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Experimenting on the Page, 1480–1630

Julie Stone Peters

in Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe

This chapter describes the creation of typographic conventions for the drama and the relations among theatrical troupes, dramatists, and publishers during the period of the establishment of ... More

This chapter describes the creation of typographic conventions for the drama and the relations among theatrical troupes, dramatists, and publishers during the period of the establishment of professional theatre in Europe.Less

The Crisis of Eloquence: Newsbooks and Historiography

Joad Raymond

in The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641-1649

This chapter considers the problems created by newsbooks, which involved speech and authority. With printed speeches, pamphlets, and particularly newsbooks, it was never clear who was saying what to ... More

This chapter considers the problems created by newsbooks, which involved speech and authority. With printed speeches, pamphlets, and particularly newsbooks, it was never clear who was saying what to whom, nor what the precise context and language were. The danger was that the uninformed historian, while fighting for truth, would be deceived by the falsifying imagination of propagandists. The chapter also looks at criticisms of newsbooks, which focused on six more or less equally important attributes: (i) the inferior typography and diminutive stature of newsbooks; (ii) the grand untruths they told; (iii) the greed of their writers, printers, and publishers; (iv) the vulgarity of their readers, who were accordingly prone to believing the lies they read; (v)the disruptive effect they had not only on relations between the king and parliament, but on society in general; and (vi) their poor literary qualities.Less

Mr Knight's Best Small Capitals

Richard Cronin

in Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo

The chapter contends that this was the first age of print, the age when, as the New Monthly put it, print became ‘like to the air we breathe’, ‘the medium through which we receive every idea and ... More

The chapter contends that this was the first age of print, the age when, as the New Monthly put it, print became ‘like to the air we breathe’, ‘the medium through which we receive every idea and every feeling,—beyond whose influence we cannot get, and could not live’. For writers of the new generation, as for Charles Lamb, the manuscript even of a great writer never seems quite ‘determinate’: ‘print settles it’. The chapter explores the consequences of this new perception, concluding that Don Juan is the primary epic of the age of print.Less

Performing Girlhood through Typographic Play in Hebrew Blogs

Carmel Vaisman

in Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media

This chapter is concerned with the ways one community of Israeli girls, Fakatsa, employ linguistic repertoires and typographic styles in performing a “girly girl” identity on their blogs. The chapter ... More

This chapter is concerned with the ways one community of Israeli girls, Fakatsa, employ linguistic repertoires and typographic styles in performing a “girly girl” identity on their blogs. The chapter emerges from a larger ethnography of girls' engagement with new media literacies in the Hebrew-language blogosphere. Fakatsa girls have developed a vernacular Hebrew literation and typographic system in which the aesthetic form of writing is as important as content. It is through this particular style that they are also able to negotiate (or resist) popular stereotypes about them. The chapter contributes to an understanding of the reciprocity between gender identity performance, globalization, language, and new media.Less

Epilogue

in All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic

The remarkably successful career of the Slavic amulet of seventy two divine names hinges on one central event in its history: its initial printed publication. The text first appeared in 1520 as part ... More

The remarkably successful career of the Slavic amulet of seventy two divine names hinges on one central event in its history: its initial printed publication. The text first appeared in 1520 as part of a pioneering work of Cyrillic typography. The book, known as the Miscellany for Travelers, came out of the Venetian printing house of the Montenegrin entrepreneur Božidar Vuković —a central figure in the earliest chapter of modern Cyrillic bookmaking. Cyrillic typography appeared on the cultural map of Europe relatively late, however, early in the next century, the production of Cyrillic books moved almost entirely to Venice, which had established itself as perhaps the most important typographic center in Europe at the time. The publishing house of Vuković had much to do with the success of Cyrillic printing in Venice.Less

The Eureka Years

Jad Smith

in Alfred Bester

In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a ... More

In the early 1950s, working closely with Galaxy magazine editor Horace L. Gold, Bester wrote a highly experimental novel, The Demolished Man. In addition to hybridizing the SF and detective novel, a feat Campbell had declared impossible, The Demolished Man also reimagined telepathy via sociolinguistics, thinking of it in terms of language change. Bester’s telepaths, which he calls “espers,” develop their own idioms, metaphors, and in-jokes, all of which Bester captures through nonstandard orthography, extra-coding, and other forms of innovative, modernist-style language play. This chapter also chronicles Boucher’s continuing influence on Bester’s development as a writer and examines Bester’s preoccupation with the wish fulfillment theme in short stories such as “Hobson’s Choice” and “5,271,009.”Less

Practices

David Jhave Johnston

in Aesthetic Animism: Digital Poetry's Ontological Implications

Digital poetry case-studies. The chapter begins with precedents, typographic explorers, and parallel practitioners. The bulk of the chapter offers numerous case-studies of contemporary (1995-2015) ... More

