T H E J O U R N A L O F S T B R I D E L I B R A RY SUMMER 2015
£7/ FREE TO FRIENDS OF ST BRIDE
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No. 17
Published with the generous support of
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Book reviews
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‘Cut him out in little stars’
The Blue Book of Bob Richardson
SAM WINSTON
BOB RICHARDSON
Ashley Bishop, acid etched, mirror silvered and oil gilded, with mother of pearl, abalone and enamel paint shadows on glass.
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‘A time of enormous optimism…’
Station to station: the graphic heritage of the Argentinian railways
A neverending process
LESLIE McCOMBIE
HAIEN SONG
FA B I O A R E S & O C TA V I O O S O R E S
Issue 17 SUMMER 2015 Editor Simon Loxley Design and layout Simon Loxley Library support Bob Richardson, Heather Jardine, Mick Clayton, Oliver Nesbitt Editorial assistance Teddy Loxley ‘Muchísimas gracias’ to Cary Núñez Gonzáles for her translation from the Spanish. © St Bride Foundation 2015. www.sbf.org.uk Ultrabold uses the font families Le Monde Livre Classic and Parisine, with kind permission of Jean François Porchez.
Printed type specimens may be rarer items than they used to be, but those that appear these days are often things of grace. Fontsmith’s latest, promoting FS Silas, is no exception; pages of different dimensions, differing stock, and the booklet itself contained in its own wallet. The type’s good too. FS Silas comes in two styles, sans serif and slab serif, with five weights each plus italics. ‘At once cool, calm and authoritative. On closer inspection, more nuanced and expressive. Simultaneously revealing and intriguing…’ Particularly intriguing, indeed, is the slab serif, which manages simultaneously to invoke the spirit of Vincent Figgins while positioning itself very firmly in the second decade of the twenty-first century. www.fontsmith.com
FS Silas Slab Bold
Readers of Ultrabold will be familiar with Sam Roberts and his work with Ghostsigns, recording and photographing fading, eroding painted wall advertising. Of his latest venture, Better Letters, he says: ‘Better Letters is the result of people getting in touch through Ghostsigns, seeking signwritten work. There wasn’t an easy way to find good quality craftspeople, so the original idea was to create an online directory. This then evolved into the concept of a lettering agency, providing access to signwriters and lettering artists around the world. A limited edition book, Hand Jobs, was created as a promotional piece and lettering projects have so far been delivered for Coca-Cola, Craft London, My Warehouse Home and Ottolenghi’s new restaurant venture, Sesame. ‘Better Letters and Ghostsigns are two sides of the same coin for me. The former embraces and promotes contemporary signwriting and lettering, while the latter is concerned with documenting and researching the historical aspects.’ www.betterletters.co www.ghostsigns.co.uk
Left: Lilly Lou, acrylic spray paint on boards.
Front cover: An Argentinian railway A to Z with numerals; see our article on page 12. Ultrabold was printed by
on 120 gsm UPM Fine Offset.
Join the Friends: www.sbf.org.uk Annual subscription: £35 Student/concessions rate: £20 2
Right: Alice Mazzilli, gouache on cartridge paper.
FS Silas Sans Bold
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Left: Engine No.1 ‘La Portena’, with its bronze identification plaque. Built in Leeds, England, it was the first locomotive to operate in Argentina. Photograph: National Archive, Leg.011524
O S O R E S
Station to station: the graphic heritage of the Argentinian railways As Argentina begins the renationalisation of its rail network, Fabio Ares and Octavio Osores have been visiting busy stations and long-abandoned stops along the lines, sifting through archives and reinterpreting the graphic fingerprints left by the many contributors to a complex railway history, the ghosts of Buenos Aires and La Plata, and of Birmingham and Leeds.
