A Peculiar Timelessness by Madeline Partner

a peculiar timelessness

Approach this work with an open mind. Mixing the two texts creates an

intentionally confusing environment where unexpected connections will be made, and one will gain a new understanding of each text.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. One morning this past June, I played truant from a conference I was attending in Norwich, England, and called a taxi to take me out to the countryside. But the taxi was late, and I had to stand and wait awhile. When it finally arrived, shortly after nine, there was some confusion. Was this the taxi I had hired? Was I the person the driver had been sent to pick up? Had some other passenger, not yet waiting there at the circular drive at the heart of campus, called the dispatcher? We only had each other: I was going somewhere and he was prepared to take someone somewhere. I entered the car.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. It was a gray morning, and visibility was poor. The high latitude and the date — it happened to be the summer solstice — meant the sun had been up since four-thirty, but fog persisted. I told the driver where I was going, and we drove in silence for a while through mild traffic and quiet streets, until the city began to thin out in the gray. And where exactly in Framingham Earl? the driver asked me. St. Andrew’s Church, I said, reciting what I had written down: near Poringland, just off the Yelverton Road. He knew it.

There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

I looked out the window, watching the landscape slip by, the houses, the hedges, the fields and farms, the strange-looking bales of hay bound in black plastic, the road signs with their unfamiliar East Anglian names, the heavy, threatening trucks that barreled down the busier roads. The driver broke the silence and became talkative, flitting from one subject to another in a laconic but unceasing way, not really caring much whether I was listening or interested.

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist. I like the area and I like traveling in it, he said. There are many airfields around here, not just in Norfolk but also Suffolk and many other parts of the country. It’s just something I do. I have a spare bit of time, yeah, I go down to an airfield, see an air show, or just visit a disused field, go down there, remember what it was like. Places like Greenham Common, down in Berkshire. You know about that, yeah? I said I didn’t, but he could see now that I was making some notes, that he had captured my interest. He forged ahead.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought.

â&#x20AC;Ś it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

Greenham Common’s the major one. That’s where your CND camp was, yeah, the women’s peace camp, all that. Used to be cruise missiles and all sorts there through the eighties, until the nineties. I went down there, bit of runway left, but otherwise it’s all gone. And right around here, in Norfolk, with all the airfields and bases and what have you, this was called Little America during the war.

It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization. Whole area was full of American air bases. During the war, the Second World War, mind you, bomb groups based here and they used to go out on flying missions from here in the evenings. We are near the coast, and they’d take off from here to bomb the German cities, from here and from Suffolk, too.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e. that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether. There is someone who would have loved to talk to you about this, I said, perhaps not loud enough for him to hear, and, as I said it, there was a sudden catch in my throat. Only then did the driver introduce himself, turning back for a moment with his hand on the wheel, his blue eyes a little bulbous, but the palest and most guileless of blues, tending almost toward gray. My name’s Jason, he said. And, with the same laconic urgency as before, he continued talking. Bentwaters was another big Cold War air base, he said. That closed down in 1993, thereabouts, but many of the men just stayed here, you see. They’d been here so long, they were part of the life here, these American airmen. They married local girls. There’s a museum down there in Bentwaters, that’s in Suffolk, they’ve got some of the old airmen giving talks.

Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! Tell you what, I think the place belongs to a family now, they bought the airfield, if I’ve got that right. The Kemble family, it’s theirs now. There’s just the one plane flying from there now, a Spitfire, and it’s flown by a lady called Carolyn Grace. She’s nearing sixty now, but she still takes the plane out. Only lady that flies a Spitfire in this country, to the best of my knowledge. Strange to say, her Spitfire was flown in a mission over Normandy on the morning of the D Day landings. And there was another based in Woodbridge, close to the coast, and that one had an emergency landing field, with an airstrip three times your normal airstrip length. That’s for your planes coming in from missions, maybe in distress or something.

