In the little city of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a public art work-in-progress is unfolding daily on the cover of the local newspaper. Each day, for twenty-six straight weekdays, the front page of the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise will be dominated by a giant custom-designed letter of the alphabet. The letters are supplied by twenty-six different designers and typographers from around the world. Around that typographical centerpiece are stories connected to that letter. It’s sort of like Sesame Street meets Our Town.

See the current installments of The Alphabet below. 

The project, appropriately titled The Alphabet, is masterminded by visual artist and MacArthur Fellow Anna Schuleit Haber, who came up with the idea to embed herself as a visiting artist at the paper. “This is very special, the fact that this paper is still in operation in this small city,” Schuleit Haber tells Kurt Andersen. “It’s been in operation since 1838, which is older than The New York Times. I said, ‘What if we connect the arts with your day-to-day rhythm?’”

Fitchburg residents reading the Sentinel & Enterprise, featuring the art of Anna Schuleit Harbert

(Ariana Garcia)

Schuleit Haber had a few simple requirements for her project: it had to be longer than a day and had to have a beginning, middle, and an end as a series. The letters of the alphabet met her criteria. The alphabet is “the most unemotional series that everyone can agree on — a 5-year-old knows the alphabet and a 95-year-old knows it.” There was only one detail she would not budge on. “There were two or three crucial moments when they offered me page 3 instead and I said I wouldn’t do it at all,” she says. Page one is “the Holy Grail of the news.”

The project is responding to the predicament lots of small-town newspapers find themselves in, faced with declining readership and the loss of advertising revenue. “We’re at the end of the era of print,” Schuleit Haber explains. But, since the alphabet project started, she’s been hearing from locals who want to find the letters missing from their collection. “That’s exactly what I wanted,” she says. “I wanted to create an urgency to collect the paper. There’s a rarity to the paper version which in the end lives a whole other life than something that’s on the web.”

Copies of the Sentinel & Enterprise on sale featuring the The Alphabet

(Ariana Garcia)

The first seven days of The Alphabet:
(Click to enlarge)