Typography has been largely disregarded by railway historians and aficionados in Argentina, despite its widescale presence on every line. Each railway company, whether state- or privately owned, used its own designs – a striking historical feature which we wanted to investigate and illustrate, as it was an aspect that had yet to be explored in Argentina, let alone the rest of the world. But it is a factor which we feel is important in studying and re-evaluating Argentinian typographic heritage. We would also like to show some of our ongoing digital responses and recreations of these historic sources and designs. Some of this work has already been displayed alongside railway artefacts in exhibitions in Argentina. If you’ll forgive a railway metaphor, for us this is just the beginning of a long journey, with much still to discover.
A brief history of the Argentinian railways Argentinian railway history began when the Sociedad del Camino de Fierro de Buenos Aires al Oeste (Western Buenos Aires ‘Iron Road’ Society) received permission to build the branch line that marked the beginning of the Ferrocarril Oeste de Buenos Aires, the Buenos Aires Western Railway, the predecessor to the Ferrocarril Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Railway) which opened in 1857. In 1862 the British-owned Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway (later renamed the Ferrocarril General Roca) started the construction of a line between Constitución Market in Buenos Aires City and the Chascomus neighbourhood in Buenos Aires Province, the first segment of what later became the most important railway in the region. In 1863 the construction of the Ferrocarril Central Argentino (Central Argentinian Railway) later called Ferrocarril General Mitre, began between the cities of 12
Below: Serif lettering is used for the carriages and sans serif for the station signage at Constitución Terminal, Buenos Aires. Photograph: National Archive, Leg.24534
Rosario and Córdoba, followed three years later by the building of the Ferrocarril Primer Entrerriano (First Entre Rios Railway), later renamed Ferrocarril General Urquiza, the first railway line of the province between Entre Rios and La Mesopotamia. By 1880 railway expansion was rapid. The development of the network was sponsored initially by national capital, followed by further investments of predominantly British and French money. This growth was directly related to the export of agricultural products, largely from the Pampa region, where the greatest number of railroad lines was concentrated. Built to a radial pattern, the main lines ended up in Buenos Aires City port. The state also made an important contribution to the development of the railroad network by building the so-called ‘fomento’ or promotional lines, created to reach areas deemed unprofitable by private investors. A large part of what was later known as the Ferrocarril General Belgrano (General Belgrano Railway), was paid for by the State Railways company, which extended lines between provincial capitals, such as those from Córdoba to Tucumán, and from Salta to Jujuy. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were about 16,500 kilometres of line, of which 2,000 belonged to the state, with an annual traffic volume of 18 million passengers and 11.3 million tons of cargo. Between 1946 and 1948 all the railways were nationalised and operated under the management of the Empresa Nacional de Transportes (National Transportation Company), ENT . During this period the lines were renamed after significant figures in Argentinian history: presidents, military leaders and heroes of the nineteenth century struggle for independence: José de San Martín, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Manuel Belgrano, Justo José de Urquiza, Bartolomé Mitre and Julio Argentino Roca. SUMMER 2015
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From left to right: drawn, traced and cast letters. The Argentinian railway network, with about 50,000 kilometres of line, was once one of the largest in the world, and it remains the largest in Latin America. It had four different gauges, as well as connections with Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. A period of decline began in 1958 when, due to a decision to concentrate on developing the road network, some railway lines were closed or simply dismantled. After 1976 the closure of lines accelerated under the civilmilitary dictatorship. Several passenger lines stopped running, and with no investment the infrastructure deteriorated, isolating small communities. Finally, in 1991, the Argentinian Railway Company was deactivated to give way to a complete privatisation of the network, which began in 1992. Under the administrations of the presidents Néstor Kirchner (2003–07) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–present), a new era in the history of the national railways began. As a part of the largest investment of the last 50 years, new lines have been opened and the rolling stock of all urban and long distance lines has been renovated. There has been a significant increase in the transportation of goods by train and investments have been made to improve the lines. On 1 March 2015, President Kirchner announced the cancellation of existing contracts with private operators and the first steps towards the 1 renationalisation of the network. 1. Source: Universidad Tecnolégica Nacional, Brief History of the Argentinian Railways, its construction, destruction, importance and renovation project, Chapter III. Haedo: UTN, 2012.
