Typographic Book Covers

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education had a short article about the uses and history of typographic book covers.  In the post, the author, Carol Saller, polls several designers regarding their reactions and thoughts about the practice.

You can read the full text of the article here.

The tone of the article is overwhelmingly positive.  While it is admitted that an unimaginative design is a detriment whether the cover is imagistic or typographic, Saller also asserts that "Even when the title lacks pizazz, typography can deliver it."

"Smoke Screen" by Maciunas

While reading the article, I kept thinking about the work of George Maciunas, the avant-garde organizer and typographer who was the driving force in many ways behind the Fluxus art movement of the 1950s through the 1970s.  His work - both for Fluxus events and for commercial design - is deeply felt but seldom acknowledged.

All of this ties in to a small but sturdy volume I picked up at a used bookstore this weekend.  The book is called Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Editors, & Students.  I haven't had a chance to give it a thorough going-over yet, but looking at its index, Maciunas's name does not appear.  His influence, however - through the mashed-up type style and stark use of Helvetica and other sans-serif fonts - is definitely felt.

Certainly Maciunas was not the only one to use this approach.  Kurt Schwitters, Russian Constructivists, and the Bauhaus all developed versions of this type-heavy graphic style.  Using words as art, with either one or no graphic elements besides, is a long-standing mode of expression.

And this finally makes me think of Islamic art, where very often no graphic expression besides the words of the Qur'an themselves is allowed. 

The West, in many respects, is an image-dense culture.  It is interesting to see the way in which these text-dense approaches can catch us by surprise or strike us as a novelty.  We seem to naturalize the image as the norm, and imagine text as the substrate of our visual lives.  As these several examples show, this is hardly the actual case.

More resources from the 2012 SCRIPT Meeting - Paper by James Watts

Jim Watts has posted the text of the paper he delivered at the 2012 EIR-AAR/Society for Comparative Research in Iconic and Performative Texts meeting over at the Iconic Books blog.

You can read the full text of his talk here.

SBL funds new Society for Koranic Studies

An announcement appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week about the formation of a new scholarly society to "support scholarship and teaching about the Koran in its historical, religious, and cultural contexts."

This undertaking, headed by the Society for Biblical Literature, is supported by a $140,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

John Kutsko,  executive director of the SBL, is reported in the Chronicle as saying the intention for this new Koranic Studies society is that it be "independent," and he says he and his fellow organizers are eager to avoid being seen as presumptuous or as exhibiting a colonialist attitude. "We have no preconceived and presumed ways of reading," he reiterates.

You can read the full text of the Chronicle article here.

[The above was paraphrased from the Chronicle article, and should not be understood to represent original reportage.  Thank you to Professor Scott Newstock of Rhodes College for bringing the article to my attention.]

How a book is made

A beautiful little film by Glen Milner. Enjoy.

Report from Eastern International Region SCRIPT Conference

This is the second year that SCRIPT has held a meeting concurrently with the Eastern International Regional meeting of the AAR. Last year we met at Syracuse University.  This year's meeting was held at Waterloo University, outside Toronto.

We had a slightly smaller footprint at this year's conference.  Instead of several sessions, we had one.  Despite the small size, however, it was well-attended, and the conversation was quite lively.

The following presentations were part of the session:

• David Dault, Christian Brothers University: "On a Controlled Bibliographic Vocabulary for SCRIPT and its Related Organizations: A Response to Deirdre Stam"

• James W. Watts, Syracuse University: "Relic Books"

• Karl Ivan Solibakke, Syracuse University: "Identity, Mimesis and Script: Walter Benjamin's Mimetic Function Revisited"

I will reproduce my paper in a separate post.

Jim Watts's paper builds on the thesis he first put forth in his earlier paper, “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures.”  In his discussion, Watts argues that a "Relic" text can be understood as a text where the iconic dimension has been hyper-emphasized, and the other two dimensions (the semantic and performative dimensions) have been largely or wholly eclipsed.  He had a good supply of examples, from the Declaration of Independence on display in Washington, D.C. to several kinds of Bibles that are designed to be seen, but not read.

Karl Solibakke's paper attempted to bring the questions of Iconic Books into conversation with Walter Benjamin's corpus, particularly around the Benjaminian concept of the "script."  According the the website of the International Walter Benjamin Society, "The term 'Script' (Schrift) emerges in the 1920’s as the center around which Benjamin’s meditations on the relationship between writing and image crystallize," and refers specifically to the act of writing as a graphic event, and not merely a textual one.  Solibakke's paper added a rich dimension to the discussion that followed the three papers.

Despite our only having one session this year, we managed to attract a number of interested persons to the session, with some even pledging to join SCRIPT as a result.  After the session, the participants and many of the attendees departed to the evening reception where, despite a loud jazz band, good conversation and conviviality lasted well into the night. 

Conversation about Erasmus on BBC 4

How much do I love the BBC? Quite a lot, actually. Where else would you find a radio program taking three-quarters of an hour to devote to a discussion of Erasmus of Rotterdam? On NPR, maybe, but even there you would have lots of interruptions and station breaks and such.

Not so, here. In the past couple weeks, BBC 4 has been re-broadcasting a wonderful conversation about Erasmus conducted by Melvyn Bragg on his show, In Our Time. The show, which can be heard in its entirely here, features the following esteemed scholars:

Diarmaid MacCulloch
Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford

Eamon Duffy
Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge

Jill Kraye
Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy and Librarian at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

In the course of the program, they discuss the history of Catholic-Protestant relations, the influence of Erasmus on Luther (and vice versa), and the role of Erasmus in the development of the 1611 King James Bible.

From the show's website:

In his lifetime Erasmus was almost universally recognised as the greatest classical scholar of his age, the translator and editor of numerous Latin and Greek texts. But above all he was a religious scholar who published important editions of the Bible which expunged many corruptions to the texts of the Scriptures.

Take a few minutes and give a listen. Well worth your time.

(My thanks to Professor Michael Leslie, of Rhodes College, for the link)

Pennsylvania declares 2012 "Year of the Bible"

Pittsburgh's public radio station reports that state lawmakers in Pennsylvania have recently passed a resolution declaring 2012 to be the "Year of the Bible":

Sponsoring Representative Rick Saccone (R-Jeffrson Hills) said he’s been getting a bit of critical feedback on the measure. “One person put on the comments, ‘Why don’t you have a resolution honoring the Quran?’ Well, we could, but the Quran didn’t have an influence on the founding of our country,” said Saccone. “I’m honoring a document and reflecting on a document that had a significant impact on the foundation and throughout the history of our country.”

You can read the whole article about it here.

(Thanks to Harold Hartger for the link)