SerifOrSans

Graphic design?

Each of these larger letters is composed of several smaller letters. So the ‘F’ is made up of uppercase F’s, etc. From The Advertiser’s Gazette, late 1860s.

As I was looking at my UPS InfoNotice® this morning, it occurred to me that I know nothing about the history of form design. Sue Walker has written brilliantly on amateur typography, so I have to wonder if she or one of her colleagues has researched the collision of handwriting and typography in everyday documents.

The rare books collection at Columbia has several folders’ worth of patent applications filed by the American Type Founders, and these are some of the most interesting forms I’ve ever seen. I have to assume that these typographers, more accustomed to creating forms than filling them out, felt compelled to toy with the format of the application by injecting a degree of pomp and humor into the text fields. Some pictures are pasted below. Whoever filled out these forms for James Conner and Georg Giesecke took the opportunity to simulate decorative lettering (used in other sections of the form) in the portion of the form stating the object of the patent.

Henry Lewis Bullen (1857-1938) was an American printer as well as the librarian and archivist of the American Type Founders Company (ATF). Bullen wrote several articles, most notably a series entitled, “Discursions of a Retired Printer,” which was published in the Inland Printer trade journal from 1906 onward. Of particular significance is Bullen’s comprehensive knowledge and meticulous assembly of materials on printing history for ATF. This collection was sold to Columbia University upon the financial collapse of ATF during the 1930s, and the bulk of these materials were moved from the Jersey City factory to the Upper West Side.

In 1912, Bullen published an article called “The Psychology of Printing Types” in the trade journal, The Printing Art. What I find interesting about this article is his assertion that the appearance of letterforms has a psychological influence on their users, even at the national level. Rather than suggesting that typographic forms are symptomatic of national or cultural psychology, he claims that it is the forms themselves which induce psychological tendencies on a broad scale. Bullen writes:

“The theory that letter models have a psychological influence on their users was advanced a few months ago by the present writer in an exposition of the radical differences between the solitary geometrical roman letter design, commonly used in occidental countries, and the great variety of cursive letters used in oriental countries. All oriental alphabets have an unvariable cursive model. None of them lend themselves to decorative effects. While most of them are graceful, none afford scope to the designer; seemingly fluid, they are actually unyielding. They fitly typify the oriental civilization, which, like their alphabets, had become stereotyped long before the invention of typography, and have remained practically unchanged ever since. Opposed to these numerous cursive letters is the solitary roman letter model, structurally more severe and less graceful, seemingly less pliant, but actually more expressive; capable of an endless gamut of expression from extreme dignity to the vulgar comic. The roman letter is exactly typical of the ever-changing, ever-progressing occidental civilization; and probably the models of the character, by means of which the occidentals have been educated for centuries, have had a stirring and beneficial psychological influence, which might have been lacking if Europe had adopted an alphabet purely cursive in structure and unchangeable in design.”

What Bullen posits is a parallel between the illegibility of alternate writing systems to his own eyes and the psychological underdevelopment/stasis of the societies producing these systems. Thus, the inability of “oriental” letterforms–the adjective, in light of subsequent critical scholarship, is all too appropriate–to signify to a non-speaker translates into a generalized lack of cultural expressiveness. Additionally, Bullen reads the formal elements of writing systems graphologically, which is to say he diagnoses cultural “personality” traits based on the shapes of writing.

Tamara Plakins Thornton, in “Handwriting in America,” states that the injection of pyschology into early 20th century popular culture–the very period in which Bullen wrote his article–was concomitant with a surge in popular interest in graphology. Bullen employs graphology as a tool for cultural diagnosis, whereby the expert extends this graphical symptomatology to societies rather than individuals.

Though it doesn’t directly address typography, this blog is one of the most comprehensive marketing sites I’ve come across. What fascinates me, however, is the alignment it creates between good marketing and a sort of righteousness. Christian marketing only seems to really suck when the formal tenets of brand strategy and design have been violated, because this violation translates into a disruption of the Christian message itself. The stakes of good marketing, in this case, are even higher than usual: the viability of the business and the clarity of the religious message are intertwined.

