This issue of Amodern turns to new scholarship on typography in the expanded field of reproductive print technologies. It has its roots in “Before and Beyond Typography,” a 2020 conference sponsored by Stanford University that explored “the vitality of non-typographic publishing networks” and “the dynamic interplay between technological change and non-typographic printing” around the globe.1 Organized by Thomas S. Mullaney and Andrew Amstutz, the conference drew together scholars working on print cultures that either preceded the global spread of industrial type printing and the discursive conflation of type with modernity or jostled alongside type in the twentieth century as “alternative trajectories.”2 The animating question of “Before and Beyond Typography” was this: “What becomes of our understanding of ‘-graphics’ when we dislodge the prefix ‘typo-’ from its long-dominant position and place it alongside those of ‘chiro-’, ‘xylo-’, ‘litho-’, ‘mimeo-’, ‘xero-’, ‘seri-’, and other methods and technologies?”3
The five articles in this issue respond to this question, extending it both chronologically and thematically to document what Mullaney has elsewhere described as the “vibrant technolinguistic imagination” before, beyond, and alongside type.4 We build on Amodern 9’s analysis of “the paths not taken, the dead ends and minor figures of media history” and take additional inspiration from Ruben Gallo’s work on avant-garde writers and artists in early twentieth-century Mexico.5 Exploring the relationship between revolution, new technologies, and visual cultures, Gallo shows how these “foot soldiers of technology” used “cameras, typewriters, radios, and other mechanical instruments” in their practice and “embraced the new technological media and wrote eloquent accounts of their mechanical encounters.”6 This issue extends Gallo’s analysis to print culture, with each article variously locating – and dislocating – typography via encounters with print-making around the world. Aesthetic interventions made with alternative text technologies comprise a major aspect of our focus; but so, too, does everyday use: as these articles will show, it is often in printed ephemera that one sees so-called “typographic modernity” thoroughly pushed to the periphery.
In responding to the question first posed by “Before and Beyond Typography,” the five articles in the issue are interdisciplinary, spanning digital humanities, media studies, comparative literature, architectural history, and history. We explore a range of different print technologies, from wood block printing, magazine publishing, typography, and lithography to photocopying, recording and transcription, and character encoding. Further, we model our approach to these technologies on the productive emphasis Amodern 8 has put on “locating and interrogating connections between genres, formats, and contexts.”7 In the present issue, for example, Margie Borschke extends this emphasis by stressing “anomalies and accidents” as well as the importance of “not-quite-print technologies of reproduction.” Likewise, as Kelly W. S. Ritter evocatively puts it in her contribution, many print technologies are themselves “the site of medial border-crossings and hybridization.” A number of contributions take these medial border-crossings as their focus. We also take inspiration from Alexander Jabbari’s encouragement to attend to the intertwined technological and affective elements of print technologies since “print and its conventions were technologies of modernization as well as sites of affective investments, and the physical appearance of the text was as significant to its readers as its content.”8 Returning to Borshke, she argues that format shifting between different media technologies “has material consequences as well as rhetorical weight” since “each shift or transformation offers new affordances, new audiences, and new context for the content that it contains.” The expanded field of reproductive print technologies should be understood to include affect, aesthetics, audience, and rhetorical address in the same way that it encompasses a range of ‘-graphic’ print media.
The five essays in this issue can be broadly grouped into two time periods: first, the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s and, second, the 1970s and 1980s. The first three articles (Haihong Li, Kelly W. S. Ritter, and Andrew Amstutz) examine the intersection of mechanical print and visual culture in both China and India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is no accident that these articles examine Urdu and Chinese print production given the uneasy relationship of both languages to typographic technologies. In different ways, these three essays provide answers to Gallo’s query for Mexico during the same time period of “how the rise of new technological media sparked debates about the representation of technology … and the cultural repercussions of these processes.”9
Turning to the second period, Margie Borshke and Tyler Shoemaker’s articles shift chronologically to the eve of the digital age in the 1970s and 1980s with a focus on the impact of everyday office technologies on subsequent digital networks and reproductive text technologies. Borshke, for example, argues that the Xerox machine was crucial in Saul Kripke’s transformative impact on philosophy. The Xerox machine returns in Shoemaker’s article as it influenced the making of Unicode Standard. In drawing together diverse regions and different time periods, this issue builds on the observation in Amodern 7 of “the benefit of this cross-temporal and -media conversation” and the simultaneous “materiality and fragility” of media ephemera.10
Overview
Haihong Li, in her contribution on nianhua, a woodblock print technology in China that employed polychrome xylography to produce new year’s pictures, examines how often anonymous nianhua artists engaged themes of human agency, political dissent, and changing gender norms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inquiring “how did folk artists use nianhua to comment on social and political changes?” Li argues that the genre often tacitly encouraged the questioning of social and political authority in both its topics and modes of visual representation. In her own compelling terms, “the genre offered a heterogeneity of voices that articulated desires, dilemmas, challenges, and crises.” Expanding on the robust scholarly study of the relationship between print and social-political change in early twentieth century China, Li argues that the artists working in the nianhua genre made “common people, especially peasants, its protagonists” in ways that both anticipated subsequent communist officials’ engagement with the genre in the 1930s and illustrated the genre’s wide ranging social implications.