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Lettering styles As we travel through Argentinian railway history we find many different character styles. Chronologically, serifs, particularly clarendons, are associated with the early days of the railway and its the expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Examples are usually cast in metal and almost exclusively imported from Britain or France. The first sans serif styles were grotesques. From the second decade of the twentieth century onwards, we see more humanist, and particularly geometric forms. These examples would have been created by draughtsmen in the employment of the railway companies. To these two main groupings, and running chrono-
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logically parallel to them, can be added scripts, formal or informal, either calligraphic in style or closer to handwritten forms. Finally there are decoratives, which reflect the stylistic trends of the period in which they appeared.
Calligraphy, lettering and typography There were at least three ways of generating the letterforms: tracing them by hand using writing tools, drawing them, or by using or designing type. Handmade production, both formal and informal, therefore coexisted with typeface selection from specimens of existing and commercially available alphabets, and the designing of such alphabets.
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Below, lettering for various purposes. From left to right: corporate identification, the initials of Compañia General de Ferrocarriles en la Provincia de Buenos Aires, cast as part of the framework of a seat; as a warning: ‘Danger :Train’; for information: ‘In the interests of public health, you are requested not to spit outside the spittoon’; informative and directional, but also as part of the decoration and architectural styling of the building: ‘Luggage’.
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FC PROVINCIAL This sign on the Ferrocarril Provincial de Buenos Aires caught our attention, not only for being cast in one piece with its concrete support, but also for its peculiar design, which could be described as a display type, monoline upper case and in a constructivist, modular style with basic geometric shapes. Undoubtedly, its most distinctive feature is the rectangular appendices on the baselines and the above the cap height, which create a sense of flow and rhythm within the shape of a line of text. According to Jorge Waddell, railway historian and Director of the Fundación Museo Ferroviario (Railway Museum Foundation), the signage of the Provincial may be closely related to that of the Compañia General de Ferrocarriles en la Provincia de Buenos Aires (General Railway Company of Buenos Aires Province) and the Ferrocarril Midland, the Buenos Aires Midland Railway, FCM. From the beginning of 1954 both companies merged to create the state company Ferrocarril Nacional Provincia de Buenos Aires (National Railway of Buenos Aires Province), and incorporated into the Ferrocarril Nacional General Belgrano (General Belgrano National Railway) network in 1957. Although these signs don’t share the same typographic style, their supports have the same dimensions and seem to share the same method of manufacture, which suggests that they may have been produced in the same place. Horacio Menéndez, a former railway guard, and now an active member of the Asociación Amigos del Ferrocarril Provincial, (Association of the Friends of the Provincial Railway), confirmed that they were installed in the early 1960s, which supports our theory. We have used these signs as our source of typographic
1927-1977
FERROCARRIL PROVINCIAL RAMAL P1
LA PLATA The sign at Avellaneda station and opposite, our font design inspired by the signs on the P1 line of the Ferrocarril Provincial de Buenos Aires.
A.SEGUI - C.A.EL.PATO - ING.J.ALLAN
inspiration for FC Provincial, and have designed headline fonts, both with and without appendices, and a lower case, which can be used in combination. The Association of Friends of the Provincial Railways will use them in the design of its pieces of visual communication.
In the case of railway companies, all these methods were used because they either produced their own letters, imported them, or selected them from those already available. The production of letters was carried out by draughtsmen in technical departments, employees of ‘Vía y Obras’ (Roads and Works), and official typographers working in printing departments owned by the main companies.
the service in some way We could even link different typographic styles to a specific railway line, which were used for one particular company, such as those we found on the signage of the P1 branch line of the Ferrocarril Provincial de Buenos Aires.
