Research :: chapter synopses

In the first chapter, I explain the index in detail, situating it in the context of its formation for its inventor. I distill Peirce’s definition of the index as something that both “refers” and “coerces”, into abstract and concrete parts, respectively. I use this distinction to begin outlining two lines of implications for typography, one abstract and referential, and one concrete and coercive. I then re-unite both to speculate on the existence of “the typographic surface”. A peculiar index, I argue, born by letterpress. One that endures quite powerfully, yet subtlety, in all forms of type today.

In the second chapter, I analyze typography, both practically and historically, according to each of the lines of implication introduced in Chapter One. I discuss the abstract and referential in relation to typography’s seemingly existential responsibility to written description (or what Perice called the symbolic sign). Here I cleave, temporarily and solely for the sake of brief observation, this responsibility from type. I discuss the concrete and coercive in relation to letterpress technology. Here I detail the typecasting process , of punchcutting, matrix-making, the type-mold, and sort pouring in light of “the typographic surface”. I then draw a parallel between the space of this surface and Walter Benjamin’s “homogenous, empty time”. 

I continue my discussion of Benjamin’s “blank” time as a segue to the subject of this chapter, the significance of the color white to typography. The chapter contends type’s story, of “democratizing” the written word, captures only the descriptive aspect of type’s distributive power. And that alongside, even just prior to, the word, type offered a fixed and flat visual display. One which, preceding the photograph and the halftone by centuries, was the first widely distributed form of its kind. One which, in the vast majority of letter-pressed works, the color white is resplendent. I discuss historical meanings of white, and their implications for typography, through a variety of historical precedents. These include the transfiguration of Jesus, changing perceptions of cleanliness, linen underclothes and changing standards of dress, the inventions of laid rag paper, and later wove paper, Baskerville’s “blinding” print innovations, John Locke’s image of the nascent mind as “white paper”, LeCorbusier’s Ripoline paint and recent perceptual studies on the phenomenon of “whiteout”.

Peirce’s commentators have observed the index’s leanings toward the existential. And, Peirce himself would describe it relative to what he called the “volitional”, an orientation later philosophers would identify with phenomenology. In the fourth chapter, I take up themes of phenomenology and the existential as they pertain to typography. I begin with Walter Ong’s seminal, if largely logocentric, gesture toward the topic. I continue with arguably the first phenomenological study of type using Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Their ideas, of the body and “the thing” respectively, animate new observations of the typographic sort. Historically, the sort being the most iconic and overdetermined component of the typographic apparatus. I end the chapter on a existential note, with what could be called “the blank”, arguably the richest yet most vacuous artifact we have inherited from typography. At least, according to a phenomenologist.

No historical study of phenomenology and typography would be complete without mathematics. It was in fact in “the algebra of logic”, that Peirce’s first sightings of the index were confirmed. In Chapter Five, I provide a story of mathematical logic, as seen from its weary typesetters. I begin with Peirce himself and Gottlieb Frege, the former’s unbeknown rival claimant as the progenitor of so called “formal language”. Though the historical record on the legacy of these respective thinkers concerns the most suitable “notation” for their logical innovations, as I tell it the story it is all about typography. Peirce’s style is “linear” and Frege’s “spatial”. I describe how the spatial efficiency of Peirce’s approach was ultimately adopted but not before Frege’s visual innovations with the typeset page. I also provide accounts of Giuseppe Peano’s DIY acquisition of his own printing press, intentionally inverting sorts for the capitals A and E, to express new logical operations and Betrand Russell’s run ins with Cambridge University Press over the elaborate typesetting of his and Whitehead’s magnum opus, Principia Mathematica. I close with a discussion of the interrelationships between typographic instantiation, formal language and non-sentient reading acts and the implications of these today.