[1995#04] are letters things?
“Letters are things, not pictures of things”, wrote Eric R Gill in his Essay on Typography. Is that sentence still true?
The history shows us that the actual, real manifestations of the presence of the human beings on the earth, in short what remains through the long ages of our collective life as an evoluting kind of social animal with a peculiar structure of body, brain and behaviour, sophisticately adapted for his reproduction thanks to a process of selective replica/recombination of the genetic code, intimately of digital rather than analogue nature, are artifacts, as opposed to the natural products or, better to say, gifts that all other animals benefit.
The artifacts (things made by art, literally: expression and goal of craftmanship oriented by a more or less specific purpose, which distinguishes them from the “tools” of some other animals), have a doublefaced, somehow positively ambiguous nature (well expressed by the Janus image), both as (1) prosthetic extensions of our body—so may be conceived and understood the tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a way that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted; and as (2) expression of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs of communication and memory (that give birth to the history, which then differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is)—so may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest being the only one presuming to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts. So we may say, at the same time, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and have always a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, ornament, ie an expressive and functional meaning applied to nature’s matters, a surplus given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning?
Without form the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase when the man gives him a form, when he trasform his absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of forging his shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter kept from a natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to receive a form (more or less complex, that’s not the point) to become artifact, part of human inheritance of history and “built” environment.
And, finally, it has to be pointed that a great part of the material, actual history of our artifacts is the history of a changing relationship between “carving”, “tracing”, “signing” (note: those are not at all the same, as they differ and so imply variables attitudes/gestures) tools/media and a support: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus (that means column, in greek, that becomes so the basis of the “classical” system of structural/architectural proportions, relations and not always written but visible rules, from which we so often misunderstand “style” as expression of a general art conception in a specific period of time), the wall/wood/canvas and the tinted brush, the tracing/vellum paper and the pencil, the sketches paper and the chalk/watercolored brush/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, and so expensive) papyrus/paper or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, and so on: the electronic beam and the phosphor coated glass of the monitor aren’t on the same evolutive line? Please note that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate pulsive nature, has always been the “how”, and not but if superficially the “what”, from a creative internal point of view, that has to be assumed, in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, to objectivate in form/matter the contents of his memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
The alphabetic system of signs we use, after a long selective process of evolution, is one of these artifacts we are talking about, and one of the most conservative yet, in may ways; let’s think both to the extraordinary permanence of the order in which the letters are in the set, and as well the sound/form and often meaning relations that many of the letters still have, after about five thousand years, and check wheter there are so many other so refined artifacts with such a degree of duration: for example, the phoenician original g, the gamal that means camel, soon to be the greek gamma, not to talk about a, aleph the taurus, soon to be the greek alpha, and so on. And what has to strongly underlined is that the alpabeth is really a systematic artifact, a complex decision on communication design: about 2700 years BC someone (that means a group of people not merely one), in a short period of time decided that this one, the alphabet, was the most economic and effective mean, in terms of communication, of recording the words (letters are sound for words, to quote again Gill and his Essay), of having a collective memory of events and emotions. So they built the foundations of the western civilization, even if for centuries it was based more on the ear than on the eye, more on sounds (that explains the role of rythmic poetry and mnemonic techniques in the ancient world) than on signs; but visible signs slowly gained importance, within the evolution of technology (ie the relation between tool/support, and the decreasing of related investments/costs) being the more stable way of transmitting ideas/events. “Verba volant—said the latins—scripta manent”: the permanence of writing, of the words, of the sequences of letters is the continuity/transmission of our civilizations. At this point, it is important to underline too that there is again a double, interplaying genesis or, better to say, very slow evolution of the letterforms: (1) an architectural path, that descend from carving the (painted) letters on buildings and walls, a kind of engraving/etching, anyhow a scratching on a surface/support to have a cavity, something emptied (or a relief, it is the same, as you push out of a surface that