Watch the creation process unfold in an 8 minute video:

vowels The Vowels page spread plays with “Electric Company” standard shorts – the two talking mouths and words coming out – and there are silent “e” word changes: on the middle top left is “man” and on the top right page is “mane.” The page below is one of many where the arrangement on two […]

The Pictorial Webster’s is, in simplest terms, an artistic visual reference of what was important to 19th Century America.The 400 plus page volume is printed with the original wood engravings and copper electrotypes of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of the 19th Century; namely the 1859 American Dictionary of the English Language (the 1st illustrated dictionary in […]

The “Webster’s Project” started in the summer of 1996 before I began my second year studying at the North Bennet Street School in Boston. At my grandmother’s farm in Maryland, under my grandfather’s favorite reading chair, I discovered a tattered 1898 edition of the International Dictionary. I’d always wanted one of these big old Webster’s […]

The story begins with the engravings, themselves. You might imagine what a Hamilton Type Case (a big flat drawer in layman’s terms) would look like from this small sample. These images have already been identified — the post-it notes on their sides have the name and any other note I thought necessary on them. You […]

Johnny Carrera has been working with the images from the original 19th Century editions of Webster’s Dictionary since 1996. To create the artworks in this series, Carrera organized, cataloged, restored, reprinted, ruminated over, recreated, recontextualized his favorites from more than 12,000 original engravings created by Merriam Webster, most from the 19th and early 20th Century. […]