Fontes Litterarum. Typographische Gestaltung und literarischer Ausdruck by Herausgegeben von Markus Polzer und Philipp Vanscheidt (review)

Typography is not getting the academic attention it deserves, despite the obvious fact that typography—even and especially in the digital age—is a reliable means of getting your attention. And this is not just a fact about advertising, cover design, or film titles—it is just as true of literature. Therefore one of the most painfully obvious absences in the systematic historical study of design and layout, of type-setting and text design, is a very basic lack: that the field of typographic history has not entered into deep conversation with the humanities. After all, this is what knowledge looks like: without the discipline of layout and alignment, kerning and shaping, concatenation and parsing we would not be able to communicate complex ideas so readily. The visual appeal and communicative discipline of certain forms of writing was of course pivotal long before the epoch of the printing press radically transformed how writing and reading function in the world—Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan pictograms, or Chinese calligraphy all exemplify ways of writing whose immediate visual appeal is necessarily lost if we try to represent them translated into our alphabetic culture. By the same token, a single word can communicate rather divergent notions if it is set in different fonts: from a matter-of-fact to a romantic look, from a nationalistic or jingoistic to a classical look, from a traditional to a hypermodern look, and so forth. And yet as long as text and its visual appeal and channeling is taken for granted, the technical as well as the aesthetic history of our typefaces is not being considered in conjunction with poetry, art, animation, cinema, television, and the many large and small screens that connect us across the internet. Some fans of the late Steve Jobs like to indulge in counterfactual histories of what might have happened if Jobs had not taken a course at Reed College on typography—would personal computers still have kicked off a publishing revolution? Would desktop publishing have fallen prey to the depredations of plain and ugly shapes? Would we have witnessed the remarkable success, chronicled in one chapter here, of Adobe Garamond and Adobe Minion that have come to practically dominate in the literary world? Sadly, the world of literature and of journalism has long settled into making the tools of legibility mere handmaidens, and it is rare indeed for literary studies and design history to collaborate on a close reading of a novel.

While it contains a chapter on the asterisk and another on the semiotic analysis (à la Jakobson) of emotive and poetic functions of type, the bulk of the contributions to this edited collection on typography and literary expression focus on 20^th-century German authors. The samples and case studies range from montages by Karl Kraus and Kurt Schwitters to experiments by Otto Nebel and Peter Weiss, from the role of mass media in the writing of Uwe Johnson and Alexander Kluge to writing that quite literally pushes the envelope by Mark Danielewski or Jacques Derrida. Anglo-American readers may care less about the debate within German publishing circles a century ago on whether Fraktur or Antiqua letters were more appropriate for printing and writing; they may also wish that the volume had given more space to explorations and readings of BTX text art, ASCII art, video poetry, mail and email art, or other such forms that combine letters and visual aesthetic means. But to give it credit, the volume does try to encompass the literary aspects of typographic culture, especially with regard to German literature of the past one hundred years, and it does so admirably. Mapping its contributions between an emphasis on expression or on decoration, a formal or a message orientation, is only one way to measure this space. Graduating from arrangements of letters to serial and permutational metric and acoustic patterns, and working its way to stochastic and topological poetry, the volume covers a lot of...