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Chapter Five. Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter
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five Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter zachary lesser Part of what makes a history of reading so difficult to write is that reading occurs at the intersection of the material and the immaterial , the physical and the psychical, the letter and the spirit. Here I examine this intersection in one particular type of letter: the black-letter (“gothic” or textura) typeface. Black letter is suffused with nostalgia, both in the early modern period and in our own. The typeface has long enjoyed a privileged position among scholars because it seems to provide a material key to readership, in particular to “popular” readership and “popular culture.” Since the beginnings of modern bibliography in the early twentieth century, scholars have asked the black-letter typography of “cheap print” (broadside ballads, chapbooks, romances) to serve as a “social discriminant” in differentiating “high” from “low” readers.1 But popular reading seems never to answer our demands to reveal itself, and our quest for it is thoroughly nostalgic. Nostalgia, according to Susan Stewart, involves the search for “re-union” or authenticity in the past, but such a “narrative utopia” works “only by virtue of its partiality ,” its tendentious and incomplete representation of history, making any such re-union impossible. Nostalgia thus functions to reproduce itself endlessly, as the lack that incites desire is rediscovered. Nostalgic desire does not supply some present lack with the fullness of the past, but rather reproduces the desire for fullness itself: “Nostalgia is the desire for desire.”2 We can see a similar process at work in critical interpretations of black letter and “popular culture.” Typographic nostalgia imagines the popular 99 as a unified and distinct culture, locating in some (always shifting) past the moment of a split between high and low, elite and popular. But, as Scott Shershow writes, “rival social groups . . . never really ‘have’ their ‘own’ separate and autonomous cultures but are, instead, participants in intricately interrelated fields of cultural production whose distinctions are merely self-constructed and self-proclaimed.”3 It is not simply that the boundaries between “high” and “low” are porous, nor that our archives are inevitably tainted by cultural “mediators” who represent the popular in forms at some remove from the reality of popular culture.4 Rather, as Roger Chartier argues, the very search for popular culture relies on a series of flawed assumptions: first, “that it is possible to establish exclusive relationships between specific cultural forms and particular social groups”; second, “that the various cultures existing in a given society are sufficiently pure, homogeneous, and distinct to permit them to be characterized uniformly”; and third, “that the category of ‘the people’ or ‘the popular’ has sufficient coherence and stability to define a distinct social identity that can be used to organize cultural differences.”5 Because these assumptions nostalgically posit a unity and an authenticity to popular culture that dissolve on closer inspection, in discussions of black-letter printing the “people” supposedly signaled as readers of this typeface slide up and down the social scale, and the moment in which the people became separated from “high” culture (or when elites “withdrew” from popular culture) slides back and forth in time. Popular culture itself can never be “discovered” because it does not exist as an autonomous entity, neither as a “system of shared meanings, attitudes, and values” nor as “the symbolic forms . . . in which they are expressed or embodied.”6 But the search continues: the study of popular culture is the desire for popular culture. A brief review of the work on black letter reveals that this desire springs from a fundamental misconception of the workings of the “systems of linguistic and bibliographical codings” that make up books.7 Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie have stressed that the material aspects of books—typeface, layout, format—are semiotic codings and therefore must be interpreted just as much as language.8 Almost all studies of black letter, however, see the typeface merely as a direct index to readership, one that has seemed all the more appealing, I suspect, because of the apparently empirical quality of bibliography as compared to literary criticism.9 Already in R. B. McKerrow’s Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, one of the earliest and most influential New Bibliographical 100 zachary lesser [3.227.252.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:56 GMT) texts, black letter was seen as a marker of popular reading and used to distinguish...