I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. Jason talked, and we drove on, through small country roads that were like a postcard idea of rural England, winding, narrow, sedate roads, which, at sudden intervals, became larger roads, fierce, fast, and dangerous roads, which seemed to have barely enough space for the heavy traffic that plied them. On one of these larger roads, just as I noticed a sign for a village called Dunston, a large trailer rumbled past us at speed, and, whether from the shock of that overtaking vehicle, or because I had eaten nothing that morning, or perhaps due to some uneasiness brought about by Jason’s stories, I felt carsick for the first time in my life.

We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor. And at that very moment, with a flickering photographic recall, as though someone had just switched on a slide projector, I remembered something W. G. Sebald had written. Looking it up now, I am surprised by how accurate my memory of it was, save for a few of the statistical details: His thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth air fleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles. Are you all right? Jason said, glancing at the rearview mirror. I had rested my forehead on the window at the back and bunched myself up on the seat. I must have looked terrible. I feel ill, I said. I think Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to get something to eat, is there a small shop nearby where we could stop? Jason said there was a place right ahead, just past the Poringland Road, and within a few minutes we pulled in near a busy intersection. I went into the shop to buy a banana and a bottle of apple juice. It was about a mile away from where we were, in Framingham Pigot, in December 2001, that Sebald had had a heart attack while driving his Peugeot. The car had crashed and Sebald had died instantly. His daughter, in the passenger seat, had been badly injured.

â&#x20AC;Ś the firestorms setting the heavens alight and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

it was another set of lives, another set of fates rising I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think—we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something infinitely more important. As I thought about how close in space these events were, even though by now removed in time, I noticed from the backseat of the taxi the headlines of the Eastern Daily News, pasted in front of the shop: MAN JAILED FOR MURDER OF NORFOLK PENSIONER. It was another set of

lives, another set of fates rising to the surface for a moment before falling into history.

I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in colour. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of; if you have seen the old typefoundries’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest ‘wording’ that he could find (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. Northwest of here is Swanton Morley, Jason said, when he saw that I had recovered somewhat, eager to resume his storytelling. I’ve been to that as well, there is another airfield there, they’ve got acrobatic displays. And just to tell you how a little bit of history opens things up, yeah, I noticed a small memorial when I was there, didn’t recognize the name. But just from the name of the airfield, I was able to go home and on the computer find out who that was, what happened to him, why there’s a memorial.

I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr Cleland said, ‘No: you’re wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read — if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamour and significance — then the layout would have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying “This is not the text as it will appear.”’

to the surface for a moment before falling into history. 51

With just a little bit of information your computer can tell you so much. Christopher Wilkins, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the name, he was flying in an air show, in 1998, when his engines stalled and he went down. And while Jason was telling me this, I remembered one of Sebaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s micropoems in Unrecounted: On 8 May 1927 the pilots Nungesser & Coli took off from Le Bourget & after that were never seen again.

Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising. Jason said, as though he were commenting directly on my own silent thoughts: These people are worth remembering. It’s nice to think that people will want to remember the past, because it shapes who we are, at the end of the day. I try to remember, you know. I’ve even been to some airfields in Germany. Well — his tone changed, and he stopped the car, bringing me out of my reverie — here we are. St. Andrew’s Church. I’ll just wait out here for you.

The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. It was a quiet, shaded lane. The fog had lifted, but the day was not bright. There was not a soul around. I raised the slim iron latch of the wooden gate, which was overgrown with creepers, and went around the old Norman church with its characteristic East Anglian round tower. Round-tower churches are rare in England now, except in Norfolk and Suffolk. St. Andrew’s is built of honey-colored stone, its churchyard full of old stones, old graves, well kept but arranged somewhat haphazardly. Flowers were in bloom all over, and there was in particular a profusion of foxgloves.

Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. I searched. Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw Sebald’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in “1944” and the “1” in “2001.” The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down.

how long was I th

here? The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called ‘fine printing’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. That is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘colour’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hair-spaces—these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus. How long was I there?

