just, like, been suppressed or forgotten or deliberately ignored, and brought those back to light and published new editions.

00:01:43:00 - 00:02:06:15

Bethany

And that changed some of the traditional stories that were being told about, like, you know, what is great literature? And it turns out it's not just written by straight white men. So now you can't say like, well, there are no women writers before 1850, because that's just not true. And we have a lot of evidence. And so you have to have people of color, you have to have women, you have to have queers.

00:02:06:15 - 00:02:12:07

Bethany

You have to have these other voices. You can't pretend like they didn't exist because.

00:02:12:07 - 00:02:12:16

Joe

Exactly.

00:02:12:17 - 00:02:20:02

Bethany

It's become more public in our current era. There's this idea that, like, everything that's important has been digitized, and that's just not true.

00:02:20:03 - 00:02:20:19

Joe

Absolutely.

00:02:21:00 - 00:02:33:12

Bethany

And there's a lot of material that is not available online. And if we think that everything is available through the internet, we're actually missing a lot of that archival and historical stuff.

00:02:33:12 - 00:02:36:08

Joe

We’re actually missing most things.

00:02:36:09 - 00:02:38:10

Bethany

Most, actually, of human knowledge is not digitized.

00:02:38:12 - 00:03:09:05

Joe

Yeah, I remember I saw some infographic that was talking about like, you know, like, what is the true volume of music that's on a Spotify or a Tidal or, you know, YouTube music or whatever. You know, the library of Spotify seems infinite to me. But, you know, when you actually look at it in regards to the totality of music that has been recorded, it's actually just like a drop in the bucket.

00:03:09:07 - 00:03:34:13

Joe

And, you know, thinking that because we can now digitize everything, that means that everything is going to be freely available and accessible to people is just simply not the case. And it takes like real skill and real dedicated people to go into physical archives and dig around and see what jumps out and then bring it to bear.

00:03:34:15 - 00:03:58:18

Bethany

So I want people to sort of get a sense of the different things that we can find in the archives and in the past, and how those connect with us right now. And how they can help shape a future that's a little more inclusive or a little more comprehensive, if nothing else. And so for this first season, we are thinking about typography and design.

00:03:58:20 - 00:04:19:11

Bethany

Design shapes how we absorb information. If you think about like a badly, a really ugly poster versus like a beautiful poster, like which one do you remember better and so good design often is seen as something invisible. You don't notice good design, it's just there. And so women's work in good design is in sort of doubly invisible.

00:04:19:13 - 00:04:50:13

Bethany

The first season is all about women who design typefaces in this early metal type era. So this is starting in the late 1800s, going to the mid 1900s, when Linotype and Monotype machines made typesetting more of a mechanized process instead of putting everything out by hand, which is how it had been done for literally centuries, the design norms that are sort of being solidified in that time are still with us today, even though we're looking at things on screens.

00:04:50:13 - 00:05:22:18

Bethany

The fact that we think headlines should look a certain way or, you know, what a paragraph should look like, stuff like that. So there's a continuity in what things kind of look like, but what's really fascinating here is that there are all kinds of women doing work in this field. But as with so many other areas, women's work was ignored or erased when we think about these grand narratives, I got into this through working with, Letterform Archive, which is a really cool spot here in San Francisco.

00:05:22:20 - 00:06:18:18

Bethany

That is a place that has all sorts of things from like a cuneiform tablet to things from last week, about letterforms in all of their forms. And I was volunteering there. They've been having a lot of requests for early type materials by women. They've been doing typography education ever since they opened in 2015. And so I got funding as a Mellon Public Scholar to do a project with them in 2021 to basically lay the groundwork for what do they own that's early type materials by women, then sort of what is out there so that there can be this online, freely accessible digital resource that sort of synthesizes everything about women and metal type design. There have been research projects that people like Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie have done about women who work behind the scenes at Monotype. There's a 1997 master's thesis by Laura Weber that's like a foundational piece of work.

00:06:19:00 - 00:07:02:09

Bethany

There's a blog post and resource lists from Alphabettes. Women and metal type, from the metal type era, show up in histories of women and graphic design. Yulia Popova wrote a book published in 2021 that gives a very brief overview of most of the known women. And then Lauren Elle DeGaine, who shows up in a later episode of this series, defended a master's thesis on this very topic in September 2021, and she had a WordPress site that had notes that were really helpful for me. We're going to have a person or two who is sort of like the focus of the episode. You and I will have a chat about what we know about their work, their lives. Some people we literally know 2 or 3 things about. Some people we know, like a very long biography.

00:07:02:10 - 00:07:31:07

Bethany

We have a lot of examples of the work. And then I will have a chat with somebody who is connected either to that figure or what that figure did to sort of dive more into things like, you know, what is it when you think about influence or how did how did modernity like, like mid-century modern as an idea? Like, where does that come from? And what does that reacting to and where does that go next?

