Since arriving from Canada with his wife Elsa in in 1979, no one has been more identified with Manhattan’s unique Lower East Side culture than artist, activist, gallerist and archivist Clayton Patterson.
The Seven-Letter Word Game is a playful departure from his previous books. As an editor and publisher, he has marshalled scores of writers to compile large, richly-detailed histories of his Lower East Side neighborhood, such as the three-volume Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side and Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side.
The Seven-Letter Word Game is something completely different, a gallery of his mysterious, whimsical hand-drawn sigils. He explains them this way:
“The Seven-Letter Word Game is a game made up of drawings that contain seven letters. The letters are always the same. The letters spell a word. The word is always the same. The letters are only used once. It is possible there are mistakes in these drawings. It is possible there are mistakes in these drawings. See if you can discover the word. See if you can find any mistakes.”
As different as this slim volume is from his other books, The Seven-Letter Word Game is just as connected to the Lower East Side. For years his neighbors, mostly Hispanic, came by his Essex Street storefront to have him take their pictures in front of his richly-graffitied door. Before giving them their photos, he often signed them with a Seven-Letter symbol. The game for them was to guess what the word was. “Since the seven letters were always the same, my game was to keep developing different images.”
In The Seven-Letter Word Game they march by alphabetically, 111 charming images, from Airplane through Giraffe to Masked Man and Siamese Cat to WWII Machine Gun. All spell the same word. See if you can guess what it is. -Publisher