Digital poetry case-studies. The chapter begins with precedents, typographic explorers, and parallel practitioners. The bulk of the chapter offers numerous case-studies of contemporary (1995-2015) digital poetry (and/or language-art in mediated contexts) grouped by thematics. Authors analysed include (among others): Christian Bök, Zuzana Husárová, Joe Davis, Eduardo Kac, S. S. Prasad, Jason Lewis, Erik Loyer, Andy Campbell, Ben Fry, Amaranth Borsuk, Christophe Bruno, Talan Memmott, Jaap Blonk, Daniel Howe, Karsten Schmidt, Brad Troemel, TRAUMAWIEN, Darius Kazemi, Ray Kurzweil, John Cayley, Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Antonio Roque, Håkan Jonson, Johannes Heldén, Danny Cannizzaro, Samantha Gorman, and Camille Henrot.Less

The Workplace: Places, Procedures, and Personnel 1668–1780

Martyn Ould

in The History of Oxford University Press: Volume I: Beginnings to 1780

The core occupations of the printing house — type-casting, composing, proofing, printing, distributing, gathering, and collating — remained largely unchanged during the period studied in this book, ... More

The core occupations of the printing house — type-casting, composing, proofing, printing, distributing, gathering, and collating — remained largely unchanged during the period studied in this book, and the technology of printing with its wooden presses, hand-made paper, and hand-set type remained similarly consistent. This chapter thus considers how these particular working practices and technologies were implemented in Oxford. It discusses the awkward organization of printing activities in the Sheldonian Theatre, with printing presses in the basement and compositors ceding the main floor to university ceremonies, and describes other buildings in Oxford used for printing and warehousing. The design of the new Clarendon Printing house allowed both the Bible Press and the Learned Press to operate in one building from 1713. The roles of the Architypographus and Warehouse Keeper are examined, as are the working conditions within the Press. The sources of the paper, type, and illustrations used by the Learned Press are also catalogued.Less

Designer and Filmmaker

Jan-Christopher Horak

in Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

Like many designers, Saul Bass was loath to discuss his work in a theoretical framework. He spent almost fifteen years working in studio publicity before founding his own design studio. In the ... More

Like many designers, Saul Bass was loath to discuss his work in a theoretical framework. He spent almost fifteen years working in studio publicity before founding his own design studio. In the mid-1940s Bass came under the spell of Bauhaus design aesthetics through books by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, translating their work into an American idiom for corporate design. Bass jettisoned much of Gestalt theory and adopted Bauhaus principles of clean, uncluttered design based on sans serif type and basic geometric shapes to communicate modernity to post–World War II consumers. Prior to Bass, Hollywood film advertising was no more than sophisticated ballyhoo. Bass pared down the cluttered look of most movie ads and created a distinct brand consisting of strong graphic elements, modern typography, geometric ordering of the two-dimensional space, a limited color palette (mostly primary colors or coordinated pastels), a simple iconographic element at the center, and a catalog of “house” images.Less

Film Titles: Theory and Practice

Jan-Christopher Horak

in Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

In the late 1950s Saul Bass almost single-handedly initiated a Renaissance in the design of film credits. His titles for That’s Entertainment II summarize many of the techniques of traditional movie ... More

In the late 1950s Saul Bass almost single-handedly initiated a Renaissance in the design of film credits. His titles for That’s Entertainment II summarize many of the techniques of traditional movie titles, which were inherently self-reflexive. In classical Hollywood, titles were kept to a minimum—used to identify the studio rather than an individual film. In Bass on Titles, the designer talks not so much about his theory of film titling; rather, that film is more of an advertisement for his titles. Bass’s title designs were based on a grid structure with strong horizontal and vertical symmetry and sans serif typefaces for legibility. His titles for Psycho, Goodfellas, Bonjour Tristesse, and other films were composed graphically in two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional space, even when the titles were animated.Less

‘So fremd war das Gebilde’: The Interaction between Visual and Verbal in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages

Lyn Marven

in Herta Müller

Müller's collage works, which consist of often surreal imagery and brightly coloured poetic texts, are becoming increasingly prominent within her work, and function as a visible representation of her ... More

Müller's collage works, which consist of often surreal imagery and brightly coloured poetic texts, are becoming increasingly prominent within her work, and function as a visible representation of her distinctive linguistic style. This chapter examines the development of collages through Müller's œuvre, from metaphor in Reisende auf einem Bein through three stand-alone collections and, most recently, her first published work in Romanian, the collage collection Este sau nu este Ion. It demonstrates how the collages enact a relationship between word and image, not only in their visual form, but also in the links they create to Müller's written texts; the fragmentation and ambiguity the collages embody further reflects in visual form the expression of trauma that underlies much of her output.Less

The Printed Page

Paul Luna and Martyn Ould

in The History of Oxford University Press: Volume I: Beginnings to 1780

The chapter considers the visual character of the Press's books: their typography and layout; the use of illustration, especially in engraving; and the development of an ‘Oxford page’. The various ... More

