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“Letters are the greatest beginning of understanding.”
(Byzantine school tablet, fifth century A.D.)
In 1932 the famous English typographer Beatrice Warde designed a type-display
poster “to show off Perpetua Titling to good advantage.” A
reproduction of it by the Monotype Corporation hangs in my office.
THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE
FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND,
YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE
In the present cornucopia of print, this splendid declaration
still rings true. It cheers me every time I walk by it. But my copy of
the poster includes a small footnote: “In keeping with the look
and feel of the original, this version integrates electronic publishing
technologies with letterpress printing methods. The type was set on a
Windows™ system. Film output was produced on a PostScript™
imagesetter.” Beatrice Warde’s printing house now stands on
a digital foundation. The generative substructure is electronic; only
the final display mechanism remains the printed page. The notational field
has moved from the printing house and the book to the computer graphics
lab and the electronic screen.
Casting the present day as a titanic struggle between the
Forces of Print and the Digital Raiders no longer makes sense. All text
is digital in origin. Fixed print has become printout, one substrate of
expression for a preexisting digital code. And it is no longer the only
game in town. Other, digital, displays—regular cathode-ray tube
computer screens, liquid crystal display flat screens, plasma screens,
book-sized electronic display devices, smaller electronic date/address
books, digital screen projectors, heads-up displays, goggles, helmets,
immersive virtual reality environments—now compete with the printed
page for final display. These digital displays can recreate the full electronic
expressive space, a three-dimensional, dynamic world, as the flat, fixed
world of print cannot. Text will find its future as the various ways we
can now display it compete for our attention.
Fixity stands at the center of Beatrice Warde’s
brave declaration: “not to perish on waves of sound, not to vary
with the writer’s hand, but fixed in time.” Fixed in time
because fixed in stuff, print on paper. A theory of typography came with
Warde’s fixity. Print should be like a crystal goblet that contains
a fine wine, transparent but containing, metaphysically invisible. You
do not see the print but look through it to the heady meaning swirling
within. And a theory of style came with the theory of typography; the
ideal style, like the ideal print, is a style never noticed. Fixed and
invisible. That fixity comes unglued in digital expression, and in the
process we come to see the expressive surface, typography and style, to
look at it rather than through it.
But wait a minute. The poster, we are told, was designed
“to show off Perpetua Titling to good advantage.” It wants
us to look at it, as well as through it. Two responses
are solicited. First, “Yes, Perpetua Titling is a spiffing
typeface. Notice how well it looks.” We respond to the printed surface.
Second, “Yes, print enshrines, fixes, the best in human culture.”
We look through the printed surface to the meaning beneath. Our whole
response must be an oscillation between these two ways of seeing,
between typographical surface and symbolic notation, between image and
meaning. The poster offers a more comprehensive illustration of how we
read print than Ms. Warde’s theory about it.
The competing substrates for textual display find themselves
surrounded by a larger sphere in which text must compete against image
and sound in all kinds of mixtures, many of them much newer, more complex,
and more adroit than our familiar family villain, broadcast TV. I am not
thinking of films here, or video games or theme parks either, though they
may stand for a yet larger circumambience of competitive attention-structures.
I am thinking of new ways to express what text has traditionally expressed.
In the world of fixed print, writers had to decide which
genres and which styles answered their expressive desires. A decision
about genre (we might call it the macroeconomics of style) implied a decision
about sentence structure (its microeconomics). The typographical conventions
and metaphorical densities which separated prose from poetry were also
decisions about how to compete for a reader’s attention. So were
the basic decisions about verbal style—high/middle/low, running/periodic,
etc. So were the rhetorical figures of sound and arrangement which the
Greeks invented to smuggle oral power back into written utterance. Now
those expressive decisions encompass a much wider domain. Superimposed
on the traditional choices of style a new layer of stylistic choice faces
anyone who would communicate in text. What display device do I choose?
And what stylistic rules come with it?
Above this, yet another layer. Since digital information
exists in a code which can be displayed in words, sounds, or images, these
three modes constitute yet another level of stylistic decision. Text
itself is a self-conscious expressive choice as it has never been
before. How, when you are “writing” in the electronic space,
do you decide when to use words, when images, and when sounds? Or in what
combination? It all makes for a much more self-conscious mixture for both
writer and reader. The crystal goblet becomes opaque. You have to be governed
by the poster’s bi-stable logic instead.
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