stays behind, that recedes to a background: so this kind of letters done in metal fusion are conceptually identical), that suggest a clear economy of forms/proportions to be seen mostly looking up, and a set to be normalised in order to respond to a proper brief of a power ruling, over a great part of the world, so many different nations, as roman empire was, that at the end means the capitals, the uppercase set, and a trend towards a set of monograms, of graphic devices, separated for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind typography; (2) a pictorial path, that descend from different signing tools applied to a absorbing surface/support, as exemplified before, that at the end means the lowercase set, that evolved slower and reached his final form later than the capitals, and a trend towards a set of polygrams, of graphic devices, united for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind calligraphy and survives in other letter system, as many of the oriental ones. Figures have then their own separated history, related to a mathematics system conception/visualisation based on 0 and decimals, that means in short we use an indian/arabic signs set, which came in our alphabetical system very late, through the mediterranean cultural exchanges of late Middle–age held in Italy. So our alphabet now is a complex organism, a body that absorbed an evoluting selective replication of his own, a contraddictory artifact who mixes and compromises two (if you include the figures, three) autonomous and self–sufficient letter systems: ancient inscriptions (letters on stone) were all in capitals, often with no spacing in between and no points commas etc, giving no trouble at all to the reader (and that’s the point about readability/legibility of letters/types: mostly, habit—otherwise how should we explain the Gutenberg set of black letters?) .So it’s seems that one system was enough at a certain level but not enough refined for more sophisticated details/levels of recording/communicating events, emotions and ideas. This second process of “natural” writing, of manual replication of volumina (surfaces to be rolled—but note a meaningful similarity of “volumes” in the field of literature and architecture as “composition” mean) and biblia (made of paperlike matter, rare, scarce and costly resource/surface for centuries: byblos, the Babel cane or papyrus to be carefully opened derolled overimposed, layer over layer, resulting in a very fragile support, or the real paper, fruit of a late technology that came from Far–East) from the latin scribas to the Middle–age scriptoria of monasteries came in a way to an end with modern printing, not a true invention but simply a combination of different technologies in Western world (movable words, the relatives of movable type, are known, not only in Far–east civilization, to exist long time before printing, as well as—mostly religious— images to be replicated for popular consume). From the half of the XVth Century, the printing press becomes the first industry process, and the paradigmatic model of all industrialisation, centuries before the Industrial Revolution, of which is the actual prototype. But at the beginning of this techological evolution, that built the way our civilisation transmits the contents of his culture and therefore the way in which is produced, perceived, diffused, and moreover the power of the eye vs the ear that still marks our time, the aim was to improve the speed of natural writing: the artificial writing, as it was called at the beginning, was trying to replicate a manual process through “machines”. And the conceptual tools, the cultural mentality needed some tens of years to be aware that the artificial writing was something new, and completely different from handwriting replica. Something radically changed: the letters, in order to be printed in lines in the page, by the way in which this technology is done, must be separated, must be monograms, inverting the trend towards polygrams of natural handwriting, well and highly expressed by calligraphy, art of lettering in itself, centripetal individual pulsion towards the ego expression, in front of to the centrifugal pulsion towards social communication, intimately connaturated with the printing. In printing, letters are physically separated, also if we perceive them united in words, by grouping and use of space: it’s a perceptive/cultural illusion, not too far from the color separation of images that we phisiologically perceive as continuous at the proper distance but are formed by tiny dots or the illusion on movement of the movies, that are only sequences of static photogram, of single pictures.
Well, let’s go back to the question, letters are still things as they were/are in printing and, before and still, in handwriting?
Another (r)evolution has occurred, the coming of digital over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our mentality and cultural habits seem often to be a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. But it appears clear that a new surface/support is the screen (whatever resolution now have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new media what were television, movie, radio, computer environments), a tracing tool is the light, the electronic beams that excites the phospor dots disseminated on the glass screen. So, the challenge in that field for visual/graphic designers, the border to be dangerously crossed before other people with no training but more bravery occupies all the land, the digital Far West, seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dinamic/acoustic dimension to the “page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen already fixed format/proportion—most probably they have to work with thousand of colors and 14 inches diagonal of a rectangle for a while, to reach the average audience)”, giving more depth than the relation of type/text and images/pictures on the “white” paper.