00:07:31:09 - 00:07:44:08

Joe

You know, Bethany, archival recovery. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, to the point where people say, what is archival recovery even mean anymore? The word has lost its meaning.

00:07:44:09 - 00:07:46:03

Bethany

Does it get thrown around these days?

00:07:46:03 - 00:08:04:15

Joe

Everyone's saying it. So I wanted to hear if you were to define archival recovery, or how would you explain the process of archival recovery to someone who maybe doesn't think about the Dewey Decimal System a lot?

00:08:04:16 - 00:08:13:00

Bethany

Well, Joe, most archives use the Library of Congress system. So Joe, archival recovery is like dinosaurs.

00:08:13:05 - 00:08:14:02

Joe

00:08:14:04 - 00:08:15:20

Bethany

That's not what you expect to me to say is it.

00:08:15:21 - 00:08:19:21

Joe

No. How is archival recovery like dinosaurs?

00:08:19:23 - 00:08:41:17

Bethany

I've been working on this. So. Dinosaurs existed. We're just going to take that as a given. They've been extinct for like 65 million years, something like that. Right? And so there are a lot of things we don't know about dinosaurs. And what we think about dinosaurs has changed over time. When I was a kid, like, dinosaurs, you know, had scales and like, horns.

00:08:41:17 - 00:09:00:12

Bethany

And there was there was the land before time, and there was the Brontosaurus and the T-Rex and the triceratops and stuff like that. Right. And now dinosaurs look very different. Because there has been more research done and people are like, maybe they had feathers, which like, clearly chickens are dinosaurs. Like, this is very obvious.

00:09:00:12 - 00:09:04:09

Joe

Every day you see a little bird, you just saw a little dinosaur.

00:09:04:11 - 00:09:22:16

Bethany

We will never actually know 100% what dinosaurs looked like, how they lived, what they were. Because that's just not that's not recoverable. But our understanding of them changes and evolves over time. What dinosaurs were does not change, it's just our perception of them.

00:09:22:18 - 00:09:24:03

Joe

Oh, I like that.

00:09:24:05 - 00:09:38:21

Bethany

And so history, more broadly speaking, is the same. Like what happened, happened. But how it's interpreted always changes over time. You know, there's this very cliche thing that victors write history, which is often true.

00:09:39:03 - 00:09:44:11

Joe

That's why we write about the dinosaurs, not the dinosaurs writing about dinosaurs, because we f[BLEEP]ing won.

00:09:44:11 - 00:09:46:02

Bethany

Also, we have opposable thumbs.

00:09:46:07 - 00:09:47:12

Joe

Details, details.

00:09:47:14 - 00:10:06:02

Bethany

The reason I call the podcast Re(un)Covered is because it's both about recovery work, so recovery and things that are there, but also things that are uncovered where it wasn't like they were always covered up. They were they're out in the open, just like dinosaurs, for quite some time.

00:10:06:04 - 00:10:10:05

Joe

It's the kind of idea of discovering something that's already been discovered. 

00:10:10:05 - 00:10:35:22

Bethany

One of the other things I want to do, sort of broadly in the show, is recognize that invisible work of archives, the amount of energy and effort that goes into making things preserved so that the future can see them is really huge. So there are people who have done a lot of work, in this space. Saidiya Hartman is someone whose ideas about critical fabulation are really important.

00:10:36:00 - 00:11:01:23

Bethany

I've been really influenced by other scholars like Jenny Sharpe and Ian Baucom, who have been dealing with how do we think about history, where there's literally no record of the thing. Things that are written down are seen as more authoritative than things that are spoken. Yeah. And that right there has really influenced what counts as history, what counts as truth, what counts as authenticity?

00:11:02:01 - 00:11:16:21

Bethany

How do you also make space for those unknown, those known unknowns like and just recognize, like here is the space we can try our best. We can acknowledge that it exists, but like, we'll never be able to fill that gap. And I think that's just as important as gap filling.

00:11:16:21 - 00:11:18:07

Joe

Yeah. Absolutely.

00:11:18:09 - 00:11:20:00

Bethany

So dinosaurs.

00:11:20:01 - 00:11:20:14

Joe

Dinosaurs.

00:11:20:14 - 00:11:22:06

Bethany

Archives. Feathers.

00:11:22:08 - 00:11:24:06

Joe

Not scales. Feathers.

00:11:24:08 - 00:11:29:21

Bethany

Dude, there might have been warm blooded ones too. Like, I was like, why not?

00:11:29:23 - 00:11:31:15

Joe

What? I’m not up on my dinosaur research.

00:11:31:16 - 00:11:32:13

Bethany

Neither am I.

00:11:32:13 - 00:11:41:03

Joe

Stop everything we need to. We need a dino podcast. Scratch out all the work we've done for the last couple months. We're pivoting hard to the Dino podcast.

[outro music]