printing, transparency, dialogue

This week's readings include Meggs's chapters 5 and 6, "Printing comes to Europe" and "The German Illustrated Book," and Beatrice Warde her essay The Crystal Goblet, or printing should be invisible. Address to the Society of Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild, London, 1932. Reprinted in Looking Closer 3, Critical Writings on Graphic Design (1999), but available also here.

This fragment — ...an immaculate surface that leaves no room for dialogue... — from Robin Kinross, on the "modern", in Fellow Readers (1994), will likely turn up in our discussion of this material.

Our very quick survey of the Meggs material concluded with a presentation on emblems and emblem books, whose heyday was the 16th and 17th centuries, but which still appear explicitly (as a form of art) and implicitly (in the three-part design of book covers and advertising).

We detoured into a discussion about blindness, deafblindness, and various adaptive technologies, including braille and tactile letterforms, maps, diagrams and even pictures. "Transparency" becomes an interesting metaphor in this context. The links at right, to Brainport and to the historical museum at Perkins, are worth exploring, and will be supplemented by more in due course.