At right: An example of the typeface Digital Monticello designed by Matthew Carter.

In this issue, PAW associate editor Kathryn Federici Greenwood writes about an oral history project centered in Princeton’s John-Witherspoon community, which few Princeton students ever see. Just on the other side of Nassau Street, the neighborhood has been home to generations of African Americans, including Paul Robeson, and has a rich history with many

connections to the University. Princeton students who interviewed community members said crossing over to the “other side of paradise” added an invaluable dimension to their educations.

Their oral history project had its roots in the Community-Based Learning Initiative, which was born in 1997 out of discussions with students who were eager to relate their service with the Student Volunteers Council, Community House, and other organizations to their classwork. This year, 200 students in 19 classes took part in C.B.L.I. projects.

The key is “to match the academic goals of a class with research a community organization can really use,” says C.B.L.I. coordinator Trisha Thorme. In a molecular biology class, Diseases in Children, students investigated childhood immunization rates in Princeton. In a writing seminar, The Politics of Personal Narrative, students interviewed veterans who wanted to pass on their stories to their children, or needed assistance getting veterans’ benefits. In Science, Technology, and Public Policy, a course in the Woodrow Wilson School, students examined the use of weapons inspections, such as the inspections conducted in Iraq, as a tool for monitoring disarmament. Their work will be used by the Coalition for Peace Action, a local nonprofit.

Behind Mark Bernstein ’83’s story about Princeton’s decades-long project to publish the papers of Thomas Jefferson is another tale, about typography. The 31st volume of the papers will be published in a new typeface, “Digital Monticello,” which has a lineage dating to America’s first type foundry, Binny & Ronaldson.

At the start of the Jefferson project, Princeton University Press commissioned a new font, inspired by one produced by Binny & Ronaldson in the early 1800s. As work on the papers progressed through the decades, printing technology changed from hot type to cold type to digital type, and the Press commissioned a modern version of Monticello for the digital age.

In February, Charles Creesy ’65, a former PAW editor who is now in charge of computing and publishing technology at the Press, and designer Matthew Carter unveiled this modern American typeface meant to evoke the era of Jefferson.

We were saddened to learn of the recent deaths of two Class Notes secretaries. A. Gilmore Flues ’26, who wrote the class column for nearly seven years, died March 1 at 99. A memorial is in this issue. Robert M. Levine *67, the Graduate School’s Class Notes secretary from June 1992 until last February, died April 1 of complications of brain cancer. “Ask Bob to do something, and he did it promptly, professionally, and unfailingly,” said Bob Schaffhauser *64, president of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni. Both men will be missed.