Shifting from woodblock prints to pictorial magazines, Kelly W. S. Ritter undertakes a careful study of the 1930s pictorial magazine Modern Sketch that was published in Shanghai from 1934 to 1937. Bridging scholarship on print culture with the history of literacy, Ritter demonstrates how pictorials (magazines with pictures) became an important arena for larger debates over literacy, the goals of education, and the meaning of modernity. At the heart of Ritter’s story is the inventive owner and publisher Shao Xunmei and his experiments with image and text for pictorials. This article echoes Megan Eaton Robb’s “methodological model” of “a granular account of a local newspaper’s contributions” to better understand wider publics and identity-making.11 As Ritter puts it, Shao Xunmei sought to “make reading a fun and edifying part of daily life.” While print culture in early twentieth century Shanghai has been extensively studied, Ritter draws attention to 1) the relationship between textual experiments with pictorials and social anxieties over literacy and 2) the material and discursive connections between text and image beyond even artist’s political intent. Ritter argues that pictorials present a far more subversive and varied snapshot of intellectual and social life in 1930s Shanghai than more conventional newspapers due to the cultivated sense of fun, or what she terms the pictorial magazine’s “willingness to lampoon the readership” and “their modern anxieties.”
Moving from China to India, Andrew Amstutz examines type experiments for the Urdu language that attempted to approximate the handwritten aesthetics and slanting style of the nasta‘līq form of the Perso-Arabic script in linear typography in the early 1930s. This article addresses a comparatively less studied aspects in Urdu print culture in which lithography predominated, specifically how some prominent Indian Muslim printers in Hyderabad experimented with movable type for nasta‘līq. Focusing on the 1933 catalogue of the Osmania Type Foundry, Amstutz argues that Urdu’s slanting script became the site of technological experimentation, debates over wider Muslim ties, and articulations of local sovereignty in India, despite the limited role of type in Urdu publishing in the early twentieth century. Beyond well-studied themes of nationalism and religious difference, the article documents how Urdu’s script style and print technologies were debated by some Indian Muslim intellectuals and framed in relation to other languages that employ the Perso-Arabic script around the world.
In summary, the first three articles interrogate the relationship between the printed word and visual cultures, or what Gallo terms “impassioned debates about the relation between modernity and representation, and between art and machines.”12 Moving from the 1930s to the 1970s, the next article shifts to the relationship between the spoken and written word as Margie Borshke attends to the importance of the aural, along with the oral, in the history of the book. As Borschke shows in her contribution on the published work and archive of the influential analytic philosopher Saul Kripke (1940-2022) that everyday copying technologies of the 1970s and 1980s – “tape recorders, typewriters and word processors, and photocopiers” – were crucial both in the transformation of Kripke’s spoken words into published scholarship and in forging the global community of intellectuals who were invested in his ideas. Building on Kripke’s preference for speaking rather than writing, Borschke examines recordings, transcriptions, and photocopies of Kripke’s lectures with particular attention to the making of his influential book Naming and Necessity. Drawing together intellectual history, the history of the book, and the methodologies of media archaeology, Borshke addresses the role of the oral and aural in the history of print and the endurance of oral communication for philosophical scholarship. As Borshke notes, while Kripke was certainly not the first intellectual whose publications were largely drawn from his spoken lectures, the circulation and codification of his ideas first through audio recordings and then in print “is one in which everyday reproduction technologies played a starring role.” Using Kripke as a case study, Borschke suggests that these everyday copying technologies were important elements in the circulation of academic ideas in the 1970s and 1980s.
Tyler Shoemaker’s impressive study in this issue, on the Unicode Standard, explores the technical and conceptual challenges in the making of Unicode that inform the digital text we encounter today. Grounded in an analysis of the Xerox Corporation’s early efforts in desktop publishing in the 1970s and 1980s and of the history of the Unicode Consortium, Shoemaker addresses how the distinction between characters (writing’s semantic units) and glyphs (graphic forms of writing) was shaped by a series of contingent design decisions and “nested sets of technologies, standards, design principles, and politics.” As he incisively observes, text rendering with Unicode is not only shaped by the long history of typography but also by xerography. Echoing the interplay between text and image that is a theme throughout the issue, Shoemaker interrogates how contemporary artists reveal how earlier print standards and older computing technologies shaped the making of the Unicode standard. More broadly, by carefully tracing the contingent formation of Unicode’s allegedly universal standard with “roots in Xerox,” he recovers the “potential to subvert universalizing claims on reasonable representation.” Bringing the history of technology in conversation with artists’ experimentations with the Unicode standard, Shoemaker exhumes the tensions between the Unicode Consortium’s search for universality and its contingent and local origins that make Unicode simultaneously “locally variant and globally consistent.”
