Jon Selikoff passed away in his sleep on Thanksgiving Day, 2017.
I reconnected with him eight months later.
Like all great cosmic coincidences, this one took place in an old industrial building in Fort Lauderdale. The Complimentary Spouse and I were dodging the rain one evening at an open house for a graphics art workshop. That’s when I saw a Selikoff Collection sign on an old wooden cabinet.
“Do you think that’s for Jon Selikoff?” I asked the Complimentary Spouse.
“Dunno,” he said. “But how many Selikoffs can there be?”1
It could have something to do with my old college friend—he went into graphic design after graduation and specialized in letterpress. But what was it a collection of? Why was it here, not New Jersey, where he lived and worked? And, well, what were the chances?
I explained the situation to someone there. She said the collection was indeed Jon’s. “Would you like to see it?” She asked.
“Yes. Please.”
What she showed me made me realize how many people Jon reached through his art and example—and grateful for the small but meaningful connection he and I maintained after college.
The Connection
I don’t know exactly when I last saw Jon in person, but it was a long time ago.2 I have memories of him being serious at times, and a goofy nerd at others. He’d get down at times, like we all do, but overall, I remember him being good-natured. And he loved music and design.
We met at the student paper. As managing editor, he had a meticulous eye for layout and had a knack for the analog tools that were slowly giving way to Macs and LaserWriters. He could do more with a waxer and X-Acto knife than the rest of us could manage with QuarkXPress.
Some of my favorite newsroom memories are of watching him obsess over the tiniest details. Everything had to fit just right. If we had too many classified ads, he’d perform magic with margins, kerning, and leading. If we had too few, he and I and some others would write fake ones till 3 a.m. They were ridiculous. And they were perfect.3
We weren’t close after college, but we stayed loosely connected as part of a loose network of student newspaper friends around the country. Facebook made staying in touch easier; without it, I’m sure a lot of ties (including the one between Jon and me) would have withered completely.
The Reorientation
Jon once taught me how to flip quotation marks on a pasted-up page—not in software,4 but in physical space. If the marks were going the wrong direction, he’d slice out the tiny punctuation, rotate them on the tip of the blade, and tape them back down the right way.
This was typical Jon. He didn’t just sweat the details. He wanted others to sweat them too. He believed great design, right down to a single character, was worth the extra effort. He made you believe it too.
Years later, in a different newsroom, I flipped quotation marks by hand, just as Jon had shown me, and the production team looked at me as if I were a monkey performing a heart transplant. I, a grunt in the newsroom, had just performed advanced design surgery.
I haven’t flipped a quote in decades,5 but Jon’s with me every time I cringe at straight quotes, improperly used hyphens and dashes, and—the most heinous of all—two spaces after a period.
Jon didn’t just give us design tips. He set a standard of excellence, and provided us with the passion and practical skills to achieve it.
The Collection
Jon left behind an idle studio with two vintage presses and several cabinets filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of large wooden letterpress blocks.
These were high-value items for fine art printmakers, so there was plenty of interest in the presses, blocks, and wooden cabinets. But Jon’s family wanted to keep everything together, instead of seeing his legacy picked over and taken apart.
IS Projects, the workshop Britt and I happened upon one drizzly night, offered not just to buy everything, but to maintain it as a collection in a place where it would be used, loved, and cared for.
That’s what I saw.
The Recollection
A collection I didn’t know existed. In a place I never would have thought to look — even if I’d known it was out there. From a person whose life loosely connected to mine.
Was Jon sending me a sign?
Of course not. C’mon people. Do you really believe he’d leave me a message in oversized block letters eight months after he died?
He’d already sent one—years earlier. I just didn’t realize it till that day in Fort Lauderdale.
In 2010, after New York passed marriage equality, Jon began printing Marriage Is So Gay artwork. I think this was around the time he went all-in on letterpress, so it could have been one of his first big projects.
He sent Britt and me a Marriage Is So Gay print. White paper. Bold block letters. Rainbow-swirled ink. Expert use of negative space.
In Fort Lauderdale, I realized Jon had made ours with the Vandercook press, not the Heidelberg one. That means he created each print individually. He placed the blocks by hand. Set it manually in the press. Inked the roller—in this case, with a swirl of different inks. Inserted a sheet of paper. Cranked the cylinder by hand. Carefully removed the wet print. Set it somewhere to dry.
I later learned we weren’t the only ones. Jon sent prints over the years to other people he hadn’t seen in years but who were still part of our loosely bound online community.
The Resistance. The Persistence.
Even when his health was failing, Jon used letterpress to draw attention to social issues he cared about. When “Nevertheless, She Persisted” became a rally cry in early 2017, Jon designed a Resist & Persist image.
Of course, everyone clamored for T-shirts. Britt and I got ours just in time to wear at the LGBTQ Equality March for Unity and Pride in Washington, D.C., that summer.
Resist & Persist wasn’t just a political statement. It was a personal one. He had been diagnosed with ALS earlier and sharing his story with friends on Facebook. When he made this image, he was finding it harder to move and speak. He was honest about what he was dealing with, yet pushed back as much as he could.
He resisted and persisted with life and art until, one day, he couldn’t.
The Reflection
Thirty or so years ago, Jon handed me an X-Acto knife and showed me how to make the world a little better, one character at a time.
Years after his death, he’s still sharing his passion and skills.
In Fort Lauderdale, Jon Selikoff’s legacy gives artists the tools they need to make the world better one character, one page, one message, one movement at a time. I can’t wait to see how far they’ll go.
The Carefully Designed Footnotes
- Not many. Jon’s last name—which is very similar to mine—is exceptionally rare. If you have a last name beginning with S and ending with -off in the United States, you’re one in a million. Actually, more than a million. I can show you the math. ↩
- If it was in the newsroom, there were probably flying toasters on the screens. ↩
- To this day, no one has inquired about my hovercraft full of eels. ↩
- If you’re using a Mac, Option + ] gives you an opening quote, and Option + [ gives you an opening quotation mark. Add Shift for the closing corresponding marks. If you’re using Windows, you’re basically screwed, because Microsoft takes a Walgreens-like strategy of putting everything you need behind a locked case, so you have to run all over the store (or, in this case, run through Google) to find someone who has the key (in this case, keyboard domination) for the thing you want. ↩
- Pour one out of the lost days of waxers, sizing wheels, blue pens, and pica poles. ↩