From the TDC (Type Directors Club) Tokyo website:

“My room is covered with piles of old newspapers. I had not realized how many of them had accumulated; it is now a melee of thousands of newspaper headlines gathered from countries far and near where those newspapers were read and then thrown away. I pick up fragments of text and transform them into new characters.” -Fumio Tachibana

As most of my research has been on European and American avant garde and punk design, my first reaction to this artist was to think: Japanese ransom note graphics! But because Tachibana is using Japanese characters rather than the Roman alphabet, and because he frequently uses pieces of characters rather than whole ones, it’s not entirely the same. Still, he has described some of his works as poems, and this makes me think that he is entirely aware of 20th century European avant garde typographic collage (e.g. poems by Marinetti or Mallarmé). There’s little information about Tachibana (well, in English) on the web, and I hope I can track down more in print to see what he’s up to lately.

Recently, I received a CFP for the Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism journal, with a suggestion that I submit an abstract addressing issues of nationalism with respect to typeface. My last entry on blackletter includes some reference to concepts of the nation, since it’s difficult to talk about blackletter without mentioning German-ness, and it’s easy to see how scholars of typeface could devote entire careers to this topic. My research on italics led me to some interesting problems concerning historical shifts in the perceived differences between Italian and German typefaces. The “branding” (for lack of a better word) of the italic typeface as something uniquely Italian evokes mostly unanswered questions concerning printers’ anxieties around the burgeoning book market in Europe. As Adrian Johns suggests with respect to early English print culture, however, the relationship between the state and printers has been complex. This makes me wonder: how “Italian” did Aldus Manutius, the Roman, feel when he began working with his staff in Venice on the italic typeface? How “Italian” did buyers/readers think these early italic octavos were? And was Italian-ness in fact a driving force behind these type designs, or have print historians in subsequent centuries (Stanley Morison or D.B. Updike, for example) shifted the focus to nation for their own reasons?

In some of the more canonical books on typography and typeface, there may be more to be discovered about 19th and 20th century historians’ ideas of nationalism than those of 15th and 16th century printers. For example, Updike’s persistent use of the word “charming” to describe early French types tells me more about his views of the French than about the types themselves. When I look at these types, I do not see the charm and lack of virility (also mentioned by Updike) in the letterforms as he does; moreover, I do not come any closer to understanding their French-ness as it was or was not perceived by the printers who produced them. And though it seems easy enough to see this as a call to extend my research into the realm of European nationalism and historiography (which, by definition, any post-’Imagined Communities’ work on print culture must be), I’m still not sure I would find any answers specific to these early printers, punch-cutters, book merchants, etc., or the readers contemporary to them.

Armin of Speak Up recently posted a review of Fraktur Mon Amour, a book by Judith Schalansky, a book featuring 300 different blackletter typefaces. Coincidentally, I spent some time today attempting to hunt down Paul Shaw and Peter Bain’s Blackletter: Type and National Identity online. Blackletter was published in 1998 as a companion monograph to the Cooper Union’s exhibit of the same name.

Much has been made of blackletter’s affiliation with the Teutonic, but I was not quite surprised to find a book called Mexican Blackletter, published a couple of years ago. As any tattoo enthusiast knows, blackletter is not simply a symbol of Germanic heritage. It can express everything from jive medievalism to news authority, and is found everywhere from film title sequences to forearms.

All three of these books, taken together, demonstrate not only the fluidity of geographic boundaries but of associations that necessarily defines the history of such a widely used typeface. Blackletter’s ability to successfully carry such diverse associations in different contexts shows how something enduring can also be highly unstable.

In the introduction to her book, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923, Johanna Drucker proffers a post-structural concept of materiality for application to experimental typographic forms. She writes: “I don’t claim that the concept of materiality proposed here is universally applicable except insofar as it suggests that the interaction of elements taken into an interpretive account be as specific to the historical moment of their production as possible. The one point on which I would insist, however, is that form (whether visual or verbal) is historically inflected and that neither the subject, nor history, nor interpretation can escape the specific constraints of their circumstances of production.”

I see a great deal of promise in the application of this method to the study of individual typefaces, since it can expand a modest formal inquiry into a historical network of converging subjects, theories, and processes. To examine the historical inflection of a given typographic form with an eye toward the circumstances of its production permits a useful confluence of not only design theory and design practice, but of history and method. In other words, a typographic object and its historiography need not and should not be considered separately. Though Drucker is referring specifically to selected avante-garde typographic practices of the early 20th century, this is, I believe, an approach that maps well on to my own project.