And the challenge for type designers in that field (printing will last long, as long as lasted handwriting, that is still in good health: types for printing will evolve and improve anyway, under digital realm: let’s look at the last 10 years to confirm that—but this is not the point I’m focusing) seems to be the screen type, the digital letter, where there is no more a resaon if not the old habit of thinking the type design in terms of monograms—and this is fully confirmed by the evolution of type formats towards fonts with ligatures and intelligent self–connections, that precisely shows a process of polygrammatisation of letters, of fusion in groups, more and more sophisticated, that maybe will extends to the words and, perhaps, to the sentences, walking over again the rows of calligraphy, going back on the old paths of not–western civilisations to go further on. The future has an old heart, as it lies on the past.
History most probably never repeats itself, but it is useful to think that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, that started with the (r)evolution of printing: we’ve been crossed by the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission/communication/conservation of events and ideas but we don’t know yet, and we aren’t perhaps fully aware yet of all the implications of this new age; our mind is standing, but never as now the letter designers had such a powerful tools on their own hands, provided they use the tool number one, a grey jelly 70% water, kept safe in a mervelous designed packaging, our brain. The designers may design, produce, distribute and sell with relatively small investments, as it was in the second half of XVth Century; the pressure of great companies on the market may strangle all, but there is an inertial slowness of these companies that leaves some chanches, at least for a while. The alphabet designers must not miss their chance, and surrender in a competion that is a selective evolution, as cruel as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear. And let’s say, in short, that also all the copyright problem has to be approached in completely new terms; the laws may only follow the society evolution, not to prefigure it. What strictly means, now, “copy”: that you have an “original”, from which you get “copies”—but in the digital realm, the original and the copy are absolutely the same. So, where is the border? We have to completely rethink the matter, and thinking still neeeds some effort, and time.
Letters are things and pictures of things, both physical objects carved/inked on a absorbing surface/support, as well as immaterials made visible by the light on another emitting surface/support, both things meant to express/vehiculate something that they carry on as well as expressive in itself for itself, altogether now. This is only a temptative conclusion. But let me quote again, for a circular ending of the story and with a question to start a new talk, some other words of Eric Gill: “Lettering is a precise art and strictly subject to tradition. The New Art notion that you can make letters whatever shapes you like, is as foolish as the notion, if anyone has such a notion, that you can make houses any shapes you like. You can't, unless you live all by yourself on a desert island”.
The history shows us that the actual, real manifestations of the presence of the human beings on the earth, in short what remains through the long ages of our collective life as an evoluting kind of social animal with a peculiar structure of body, brain and behaviour, sophisticately adapted for his reproduction thanks to a process of selective replica/recombination of the genetic code, intimately of digital rather than analogue nature, are artifacts, as opposed to the natural products or, better to say, gifts that all other animals benefit.
The artifacts (things made by art, literally: expression and goal of craftmanship oriented by a more or less specific purpose, which distinguishes them from the “tools” of some other animals), have a doublefaced, somehow positively ambiguous nature (well expressed by the Janus image), both as (1) prosthetic extensions of our body—so may be conceived and understood the tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a way that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted; and as (2) expression of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs of communication and memory (that give birth to the history, which then differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is)—so may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest being the only one presuming to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts. So we may say, at the same time, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and have always a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, ornament, ie an expressive and functional meaning applied to nature’s matters, a surplus given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning?
Without form the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase when the man gives him a form, when he trasform his absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of forging his shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter kept from a natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to receive a form (more or less complex, that’s not the point) to become artifact, part of human inheritance of history and “built” environment.