And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message—that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book-face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

I have a book at home â&#x20AC;Ś when I think of it, all I see is

When I returned to the car, I asked Jason to drive me back to Norwich, to the Church of St. Peter Mancroft in the city center. Jason said: Just to satisfy my curiosity, this grave you came to see, he’s a writer, yeah? What’s his name, maybe I can find out more about him. I told him the name. He’d never heard it. He was a sort of local historian, I said, like you. Like you, he didn’t want the past to be forgotten, especially the small and neglected stories. He lived in this area a long time, taught literature up at the university. Jason turned around, and from under his glasses I could see both a merriment and a melancholy. He was originally from Germany, I Said. Germany? he said. Well, that’s what you’d call ironic. And he wrote down the name.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else.

At St. Peter Mancroft was the memorial to Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physician and antiquarian whose weird digressive texts Urn Burial and Religio Medici had meant much to me as a young would-be physician. I did not read Sebald until later, after I abandoned my medical studies. Only later still did I find out that he had been strongly influenced by Browne. That connection with Browne, and with others, like Nabokov and certain obscure historians of Northern Renaissance art, helped me to understand something of the uncanny feeling I had when I first read Sebald, and the feeling that I still have each time I read him: a feeling of return rather than arrival.

The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind. That afternoon, thinking of Jason’s eyes and the slight mischief in his serious mien, I was faintly aware of others traveling in same circuits, pulled by an unidentifiable gravitational force into certain habits of mind and psyche. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald had written: Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the University of East Anglia, where he had taught for more than thirty years. A large magpie followed me around, disappearing for occasional spells, but always returning, a solitary bird, sharp black and white, bigger than I expected, and as starkly devoid of color as a woodcut. I am not superstitious, and thought nothing of it. But the bird was persistent. These things, as Sebald said in one of his last interviews, once you have seen them, have a habit of returning, and they want attention. He said this with regard to the interred past, but I think he possibly meant more. Later, in the unending late afternoon of the longest day of the year, Sam, one of the conference organizers whom I had gotten to know that week, and who had come to Norwich just a few weeks before Sebald died, said — with no prompting form me — that it had been noticed at the university that Sebald always wore two watches, one on each wrist. Was it something to do with the mystical properties of different metals? Was it some strange sense of time that demanded simultaneous witness? Or was it simply Sebald’s dry sense of humor? And were the watches even set to the same time zone, or was one testifying to past time, the way his writing did? Sam didn’t know, but I had found myself thinking again of the magpie, its talent for collecting this and that, and its eye for the sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary. I said good night to Sam and, returning to my hotel in the last light, well past nine, saw the bird again, going from bush to bush in the uphill path ahead of me, little more than a shadow now.

Publications & Sources

Words

Images

The Crystal Goblet Beatrice Warde

Lake Superior, Cascade River Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1995

Originally printed in London in 1932, under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon.

Always Returning Teju Cole The Rings of Saturn W. G. Sebald Unrecounted W. G. Sebald

Night + Fog (Norilsk) (26) Darren Almond, 2007 Untitled Roland Iselin Hinterland I, Cape Flats, South Africa Marcus Lyon, 2012 Evening Marie Cazin, 1884-88 River Mawddach, Day 71, 29 May, 8:52pm., SH 734 213 Gwynedd Harry Cory Wright, 2006 Ditchling Beacon, Dew Pond Jem Southam, 1999 Figures and Landscapes VIII, Rømø, Denmark Per Bak Jensen, 2003 A 1: Rose de la Broye (FR) Nicolas Faure, 2001

This book was designed by Madeline Partner, a junior in Communication Design at Washington University in St. Louis, Fall 2017. Typeset in Baskerville, and Univers. Originally printed on Mohawk Everyday Digital Coated Silk White, 80lb text and cover.

approach this work with an open mind