Layering the Print Novel: Handwriting and Material Artifacts in J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S.

In August 2013, the American film production company Bad Robot released a cryptic video trailer of a strange man arriving in a shore in the dark, “knowing nothing of himself.” This was enough to create hype for the unidentified project that film producer and director J.J. Abrams had in the pipeline. The obscurity was unveiled a few weeks later by a second trailer, where it becomes clear that Abrams and author Doug Dorst are collaborating on a book project, S. (Abrams and Dorst 2013), with a typewriter figuring prominently in the trailer’s frames.