And, finally, it has to be pointed that a great part of the material, actual history of our artifacts is the history of a changing relationship between “carving”, “tracing”, “signing” (note: those are not at all the same, as they differ and so imply variables attitudes/gestures) tools/media and a support: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus (that means column, in greek, that becomes so the basis of the “classical” system of structural/architectural proportions, relations and not always written but visible rules, from which we so often misunderstand “style” as expression of a general art conception in a specific period of time), the wall/wood/canvas and the tinted brush, the tracing/vellum paper and the pencil, the sketches paper and the chalk/watercolored brush/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, and so expensive) papyrus/paper or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, and so on: the electronic beam and the phosphor coated glass of the monitor aren’t on the same evolutive line? Please note that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate pulsive nature, has always been the “how”, and not but if superficially the “what”, from a creative internal point of view, that has to be assumed, in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, to objectivate in form/matter the contents of his memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
The alphabetic system of signs we use, after a long selective process of evolution, is one of these artifacts we are talking about, and one of the most conservative yet, in may ways; let’s think both to the extraordinary permanence of the order in which the letters are in the set, and as well the sound/form and often meaning relations that many of the letters still have, after about five thousand years, and check wheter there are so many other so refined artifacts with such a degree of duration: for example, the phoenician original g, the gamal that means camel, soon to be the greek gamma, not to talk about a, aleph the taurus, soon to be the greek alpha, and so on. And what has to strongly underlined is that the alpabeth is really a systematic artifact, a complex decision on communication design: about 2700 years BC someone (that means a group of people not merely one), in a short period of time decided that this one, the alphabet, was the most economic and effective mean, in terms of communication, of recording the words (letters are sound for words, to quote again Gill and his Essay), of having a collective memory of events and emotions. So they built the foundations of the western civilization, even if for centuries it was based more on the ear than on the eye, more on sounds (that explains the role of rythmic poetry and mnemonic techniques in the ancient world) than on signs; but visible signs slowly gained importance, within the evolution of technology (ie the relation between tool/support, and the decreasing of related investments/costs) being the more stable way of transmitting ideas/events. “Verba volant—said the latins—scripta manent”: the permanence of writing, of the words, of the sequences of letters is the continuity/transmission of our civilizations. At this point, it is important to underline too that there is again a double, interplaying genesis or, better to say, very slow evolution of the letterforms: (1) an architectural path, that descend from carving the (painted) letters on buildings and walls, a kind of engraving/etching, anyhow a scratching on a surface/support to have a cavity, something emptied (or a relief, it is the same, as you push out of a surface that stays behind, that recedes to a background: so this kind of letters done in metal fusion are conceptually identical), that suggest a clear economy of forms/proportions to be seen mostly looking up, and a set to be normalised in order to respond to a proper brief of a power ruling, over a great part of the world, so many different nations, as roman empire was, that at the end means the capitals, the uppercase set, and a trend towards a set of monograms, of graphic devices, separated for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind typography; (2) a pictorial path, that descend from different signing tools applied to a absorbing surface/support, as exemplified before, that at the end means the lowercase set, that evolved slower and reached his final form later than the capitals, and a trend towards a set of polygrams, of graphic devices, united for reasons rooted in the tools/surface, that’s behind calligraphy and survives in other letter system, as many of the oriental ones. Figures have then their own separated history, related to a mathematics system conception/visualisation based on 0 and decimals, that means in short we use an indian/arabic signs set, which came in our alphabetical system very late, through the mediterranean cultural exchanges of late Middle–age held in Italy. So our alphabet now is a complex organism, a body that absorbed an evoluting selective replication of his own, a contraddictory artifact who mixes and compromises two (if you include the figures, three) autonomous and self–sufficient letter systems: ancient inscriptions (letters on stone) were all in capitals, often with no spacing in between and no points commas etc, giving no trouble at all to the reader (and that’s the point about readability/legibility of letters/types: mostly, habit—otherwise how should we explain the Gutenberg set of black letters?) .So it’s seems that one system was enough at a certain level but not enough refined for more sophisticated details/levels of recording/communicating events, emotions and ideas. This second process of “natural” writing, of manual replication of volumina (surfaces to be rolled—but note a meaningful similarity of “volumes” in the field of literature and architecture as “composition” mean) and biblia (made of paperlike matter, rare, scarce and costly resource/surface for centuries: byblos, the Babel cane or papyrus to be carefully opened derolled overimposed, layer over layer, resulting in a very fragile support, or the real paper, fruit of a late technology that came from Far–East) from the latin scribas to the Middle–age scriptoria of monasteries came in a way to an end with modern printing, not a true invention but simply a combination of different technologies in Western world (movable words, the relatives of movable type, are known, not only in Far–east civilization, to exist long time before printing, as well as—mostly religious— images to be replicated for popular consume). From the half of the XVth Century, the printing press becomes the first industry process, and the paradigmatic model of all industrialisation, centuries before the Industrial Revolution, of which is the actual prototype. But at the beginning of this techological evolution, that built the way our civilisation transmits the contents of his culture and therefore the way in which is produced, perceived, diffused, and moreover the power of the eye vs the ear that still marks our time, the aim was to improve the speed of natural writing: the artificial writing, as it was called at the beginning, was trying to replicate a manual process through “machines”. And the conceptual tools, the cultural mentality needed some tens of years to be aware that the artificial writing was something new, and completely different from handwriting replica. Something radically changed: the letters, in order to be printed in lines in the page, by the way in which this technology is done, must be separated, must be monograms, inverting the trend towards polygrams of natural handwriting, well and highly expressed by calligraphy, art of lettering in itself, centripetal individual pulsion towards the ego expression, in front of to the centrifugal pulsion towards social communication, intimately connaturated with the printing. In printing, letters are physically separated, also if we perceive them united in words, by grouping and use of space: it’s a perceptive/cultural illusion, not too far from the color separation of images that we phisiologically perceive as continuous at the proper distance but are formed by tiny dots or the illusion on movement of the movies, that are only sequences of static photogram, of single pictures.
