Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation (review)

In "Reading the Invisible," their introduction to Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, editors Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton compare the visual, printed presentation of a text to the staging of a play. "The words may be Hamlet's," they tell us, "but the uniquely inflected body and voice are Branaugh's or Olivier's. The body and voice make a difference. Type and typography make a difference" (6). Thus, the essays collected in this interesting volume dispute the notion that typography, the visual arrangement of texts, is an invisible pane through which we see the meaning of a particular piece of writing. Instead, the essays herein argue that the typographic elements of a text are not transparent; they not only help to determine how a text is read and understood, but they may even influence who will read a particular work. "No matter how clear its glass," the editors tell us, "a window is perfectly visible when one simply averts one's gaze" (6).

The relationship between materiality and meaning will not be a revelation to many readers. Nevertheless, little scholarship has been devoted to the role typography might play in literary interpretation. To demonstrate the role typography plays in determining how readers, critics, and the literary marketplace construct a text's meaning, the essays in Illuminating Letters present a number of case studies examining the printing history of various texts, from the King James Bible, to Edgar Allan Poe's works, to contemporary comic strips.

About half the essays in this collection examine the ways in which printers and publishers have manipulated texts through typography and thus affected both the reception and interpretation of various books simply by selecting particular fonts or textual arrangements. The remaining pieces focus on writers whose awareness of the role visual form can play in readers' responses to a piece of writing has compelled them to try to maintain control of the typography and production of their books. Poe, we learn in Leon Jackson's essay, "The Italics Are Mine: Edgar Allan Poe and the Semiotics of Print," was in fact "obsessed with typography" (143), and he came to believe that "the 'truth' of the printed word . . . was not always the truth of the author's pen" (141). The technologies of printing stand between the writer's manuscript and the published text, and thus a publisher can act as a mediator between reader and author.

Poe's belief is supported by Sarah A. Kelen's study of an early-nineteenth-century British edition of the medieval text Piers Plowman. Kelen shows that the edition's publisher printed the book in difficult-to-read black letter type to "[mark] Langland's poem with a visible antiquity" (59) and thus "visually [reinforce] the historical distance between the medieval Catholic text and its modern Protestant reader" (66). In this way, the typography served to undermine a politically charged and controversial reading of the poem as a proto-Protestant text.

Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation is generously illustrated with examples from the editions discussed in each essay. The illustrations will be extremely helpful to readers who do not have a specialized knowledge of the fonts and typographic elements being discussed. In addition, the editors supply useful "Bridges," short editorial statements, between the essays that draw connections among the various themes under consideration throughout the book. This is especially useful since the essays collected here are truly interdisciplinary, incorporating elements of literary, historical, and cultural study and considering questions of readership as it relates to race, class, and gender. These well-written essays are apt to be of interest to scholars in many areas.