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College and Research Libraries
September 2002, Vol. 63, No. 5

Book Review

Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation. Eds. Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton. Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Pr. (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book), 2001. 198p. $34.95, alk. paper (ISBN 1558492887). LC 00-055178.

In the introduction to this collection of essays on the relationship between typography and the content and meaning of printed texts, editors Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton argue that “the ethic of typographic invisibility” has prevailed in Western bookmaking since the time of Gutenberg. The designers of readable and aesthetically pleasing books have striven to match type and content, to cultivate a kind of typographical self-effacement that highlights the work of the author, not that of the typographer. This collection intends to show that “type and typography are an intrinsic part of the text that a reader encounters when he or she reads a book.” The editors note that even the clearest window glass can be seen when one alters one’s gaze; the job of these essays, then, is to examine the glass, to look at the ways typography can illuminate or convey literary meaning.

The introduction includes a lucid summary of the vocabulary of typographical design, along with type specimens. The essays are connected by “bridge” chapters that elucidate the authors’ contributions. Although this is an innovative idea, this reader spotted a good deal of redundancy in these bridges and wondered whether literary scholars (or other sophisticated readers) would need to have these thematic connections pointed out.

The first essay proper, by Paul Gutjahr, examines typographical style in four editions of the King James Bible produced between 1611 and 1931. He organizes his argument around four “rubrics”: tradition, social status, religious sensibility, and theological interpretation. Gutjahr discusses each of these rubrics in relation to a specific edition of the Bible. For example, he suggests that the blackletter type and mythological iconography of the 1611 edition mark the text as participating in the great sacred and classical traditions. He relates Isaiah Thomas’s 1791 folio edition with the urge toward attaining social status because of its rococo decoration and the association of the rococo with high culture and the Enlightenment. The 1846 Illuminated Bible issued by the Harper Brothers, with its abundance of illustrations, is supposed to connote a particular kind of religious sensibility. And in the 1931 Golden Cockerell Press edition, font conveys theological meaning. These are fine (and good) distinctions, but the author’s argument would have been stronger had he taken pains to explore all four of his rubrics for each of the editions considered. After all, religious sensibility and theological interpretation would have been of concern to any of the publishers of these texts; and certainly, the monumental size and production values of all these editions would have persuaded even the poorest of purchasers that they were participating in an elite social system of discriminating readers—readers just like themselves.

In the next essay, Sarah A. Kelen examines the 1813 London edition of Piers Plowman, edited and published by Thomas Dunham Whitaker. This fourteenth-century medieval poem had been reprinted only sporadically since its initial appearance in print in 1550. Whitaker, then, is not only one of the few editors to present the poem in toto, but he also brings his own modern sensibilities to bear on the text and the author, William Langland. However, Whitaker eschewed the contemporary trend toward modern typefaces and, instead, used blackletter. How to explain Whitaker’s old-fashioned choice? Because of the poem’s anti-clericalism, Langland had long been considered a proto-Protestant. But Whitaker argued that Langland was, at heart, a Roman Catholic. In the political and social climate of England in the early nineteenth century, when Catholics’ rights were still under debate, Whitaker’s use of Gothic allowed him to distance himself (and his readers) from what he perceived to be an outdated belief system that threatened to become reestablished as a national religion. Old-style type and spelling enabled Whitaker to relegate Catholicism safely to a medieval past.

In one of the most interesting essays in the collection, “Typography and Gender: Remasculating the Modern Book,” Megan L. Benton examines the metaphorical language used by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century printers and publishers who commented on the contemporary aesthetic of the book. Theodore De Vinne and others decried the triumph of white space on the page, the increase of ornament, and the new technological processes that allowed the press only to “kiss” the page and not to press down upon it with the masculine force of the old handpresses. These new developments, associated in particular with new readers and female readers, were regarded as an emasculation of the printed book. Printers such as William Morris and the Grabhorn brothers responded by returning to old technologies and styles: handmade paper, dense fonts, and type pressed so deeply into the paper that a physical impression resulted. Because books printed in this manner were expensive and published only in limited editions, they were marketed to a wealthy, elite, and male audience. Book collecting and the gentleman-scholar’s library became sanctuaries in an increasingly feminine and feminized publishing world.

Beth McCoy’s contribution on the 1986 Rutgers University Press edition of Nella Larsen’s Passing focuses on the ways that modern typography and page design distance the text from the contexts surrounding first publication. Resetting Passing in the Perpetua font gives the novel a sleeker, more modern, look but also removes the visual commentary that, McCoy argues, Larsen was making on the work of fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten. Passing, like Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, was published by Knopf and set in Caslon. McCoy claims that these similarities—these ways of “signifying”—marked Larsen’s book as authoritative and culturally connected. Erasing the book’s original typographical features has consequences for interpretation.

The next two essays in the book examine the ways in which two canonical authors manipulate and monitor typographical production in their own work. Steven R. Price reviews Samuel Richardson’s printing of his epistolary novel, Clarissa. Because he worked as his own printer and publisher, Richardson was able to tell his readers something about Clarissa’s characters with typography as well as with a well-told story. Through his creative use of different fonts and font sizes—small caps, white space, manuscript fonts—Richardson could suggest something of the individual character to the reader. The fiction that he was editing the letters of a real Clarissa gave Richardson the leeway to deal with the text as though it were a set of personal letters; as a consequence, the reader paid more attention to the material text.

Leon Jackson’s discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s obsession with typography is a neat piece of detective work that links the literary and the biographical. Poe was certain that manufactured books could never represent the “truth of the author’s pen.” Typography could even give respectability to mediocre writing; showmanship could trump quality. Poe was a fanatical proofreader and frequent presence in the pressroom, and even experimented with technologies that would allow his autograph hand to be transferred to the printed page.

The final chapter of the book deals, unexpectedly, with the funnies. Gene Kannenberg Jr. presents a theoretical framework for discussing the relationship between the visual and graphic qualities of comics and their narrative and textual features. He suggests that we think about three issues: the narrative (how the story progresses); the metanarrative (how text and graphics illumine character, tone of voice, etc.); and the extranarrative (how the style of type can identify the author or genre and, hence, the potential reader of a piece). Even though the study of comics may be of limited interest to many librarians, Kannenberg’s taxonomy could prove useful as book historians begin to hammer out the way illustrated (and perhaps even nonillustrated) books are read and used.

Like other books in this series, Illuminating Letters will appeal to students of the history of books and the material text and to scholars of art history and literature. One hopes that librarians, too, will find something of interest here. Typography is primarily a visual art; and perhaps if librarians attended to traditional uses of typography in printed books, they might learn more from the objects that surround them in their daily work and even learn to apply that learning to the way readers interact with words, both in print and online.—Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Indiana University.