Uses and functions
Methods of construction
Lettering and signage are present in the railway system not of course by chance, but for very practical reasons, and each with very specific functions: for corporate identification, to identify particular lines and destinations, to signpost the stops along the line, to warn, to inform travellers about the services provided, and to decorate the buildings. There was lettering everywhere we looked. We found examples relating to: l the station architecture (waiting rooms, platforms, engine sheds, main station buildings)
The signage was made from various materials: cast iron, cement, reinforced concrete, wood, tin, paint. Each line seemed to specialise in the use of one or more particular materials. The creation of the signage was the responsibility of Vía y Obras, which had its workshops where they could be made. According to exrailway worker and now railway enthusiast Carlos Pérez Darnaud, ‘Each company was self-sufficient and specialised in at least one particular material.’ The Provincial, for example, used to work mainly with iron and tin in their Gambier workshops, located in La Plata.
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GAMBIER - LA CUMBRE - J.GORINA
PARADA KM 36 - AP KM 40 GOB.MONTEVERDE - SAN FRANCISCO SOLANO PASCO - MONTE CHINGOLO - A.A.FERNANDEZ
l the tracks (signals, rails, sleepers, poles, bridges) l rolling stock (engines, coaches, railway vehicles)
AVELLANEDA
l miscellaneous other items that were part of
FcProvincial
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ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890 @¡!”±•<>#&/()°:=¿?*[],;{|}-†#¢¥$£€ Recuperación de la tipografía de los carteles nomencladores del FPBA | Tipografía Histórica Ferroviaria | © 2013 | Fabio Ares y Octavio Osores
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Above: a technical drawing plan for a concrete station sign, drawing N.1850, Ferrocarril General Roca, 1955. Right: the reverse of a tiled sign, at Alegre station, Ferrocarril del Sud, reveals the manufacturer’s name, that of the Patent Enamel Company of Birmingham, England. Photographs: Patricio Larrambebere.
Methods of application We found letters painted, carved, moulded, tiled, cast, engraved, glued, printed, stamped and inlaid. Once again, this sort of work was generally the responsibility of Vía y Obras. But in some instances, the materials were imported prefabricated, as in the case of the tiled signs of the 18
Larger pictures, from top left: a variety of locations – in the station, on rolling stock, 0n uniforms, on the track, in printing. Inset pictures, clockwise from top: a variety of production processes – engraved, carved and painted.
Patent Enamel Company of Birmingham, England, that can still be found in some stations of the Ferrocarril General Roca (General Roca Railway), formerly the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, or those of the Ferrocarril Buenos Aires al Pacifico (Buenos Aires Pacific Railway), BAP . We also found other British letters, stamped ‘Chromo W–Hampton’. SUMMER 2015
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La Plata.
- factura nacional - economía de recursos - pericia de los operarios
T H E J O U R N A L O F S T B R I D E L I B R A RY
FC SUD
FC GAMBIER FC Gambier was inspired by this sign we found on the verandah of the station at Joaquín Gorina on the Ferrocarril Provincial, near La Plata. The sign has been made from shaped and welded iron rods. We named our digital version after Ferrocarril Provincial’s Gambier workshops, whose technicians were skilled in working with metal.
Supports and location An important element of the signage is the means by which they are held in position. These not only support the lettering, but provide vital information about their dates, origin, commissioning and the characteristics of manufacture. We have found a great range of materials employed for these purposes: wood, metal, cement, tiles, glass, ceramics and paper.
A prominent feature, still to be found on the General Roca line, is the letters used by the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway since 1925, after its old wooden signs with English-made iron ‘skeleton letters’ were replaced and unified under a new typographic style. For that, a premoulded system of reinforced concrete was used, a benefit of the growing national cement industry and the commercial links between the Great Southern Railway and the Argentinian Portland Cement Company. Most of the signs are still there on both active and non-active lines. In some places the original colour scheme has been imaginatively altered, a phenomenon also present on some other lines. In an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at graphic conformity, the signs were relocated to stations that belonged to other lines, like San Martin and Sarmiento. There were installed letters of three sizes, with hybrid features, between geometric and humanist, with some elements of Edward Johnston’s Underground Railway Block-letter, designed for London Underground, and matching the typographic choice with its own logo, inspired by the same company. The Ferroclub Argentino (Argentinian Railway Club), an organisation dedicated to preserving railway heritage, keeps a collection of these letters in one of its sites. That made our survey a lot easier and allowed a more accurate digitalisation.
