Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture (review)

Joseph Dane is known for writings that are learned, witty, and provocative; and his latest collection of essays is a further display of his idiosyncratic approach to scholarship and history. The pieces range widely in subject matter from Gutenberg’s type and eighteenth-century title pages to the genealogy of Chaucerian manuscripts and the nature of the illustrative matter in the published works of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (the early-nineteenth-century writer on bibliophily and typography). At times, Dane strains to confer unity on the volume, but these efforts are unnecessary: each essay is fascinating in its own right, and the only unity that matters is the one imparted by the author’s distinctive angle of vision. I use this expression not only to allude to Dane’s knowledgeable discussion of linear perspective in art but also to point to a key element of his approach: the idea that explanations or representations of the past reflect the preoccupations and cultural milieu of those who make them (a generalization from which Dane is not, and would not claim to be, exempt). Thus, he is suspicious of attempts to find continuities in history, labeling them belittlingly as “grands récits” or “myths” or “standard clichés.”

The trouble with this point of view, when insistently repeated in one form or another in successive essays, is that it comes to imply the futility of all scholarly investigation. Dane seems reluctant to acknowledge that if we are to pursue the past—as we are apparently impelled to do—we must take our limitations, and those of our predecessors, in stride and move on. Grands récits, after all, are simply working hypotheses; the consideration that some people accept them more uncritically than they ought to does not prevent our using them with greater insight. Dane’s informative criticisms of previous scholarship are actually a contribution to this positive process. A similar point can be made about his response to graphic reproductions with a historical aim. Looking at those in Dibdin’s books, he says that “they serve neither as accurate descriptions nor as representations of history, but rather as representatives of what that history could have been had it included (and ended with) the soon-to-be-obsolete technology and aesthetics of the early nineteenth century.” This is not a surprising observation: is there anyone who does not understand that “reproductions” reflect the time when they were made? We take this point as a given, and proceed from there.

The word sort refers to a piece of type, and the punning title of Dane’s book has at least two meanings. The book, or its first half at any rate, deals with some of the understandings that can be extracted “out of” types and typography when studied historically. But the book also shows its author being “out of sorts” in the colloquial sense, taking up topics that he says “have been irritating me for some time.” “I began,” he writes, “thinking of this work as an extension of the polemic I have been conducting for several years”; and the book as it turned out (“not intended as polemic,” he says, with “a few rare exceptions”) moves from one irritation to another and strives ostentatiously to be unsettling. Readers are themselves likely to be put out of sorts occasionally by this performance. But the continual play of intellect (as absorbing as any other game) will win them over again.