The chapter considers the visual character of the Press's books: their typography and layout; the use of illustration, especially in engraving; and the development of an ‘Oxford page’. The various types used for printing Latin, English, Greek, and other languages are catalogued and their origins traced. The chapter discusses different methods of illustration and makes a case study of the Oxford Almanack — describing its publication, distribution, and particularly its engravings. The chapter also addresses the complex requirements of combining text and illustration in mathematical and anatomical texts and in typesetting pages with multiple languages, such as dictionaries and commentaries on scriptural or classical texts. In general, margins grew more generous, chapter titles and sub-headings merited more space and title page typography was streamlined; changes to the Oxford printed page from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth century exemplify larger developments in English and European typography.Less

Poetry and the Typosphere in Léon-Gontran Damas

Carrie Noland

in Voices of Negritude in Modernist Print: Aesthetic Subjectivity, Diaspora, and the Lyric Regime

This chapter analyzes the graphemic features of Negritude's first poetic volume, Léon-Gontran Damas's Pigments. From the very beginning of his career, Damas distinguished himself from the Caribbean ... More

This chapter analyzes the graphemic features of Negritude's first poetic volume, Léon-Gontran Damas's Pigments. From the very beginning of his career, Damas distinguished himself from the Caribbean poets of the past by imitating the verse structure, the style of diction, the tone, and even the syntax of African American writing. Unique among the Negritude poets, Damas abandoned traditional verse structures early on in order to take fuller advantage of the printed page, treating it increasingly as a plastic and symbolically charged support. Through his Pigments, Damas took hold of the graphic possibilities of the printing press, of spacing and typography, to elaborate a poetics of negativity capable of transmitting the unusual facticity of the assimilé. In 1937, Pigments was published by Guy Levis Mano, an editor of artist books patronized by the surrealists whose attention to the print support—typeface and layout—was unrivaled at the time.Less

Typing Feeling: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

Lorri G. Nandrea

in Misfit Forms: Paths Not Taken by the British Novel

This chapter traces distinctions between three dynamics of feeling found in eighteenth-century literature and culture. “Sentimentality” emphasizes sameness and accord between parties. It can be ... More

This chapter traces distinctions between three dynamics of feeling found in eighteenth-century literature and culture. “Sentimentality” emphasizes sameness and accord between parties. It can be associated with the pleasurable “repetition of the same” that defines genre fiction. “Sympathy,” as analyzed by Adam Smith, centers on the imaginative identification of self with other. It became the dominant model of feeling; indeed, it underwrites mainstream models of subjectivity, sexuality, and desire that are rendered legible by psychoanalysis. “Sensibility,” misread by psychoanalysis but illuminated by Deleuze and Hume, presents an alternative to sympathy. In place of the desire for identity, sensibility embraces an attraction to difference and differing. In place of the “container model” that situates affect within the depths of an individual or text, sensibility's contagious, performative affective intensities move from surface to surface. Typographical effects allowed a page to communicate affect in this way, as demonstrated by pages from John Dunton, William Baker, Sterne, and Mackenzie. Printer's manuals by Joseph Moxon and John Smith provide further evidence supporting the coherence of the textual practice of sensibility. The chapter briefly discusses the long neglect of printing by literary critics, and the recent revival of interest among critics and novelists (e.g. Mark Danielewski).Less

Type Ornament

Juliet Fleming

in Cultural Graphology: Writing After Derrida

Type ornament describes printed designs made from ordinary letter types that bear decorative elements instead of letter forms. Also known as printers’ flowers or printers’ lace, type ornament first ... More

Type ornament describes printed designs made from ordinary letter types that bear decorative elements instead of letter forms. Also known as printers’ flowers or printers’ lace, type ornament first became popular among printers in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. This chapter explores the introduction of printers’ flowers as an historical phenomenon in its own right and as an opportunity to elaborate what can be said about the non-phonetic elements in our own writing system. For type setters have long known that meaning is dependent on our interaction with the spaces, organization, and syntax of the matter that supports it, while typography posits the existence of a pre-linguistic apprehension that is the precondition for our response to language. Derrida had a longstanding interest in both, and this chapter works the seam where the material practice of type setting encounters the theoretical speculation that he elsewhere called ‘spacing’. By doing so it develops an account of cognition that is best understood not as a representation of the world to the person who perceives it, but rather as an ongoing bringing-forth of the world through a process of living in and through the dynamic organization of its spatial archives.Less

Reading the graphic surface of Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Fifty Year Sword

Glyn White

in Mark Z. Danielewski

Glyn White focuses on Danielewski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword, exploring the ways in which typography and visual design are used to create a narrative that is intertextual and, above all, fragile. ... More

Glyn White focuses on Danielewski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword, exploring the ways in which typography and visual design are used to create a narrative that is intertextual and, above all, fragile. White has two central interests: the novella’s coloured quotation marks and polyvocal narration, and its unusual page design. He is especially concerned with how these formal and structural properties engender the reading experience. Through recourse to Derrida’s ideas on white space, or what he calls the ‘blank’ (blanc/blank), White claims that the graphic surface of The Fifty Year Sword is essentially disruptive. It is this disruption that makes the novella so fragile and endows it with what White calls ‘the texture of fabric(ation).’Less