Below left: a destination sign on the Ferrocarril General Roca. Right: the collection of concrete letters now in the archive of the Ferroclub Argentino.
Signs that contain history The signs carrying the names of the stations, nameboards, usually placed on the head of the platforms, seem to be the paradigm of the relationship between lettering and railways. Both indicators and identifiers, they provide the information about the location as well as the company, giving clues about their origin and epoch. In Argentina there is no need to look for them in museums, because in most cases they have survived the companies that made or imported them, and even the stations they once identified, demolished or abandoned during the process of dismantling which the Argentinian railways endured CGBA kilometric marker sign in Navarro, Buenos Aires Province. Photograph: Dario Cubilla. 20
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Lettering used for purposes of inventory and for personal promotion and mythology: ‘Sent by Evita –25 casitas [‘little houses’] for Jujuy earthquake victims’. An Eva Peron Foundation train carries prefabricated emergency dwellings for those made homeless by the 1948 Salta earthquake in north-west Argentina. Photograph: National Archive Leg.174104 over the last 50 years. They coexist today with signs from other periods. In many cases the station sign might be the only image, the only visual connection, the passengers had with a particular town. It is very common to find old photographs of people posing next to the signs, as if they wanted to say, ‘This is where I belong’, or simply ‘Look where I am’.
Stencilled lettering Stencilled letters were used extensively by railway lines from the beginning of the twentieth century. In 2013, the Asociación Ferroviaria Belgrano Sur, the South Belgrano Railway Association, a non-profit association charged with the restoration of the network’s G line, contacted us to advise them on the replacement of the 22
historic kilometric marker signs installed by its predecessor, the Compagnie Générale de Chemins de Fer dans la Province de Buenos Aires (the General Railway Company of Buenos Aires Province). Founded in 1904, the Compagnie Générale was a French company, and unsurprisingly, imported templates were used to make the signs. We discovered that they had used the designs of another French company, Thevenon & Cie. Thevenon was founded in 1824, and its lettering became highly popular after being used for the identification markings of tanks, aircraft and ambulances during the First World War. Later in the twentieth century, a revival of this lettering, called Charette, was made commercially available, its design wrongly attributed to the architect Le Corbusier. The same letterform, clearly a popular one, can be also found on some elements and facilities on the General Roca line and has even been used on naval equipment. Recently we were allowed to buy a set of these templates for numerals, which was a great help with our digitisation. The former owner assured us that the templates had been used by his father, a general manager of the national enterprise Ferrocarril del Estado (State Railway), SUMMER 2015
The Argentinian Central Railway’s Muestrario de Tipos en Existencia (Specimen of Existing Types) and a labelled example of De Vinne Condensed (Photographs: Patricio Larrambebere, and the Museo Nacional Ferroviario). I S S U E N O .1 7
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• FC Nefa stencil Lettering conforming to the Normas FAT– NEFA regulations, applied to a goods wagon of the General Belgrano Railway.
F C N E FA S T E N C I L FC Nefa was based on Ferrocarriles Argentinos’ plan of the same name (see main text below). Some of the sans serif geometric uppercase letters are from plan N.674, and the numerals are from N.938, dated 1976, the start of the last civil-military dictatorship.
which was responsible for the construction of the San Antonio Oeste –Nahuel Huapi section, built from 1908 onwards and later attached to the General Roca line.