Larger Significance
In conclusion, I would like to return to Mullaney’s analysis of the Chinese typewriter in which he calls for histories of print technology that follow “the intensity and endurance of … engagement” rather than focus on “histories of triumph” and “impact-focused histories of technology.”13 The intensity of engagement is a useful framework for understanding the varied experiments in typography, reproductive text technologies, and their varied alternatives and ephemera in these five articles.
All five articles interrogate how new print and reproductive text technologies shape literary and artistic production and become sites for artistic interventions. Many of these activities concern the question of script and characters as well as the relationship between print and visual cultures; readers will therefore find these dynamics running throughout the issue. Beginning at the end, Shoemaker’s article interrogates “what constitutes an unreasonable character” in the workings of the Unicode Consortium where “a precise definition of reasonableness” is an ongoing debate. While Chinese characters are not the primary focus of Ritter’s article, she notes that the pictorial “represents a remarkable innovation for the Chinese character” since “text was as carefully and artfully arranged as images.” Finally, the making of Urdu typographic technology that could adequately approximate the calligraphic hand is at the heart of Amstutz’s article.
But this is not just a story of alternative print technologies. It also is one about archives and ephemera. As Li notes for the nianhua genre in China, its “products are meant to be consumed once, then torn up, and thrown away” since they are “made of thin paper … and difficult to preserve.” Although Modern Sketch was a lavishly produced pictorial magazine, its publisher selected “a popular medium” that was often ignored by literary institutions and established educators at the time. Amstutz likewise examines the catalogue from Urdu type experiments whose material remains are difficult to locate. Finally, while the transcripts, notes, and photocopies that Borshke studies have been well-preserved, they were produced by “numerous intermediaries—some known, others anonymous.” Therefore, a connective theme across the issue is the ephemeral and everyday qualities of the print and reproductive text technologies under study. In so doing, we echo the observation in Amodern 7 of “the paradox of ephemera – that it was meant to be disposable and fleeting, but is instead often kept and collected.”14 However, while these archives may be ephemeral, they gesture towards future research possibilities. As Borshke notes, the Kripke Center at the City University of New York is digitizing the ephemera surrounding Kripke’s life and work. In turn, Shoemaker concludes his article with the invitation to consider whether any Unicode characters can wholly “index the technological history of graphical computing within the standard.”
Before concluding, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of this issue. While it engages different regions and languages, much of the world is left out. Likewise, while lithography, woodblock printing, photocopying technologies, and digital text are taken up, other technologies that are ‘beyond typography’ are themselves beyond the scope of this issue. And then there is the matter of what lies ‘before typography.’ Our focus throughout has put emphasis on the ‘beyond,’ the ‘after,’ but much work remains to be done on expanding the chronological scope to earlier print technologies. In conclusion, we hope that this issue is an invitation to further scholarly and artistic activity in these areas.
While the originally scheduled in-person conference in April 2020 was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, it was reworked as a virtual conference series in summer 2020. See “Before and Beyond Typography,” https://sgs.stanford.edu/events/canceled-and-beyond-typography ↩
Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937 (UBC Press, 2004), 89. ↩
“Before and Beyond Typography” https://sgs.stanford.edu/events/canceled-and-beyond-typography. ↩
Thomas Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (The MIT Press, 2018), 42. ↩
Grant Wythoff, “Extended Technique: New Scholarship on the Uses of Media,” Amodern 9 (April 2020) https://amodern.net/article/amodern-9-techniques-technologies/. ↩
Ruben Gallo, Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (The MIT Press, 2010), 1 and 23. ↩
Christine Mitchell and Rita Raley, “Translation–Machination” Amodern 8 (January 2018.) https://amodern.net/article/amodern-8-translation-machination/. ↩
Alexander Jabbari, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India, (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 144. ↩
Gallo, Mexican Modernity, 28. ↩
Priti Joshi and Susan Zieger, “Ephemera and Ephemerality,” Amodern 7 (December 2017) https://amodern.net/issues/amodern-7-ephemera-ephemerality/. ↩
Megan Eaton Robb, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2020), 13. ↩
Gallo, Mexican Modernity, 65. ↩
Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter, 26. ↩
Joshi and Zieger, “Ephemera and Ephemerality.” ↩
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