It was November 2016 when I lost my home. Perhaps I was the one who chose to leave, or maybe home sent me away. In either case, it was due to a global epidemic called Fascism.
30 Strange Spoons is our most recent collaboration with writer Ece Temelkuran, author of How to Lose a Country: 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism, Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World, and Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century (2026), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-fiction. The book presents new writing by Ece with excerpts from Nation of Strangers, interspersed with letterpress images of the spoons she has been stealing as makeshift markers of her time in exile from Turkey. As Ece puts it, “The spoons are the mileposts of the unhomed self’s journey from disassociation to being connected again.” The main text runs along the bottom of each page throughout the book, interrupted with seven stories of of the individual spoons, titled with the city they were stolen in.
These stolen coffee spoons are proof of my life, evidence that I have lived the last ten years. They are also the timeline for the mutating homeless self from a state of being shrunken with fear to a self that learns how to begin living after being unhomed.
30 Strange Spoons developed out of an installation project of the stolen spoons at Betterpress Lab, Rome, exhibited in March 2026. The exhibit, Strange Spoons: Measuring the Unhomed Time, was a collaboration between Ece, Betterpress Lab, and DWRI Letterpress, and consisted of an installation of Ece’s stolen spoons, sculptural pieces of objects from Ece’s life, lace and rug work from Ece’s grandmother and great-grandmother, letterpress prints created both in Rome and in Providence, a new piece of music by Brian Eno created for the installation, and the 30 Strange Spoons book. Images from the exhibition are below.
The only home one can create is in others. Soon, our sole shelter will be each other. The home will be built of words — the promises we make to support one another. When everything dissolves, the only certainty will be the other people. That is the new home, my new self, and now there is time. It is only others who can give you your life, the self, and the time.
While confronting the brutality of our current moment, the book has a compact lightness to it, conveying the humor, honesty, and clarity of Ece’s voice as a collaborative antidote to the lonliness of our unhoming times. All of the books were printed letterpress at DWRI in two colors from polymer plates and many, many passes on Gmund Cotton New Grey text using a Poly 50 MAN Automat (an automatically-fed letterpress cylinder press manufactured in Nuremberg, Germany in 1954), with foil stamped covers, a foil stamped enclosure, and wrapped in a letterpress Lokta paper band. They are bound (under the watchful eye of Nikki Klein, below) in an accordion, which is contained in the binding, but opens up to 18 feet (6 meters) in length. It is printed in a signed and numbered edition of 250 copies.
30 Strange Spoons is available for $95-/80- € EUR at DWRI Letterpress (Providence), and will be shown at the Boston Art Book Fair (Boston) in November, 2026. It is available for view at the RISD Library Special Collections (Providence), Cynthia Sears Artists Book collection at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (Seattle), the MIT Libraries (Cambridge), among others, and will also be on exhibit this Fall at the Georgia Center for the Book in Decautr, GA and The Art of the Book in Rochester, NY. They are available for purchase directly from DWRI Letterpress, shipping nationally and internationally, via the links below.
Order Online Here
Details:
30 Strange Spoons: Measuring an Unhomed Time, $95- USD / 80- € EUR.
For pickup in person, or for shipping to the United States and Canada, you can order directly here.
For shipping international, please email for current rates specific to your location, or use the link above and select your country from the drop-down list. If you do not see your location listed, let us know and we can invoice the difference in international shipping separately, if needed.
Ece’s newest book, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century (truly beautiful and essential reading for our times) is available in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Holland, and many other countries.
You can follow Ece’s projects and writing via her Instagram, her monthly column in El Pais, and see some of our own ongoing print collaborations at The Linotype Daily (one recent example shown below). For wholesale inquiries, please reach out here.
Portfolio images of the Spoons books above by Rue Sakayama.