Hot and Cold Composition The word typography brings us, of course, to the printing of texts using moveable type. If there was ever a typeface ‘par excellence’ for the Argentinian railways, it would have to be among those which were supplied to and used by the railway printshops. Today we can still find some of their traces. Our investigations took us to the typographic archive of surviving material relating to the printshop of the Central Argentinian Railway, the Ferrocarril Central Argentino, later renamed the Ferrocarril General Bartolomé Mitre. This is now in the care of the Museo Nacional Ferroviario (National Railway Museum). There we found type with the stamp of the British foundry Stephenson Blake, and thanks to the network’s 1924 Muestrario de Tipos en Existencia, (Specimen of Exist24
We have recreated some missing characters and made a new stencil version; we have included among its glyphs the FerrocarriIes Argentinos graphic from plan N.485; and have added the signs that represent the coach braking system (plan N.539) and the greyhound graphic that was used to identify the high-speed coaches (plan N.487). The latter is of a very similar design to that of the American bus company the Greyhound Corporation, and was frequently confused with it.
ing Types, see page 23), we gained some idea of the extent of the printshop’s repertoire. We were able to identify positively some of the typefaces through surviving labelled samples, as in the case of Doric and De Vinne. We also found type from the Argentinian foundry Grafex SA, Linotype slugs with the inscription ‘Linea Mitre’, as well as stereotype plates for coupon printing, and layouts for 2 printing tickets of the Edmondson type.
Moving towards a corporate identity Since the opening of the first railway in 1857, visual communication, and therefore its typographic styling, was the responsibility of individual companies, which is why these aspects developed in such a variety of ways.
2. The Edmondson ticket, the small cardboard printed tickets that replaced handwritten receipts for railway journeys, were invented in the 1840s by Thomas Edmondson, a stationmaster on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, and enjoyed worldwide use until the late twentieth century. SUMMER 2015
! ABCDEFGHIJKLMN ÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890 "#$ab “Caja baja” compuesta por la versión stencil.
The first attempt to unify railway graphics took place under Juan Domingo Peron’s government’s nationalisation programme in the 1950s; the signs of some stations on the San Martín and Sarmiento lines were replaced by those of the Roca line. Each line’s existing colour palette was retained for differentiation, but it was a scheme that was ultimately unsuccessful. In 1967, during the presidency of Juan Carlos Onganía, General Juan Carlos de Marchi became the president of the Empresa de Ferrocarriles Argentinos (Argentinian Railways Enterprise), EFEA . He developed a plan for modernization of the railway network, particularly in the areas of services and rolling stock. In 1968, the Enterprise adopted the name Ferrocarriles Argentinos (Argentinian Railways), and after a year it began operating under the jurisdiction of the National Transport Secretariat. Regulations, known as Normas FAT (Ferrocarriles Área Técnica) Regulations of the Railway Technical Department, were established for the rolling stock. This plan, called NEFA I S S U E N O .1 7
(Normas y Especificaciones de Ferrocarriles Argentinos), Regulations and Specifications of the Argentinian Railways, created the new guidelines for the different types of towed and shunted goods wagons: tarpaulin-covered, high- and low-sided, those for transporting grain, containers and flat-beds. For all of these a unique identification system was established. These regulations are still in force, although some variations in the design of the letters can be found. With the privatisation of the 1990s, new contractors arrived, bringing with them new typographic styles and the return of type, this time in the hands of digital technology. That allowed designs like Frutiger, Helvetica and later Arial to coexist with the earlier ones created by the engineers, architects and draughtsmen of the Vía y Obras. The same has happened repeatedly with the different operators responsible for services, resulting in a diversification of the criteria for the use of railway typography. Today, a new graphic identity, Trenes Argentinos 25
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BOOKS
Right: Father Edward Catich, assisted by two seminary students, making a rubbing of the Trajan Column inscription in about 1950. Below: a recreation of the
The new identity, Trenes Argentinos, in use on both rolling stock and in station signage. Photograph (left) Ministerio del Interior y Transporte (Argentinian Trains) is in use, created by the Ministry of Interior and Transport in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. Without any particularly strong precedent, it is an attempt at a corporate livery, bearing the clear stamp of the ministerial policies implemented in the new short and long distance trains. It is based largely on a strong chromatic scheme, the blue of the Argentinian flag, combined with white and black, and the crucial typographic presence of the Fago superfamily, the work of the German designer Ole Schafer. This typography is used for various purposes: identification, signage and information. The signs, ubiquitous in terminals and stations, printed with inkjet technology
and mounted on tin or foamboard, have some problems of typographic scaling. It is highly likely that this system will accompany the restoration of the railway network at a national level, as it heads towards reunification. In the interests of Argentinian typographic heritage, and particularly the heritage of the railway network, we hope it can coexist with the historic signs.
