Book 2.0 - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011

In conventional literary fiction, effective typography recedes. Grey rectangles of justified type are so familiar they are essentially invisible on the page, allowing the reader to slip into the world of the book unimpeded by the activity of reading. This article explores ways some novelists use unconventional typography as a literary device, visually interrupting the reader to make a specific point. A range of typographic devices are shown to effect pace, point of view, tone of voice, characterization and to imply ephemeral documents within novels. These typographic devices are illustrated with examples from a collection of novels including Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005), Joanthan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007). The article aims to illustrate ways authors have experimented with typographic devices to literary effect, and to encourage more experimentation with word-image interplay as a storytelling device.

In a poem towards the end of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, in 1860 entitled ‘Leaf of Faces’, Whitman explored a printer’s metaphor, the meaning of ‘faces’, comparing the expressive appearance of humans and that of type on the page. Within a poetic structure that resembles both a walk and leafing through a foundry specimen book, Whitman catalogues the faces he sees, describing a human parade, or roadside signs and billboards, labels, broadsides and book pages – descriptions that address emotional and spiritual qualities and never specify exactly whether they apply to human or type faces. As Karen Karbiener (2012) notes in her essay ‘Reading the Promise of Faces’: ‘His descriptions seldom involve physical appearance; race is never mentioned and gender rarely comes up.’ What interests the poet is the importance of physical appearance as an indicator of deeper meaning. In type, the shapes of the letters suggest a meaning independent of their use, a subliminal expressive power that can be read instantly, before the words form in the mind. His belief in phrenology – the then-popular study of the shape of the skull and its correlation to personality characteristics – may have led him to this idea. His employment in the printing and publishing trades from an early age – as a compositor, journalist, editor and publisher – informed a deep interest in the design and production of his books of poetry. Printers’ jargon often turns up in his work, as veiled double-entendres perhaps only explicable to other initiates of the trade.

This article is an extension of the arguments and examples offered in ‘Materia Prima, text-as-image’ (Calvert 2012), where the materiality of language was foregrounded, rather than its transparent role in communication. The claims of neutrality to content in ‘The Crystal Goblet’, made by Beatrice Warde, alongside ideas from various philosophical sources were contrasted with the work of concrete poets, artists and designers, whose free play with materiality in language upsets those relatively uncomplicated notions of transparency to content. The current article proposes that in the next stage of this argument, we might think of the materiality of language in terms of a kind of ‘event’, or ‘constellation’, in which the raw materials of language (whether writing/typography/speech) are fully mobilized and enacted. This performative stage, which harnesses the dynamic attributes of language, is grounded by reference to Deleuze’s theory of the event, as well as Adorno and Benjamin’s notion of ‘constellation’. Katherine Hayles, Villém Flusser and others are used to support the contention that we might think of materiality and performativity/gesture in language as a form of content. Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure is invoked as a way to describe a different space of interaction between the textual and the figural, one where the distinction between them is erased. Examples from art/design/typography are offered to support these points.

In the hierarchy of the international typographic canon, engraved lettering has not received the acknowledgement it deserves. This article amends the international typographic canon to include the engraved letter through demonstrating how engraved lettering has significantly influenced the evolution of typographic form. By examining four historical specimens of engraved printing, the author explains how engravers utilized materials and craft-oriented opportunities to deliver content that current trends in typography have all but forgotten. Four important works of engraved lettering will be discussed: Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid/The Great Mirror of Folly (1720?), A New Book of Cyphers (1726), George Bickham’s The Museum of Arts: or, The Curious Repository (1745?) and The Lincoln Crest & Monogram Album (c.late 1800s).

The letterpress broadsides of Lowell Bodger, an American artist active c.1980–2000, have been valued as demonstrations of so-called ‘pure’ typography or as examples of typography for typography’s sake. My article attempts to refute that narrow claim and establish their rightful status as works of fine art whose technical concerns are one aspect of a deeper, imaginative engagement with the condition of liminality – the sense of being ‘betwixt and between’, or caught between conflicting views, beliefs, identities. ‘Deleted/undeleted’ analyses the visual properties of the works as well as their idiosyncratic texts (most by the artist), and draws on archival materials such as published lectures, private notes and correspondence to document the artist’s creative engagement with issues of identity.

Why would a complex, often inaccessible early twentieth-century poem become ‘iPad App of the Week’ in the United States of America? Why would it warrant an editorial in the New York Times? Or garner the headline ‘The future of digital literature?’ on the front of the Sunday Times Culture Magazine? The answer may lie in the interactive experience of the poem that has brought Eliot’s words to life for a contemporary audience. Created for the iPad, rich media content, elegant typography and a spare, but deeply functional, user interface combine to form an intimate interactive reading experience that sets it apart from other electronic books. The iPad App of ‘The Waste Land’ (TWL App), was designed by the author in 2011, for its joint publishers – Touch Press and Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom. It presents the poem anew, as an interactive multimedia reading experience. The typographic design and presentation of the poem enable the reader to interactively explore the text and its meaning, and to simultaneously listen and watch audio and video performances while reading the text itself. The typography incorporates sound, motion, interactivity and navigation via touch-based interaction with the iPad tablet. The central design vision for the App was to maintain the poem text in its purest form at the heart of the reading experience. The New York Times review aptly captures this intent: ‘For all its accouterments, The Waste Land App honors the silence of the text itself, the silence that makes Eliot’s many voices in this poem so clearly audible’ (New York Times 2011). This article will examine how carefully crafted interaction design, typography and rich media content combine to create a distinctive screen-reading experience on the iPad. It will also demonstrate how a practice methodology for designing screen typography, which was developed during the author’s practice-based Ph.D. research, was applied to the design process of the The Waste Land App.

Internet necessitates and Unicode facilitates multilingual typography on a scale never seen before. As a result, multilingual typesetting, something that used to be an obscure academic specialism, suddenly sprung to the limelight. Since printing with movable type originated in Europe in a Latin-scripted environment, other scripts still tend to be treated as a complement to Latin script and their measurements normalized accordingly. The challenge that designers are facing is to create computer typography that does justice to all scripts and cultures, according to their own standards. This makes it all the more relevant to come to terms with Arabic.

The relationship between material, medium and message with respect to books has been a recurring source of discussion in graphic design. Such discussion punctuates the last 100 years: with divergent thoughts on the material resources of the book ranging from considering them as inert, equivalent to a neutral substrate that carries an imprinted message, to understanding them as a set of independently meaningful material properties possessed by the physical artefact. This article reviews such different appreciations of books and the relationship between materiality and meaning-making and reassesses them using a theoretical framework derived from cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. It suggests that both dematerialized and materialized understandings inaccurately describe the ways that meaning is made from books, and advances an account based on attention, iconicity and relevance to describe the background processing that results in dematerialized and materialized understandings at the phenomenological level.