Well, let’s go back to the question, letters are still things as they were/are in printing and, before and still, in handwriting?
Another (r)evolution has occurred, the coming of digital over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our mentality and cultural habits seem often to be a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. But it appears clear that a new surface/support is the screen (whatever resolution now have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new media what were television, movie, radio, computer environments), a tracing tool is the light, the electronic beams that excites the phospor dots disseminated on the glass screen. So, the challenge in that field for visual/graphic designers, the border to be dangerously crossed before other people with no training but more bravery occupies all the land, the digital Far West, seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dinamic/acoustic dimension to the “page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen already fixed format/proportion—most probably they have to work with thousand of colors and 14 inches diagonal of a rectangle for a while, to reach the average audience)”, giving more depth than the relation of type/text and images/pictures on the “white” paper.
And the challenge for type designers in that field (printing will last long, as long as lasted handwriting, that is still in good health: types for printing will evolve and improve anyway, under digital realm: let’s look at the last 10 years to confirm that—but this is not the point I’m focusing) seems to be the screen type, the digital letter, where there is no more a resaon if not the old habit of thinking the type design in terms of monograms—and this is fully confirmed by the evolution of type formats towards fonts with ligatures and intelligent self–connections, that precisely shows a process of polygrammatisation of letters, of fusion in groups, more and more sophisticated, that maybe will extends to the words and, perhaps, to the sentences, walking over again the rows of calligraphy, going back on the old paths of not–western civilisations to go further on. The future has an old heart, as it lies on the past.
History most probably never repeats itself, but it is useful to think that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, that started with the (r)evolution of printing: we’ve been crossed by the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission/communication/conservation of events and ideas but we don’t know yet, and we aren’t perhaps fully aware yet of all the implications of this new age; our mind is standing, but never as now the letter designers had such a powerful tools on their own hands, provided they use the tool number one, a grey jelly 70% water, kept safe in a mervelous designed packaging, our brain. The designers may design, produce, distribute and sell with relatively small investments, as it was in the second half of XVth Century; the pressure of great companies on the market may strangle all, but there is an inertial slowness of these companies that leaves some chanches, at least for a while. The alphabet designers must not miss their chance, and surrender in a competion that is a selective evolution, as cruel as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear. And let’s say, in short, that also all the copyright problem has to be approached in completely new terms; the laws may only follow the society evolution, not to prefigure it. What strictly means, now, “copy”: that you have an “original”, from which you get “copies”—but in the digital realm, the original and the copy are absolutely the same. So, where is the border? We have to completely rethink the matter, and thinking still neeeds some effort, and time.
Letters are things and pictures of things, both physical objects carved/inked on a absorbing surface/support, as well as immaterials made visible by the light on another emitting surface/support, both things meant to express/vehiculate something that they carry on as well as expressive in itself for itself, altogether now. This is only a temptative conclusion. But let me quote again, for a circular ending of the story and with a question to start a new talk, some other words of Eric Gill: “Lettering is a precise art and strictly subject to tradition. The New Art notion that you can make letters whatever shapes you like, is as foolish as the notion, if anyone has such a notion, that you can make houses any shapes you like. You can't, unless you live all by yourself on a desert island”.
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