Patricio Eduardo Devoto
Se respetó la caja alta. Se trabaja en el diseño de las minúsculas, puntuación y signos especiales.
We found this CGBA sign at Tomás Jofré station, near Mercedes, west of Buenos Aires. It features metal letters mounted on a wooden sign. Photograph: Nicolas Calvino Maggio.
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The Eternal Letter: two millennia of the classical Roman capital Edited by Paul Shaw Published by the MIT Press 270pp, colour £37.95
Fabio Ares is a graphic designer specialising in visual communication, type and printing history, and is Professor of Typographic Design at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Octavio Osores is a freelance graphic designer and teaches design at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
• FC CGBA
FC CGBA
inscription using Adobe Trajan.
ÁBCDÉFGHÏJK LMNÑÖPQRS TÛVWXYZ abcdefghijklmn ñopqrstuvwxyzæ 1234567890 ÂÆж¥Œ#$& SUMMER 2015
Codex editor Paul Shaw’s introduction tells us that ‘The Eternal Letter is the first of what is intended to be a series of thematic books, Codex Studies in Letterforms.’ Although he concedes that the subject of the classical Roman capital is too vast to be covered by one book, The Eternal Letter makes an impressive attempt, being a large-format, richly illustrated collection of articles, contributed to by a host of luminaries: Frank Blokland, James Mosley, Matthew Carter, Jonathan Hoefler, Jost Hochuli and Richard Kindersley, to list just a few, interspersed by frequent editorial links. The book takes as its central focus the 114 AD inscription on Trajan’s Column in Rome, but as lines of thought radiate outward, draws many others within its compass, including van Krimpen, Goudy, Gill, Johnston, Michael Harvey and Zapf. Although much is rightly made of the beauty of these incised letterforms, the emotion they and others like them were intended to evoke was surely not remotely feelgood, their unspoken message to slaves and conquered peoples who might have seen them: ‘Resistance is futile. We are technically, culturally and intellectually so superior to you that you could never hope to destroy I S S U E N O .1 7
us’. It was quite some corporate brand. It is unsurprising that the oldest known reproduction of Trajan’s Column was made in bronze by order of Napoleon Bonaparte, a sometime republican who fell in thrall to the allure of empire. You feel that even Hitler might have been interested, had not Roman iconography for the purposes of totalitarian imagemaking already been appropriated by fellow dictator Benito Mussolini. Carol Twombly’s 1989 digital version, Trajan, has had its critics in recent years, through no fault of its own but because of its frequent use in cinema graphics, an aspect explored by Yves Peters. As he rightly says, a lot of this use was undoubtedly imitative, copying the imagery of a
successful film in the hope that some of its moneyspinning capabilities would rub off. However, Trajan is also highly legible at distance, and can suggest by means of its magisterial elegance that even the schlockiest slasher or predictable rom-com is a classier, more intelligent production than it actually is. Appropriately, Hollywood is itself culturally imperialistic, habitually forcefeeding a particular view of life and a set of values that hold little relevance for anyone outside the United States. But Trajan, the digital font, and its developments are, as Paul Shaw tells us, proof that ‘the classical Roman capital is still relevant in a digital world’ with ‘as much meaning as letters glowing on 27