Everything is transitory: every side is a front when the codex book is opened, and only while it is opened to that position. When the page is turned that front becomes a back. The page, and its imagery, exists- and then it does not exist. It is ever changing, moving through space in time. The book is ephemeral. This is ironic, because it is also such a physical object requiring touch to experience it. The codex is so ephemeral that it exists only as fragments in now-time: the opened folio. It is only seen in full after the act of viewing.

Structure of the Visual Book, Keith A. Smith

My summer reading on typography and book design:

Methods of Book Design, Hugh Williamson
Structure of the Visual Book, Keith A. Smith
Books and Printing: A Treasury for Typophiles, Paul A. Bennett [editor]

I’m setting a goal of updating this journal once a week. Journalling here helps me stay in the mindset of the typographic and the physical. The majority of my Work this summer has been my writing, but I miss printing dearly. Feed the longing. Meditate on the act. Manifest.

The small shopkeeper, for instance, is still with us, and though the time has almost come wherein he will have no apparent place, nevertheless his survival is permanent; for nothing can stop small boys from selling one another marbles, and it is that personal dealing which is the root of all trading.

-An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill

There are, then, two world & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life- provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing by indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room- a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.

-Ibid.

I picked up a copy of An Essay on Typography while at The Strand this summer. I got perhaps a third of the way through it and then misplaced it during the move. Over the past few days of unpacking it surfaced again and I have been alternating it with Sanctuary on my bus ride.

Of Eric Gill’s most well known fonts, Gill Sans is not a font I’ve ever been particularly fond of (a personal prejudiced against san serifs, though I’ve been trying to come around and appreciate them) and I haven’t spent enough time with Perpetua to have an opinion. An Essay on Typography is set in Joanna, a font I had never encountered before. I’ve become quite enamored with Joanna and with her companion italic especially. Gill chose to set the text ragged right rather than justified as a protest against ‘the tyrannical insistence upon equal lengths of lines.’ Not to be colloquial, but the ragged right setting has kind of blown my mind.  As a final endearing typographic touch, he uses the pilcrow to mark his paragraphs rather than line breaks or indentation (and he includes a liberal sprinkling of ampersands).

Gill is continually brilliant and amusing throughout the book, if meandering. It’s less An Essay on Typography and more An Essay on Whatever Eric Gill Should Like to Talk About, and Mostly He Should Like to Talk About Typography. I don’t mind one bit. It’s interesting reading whatever way you cut it. Throughout the book there persists a theme of “two worlds,” that of mechanized industry and that of the humanist craft. Gill’s treatment of this subject sings to me. I’ve marked the pages up with dark underlining and exclamatory stamps of “YES!” Reading this book has, surprisingly, given me a grounded hope in the persistence of the humanness of our existence.

Additionally, I had no idea that Eric Gill had such a dark personal life, but every time I’ve mentioned that I’m reading the book, someone will say something like “Eric Gill! He was a nudist!” or “Eric Gill! He molested his children!” or “Eric Gill! He fucked his dog!” There’s apparently a biography by Fiona MacCarthy that rakes up all his dirt that I’d dearly love to read. Who knew typography could be so perverse?

The proofs for my book arrived last week. They looked great! Save for one glaring error in my biography: I neglected to set the numbers in my birth year as text figures.

As a child I remember distinctly wondering: Are there lower case numbers? What are they called? What do they look like? I read The Elements of Typographic Style* before beginning to set Human Parts of me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees, and was ecstatic to find the answer to this old question:

Arabic numerals - known in Arabic as Indian numerals, arqãm hindiyya, because the Arabs obtained them from India - entered the scribal traditional of Europe in the thirteenth century. Before that (and for many purposes afterward) European scribes used roman numbers, written in capitals when they occurred in the midst of other capitals, and in lowercase in the midst of lowercase letters. Typographers have naturally inherited this custom if setting roman numerals so that they harmonize with the words…

When arabic numerals joined the roman alphabet, they too were given both lowercase and uppercase forms. Typographers call the former text figures, hanging figures, lowercase figures, or old-style figures and make a point of using them whenever the surrounding text is set in lowercase letters or small caps. The alternative forms are called titling figures, ranging figures, or lining figures, because they range or align with one another and with the upper case.

The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst

I really wish I could provide some examples of form and appropriate usage, but I don’t think Wordpress has small cap capability. Perhaps I’ll scan some pages to post later.

*A book I highly, highly recommend above all others to anyone interested in book design or typography. It is lucid, poetic, almost metaphysical in its authoritative presentation of the subject.

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as “What is this author’s purpose?” or still worse “What is the guy trying to say?” Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination-which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

On a Book Entitled Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

I have read Lolita at least three times and have somehow always skipped the afterward. If you have not read this essay you really ought to, regardless of the novel.