In class so far, we have discussed the cultural significance of blank spaces within text formats, but on Tuesday we had the pleasure of diving deeper into imagery and illustrations within texts. Dr. Pressman and our readings have mentioned that the blank spaces signify the cultural norm of silent reading. Similarly, the placement, positioning, and size of an image on a page “can propose an interpretation that is complementary, supplementary, or even contradictory” (Mak, 17). This idea connects directly to the aesthetics of the book, as imagery plays a key role in shaping how a reader interacts with and experiences a text. Whereas blank spaces guide the rhythm and pace of reading, illustrations often guide the focus and meaning of the content. The visual elements can elevate a book beyond its textual function, turning it into a cultural artifact that communicates through both language and design.
During our visit to the Special Collections Lab, we examined a botanical book in which the imagery was the central feature of the page. The detailed botanical illustrations were not just decorative, they were the primary conveyors of knowledge. The minimal text served a supportive role, naming or explaining what the images depicted. This visual display showed how illustration itself can embody meaning and serve as a scientific, aesthetic, and cultural tool. As Mak writes, “ illustrations can refer to the world beyond the page and participate in a wider discourse about the book that involves the social status of the particular codex, its designers, and its owners” (17).
In this botanical text, the intricate images did more than portray plants. They connected art with science. The precision of the drawings demonstrated scientific observation, while their elegant presentation reflected artistic intention and cultural value. This bridging of science and art through the combination of words and imagery shows the aesthetic power of the book as a medium. It demonstrates how illustrations can extend the book’s purpose beyond reading into seeing, experiencing, and even situating the text within broader social, cultural, and intellectual contexts.
While reading chapters 13, 15, and 16 of History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs, there was a section in chapter 16 that stood out to me. The section was titled Jan Tschihcold and the New Typography, and it followed the namesake Tschihcold and his life as a typographer. Typography as I new it was the study and creation of fonts. As someone that’s taken a few graphic design classes, I’ve spent a bit of time learning about typography. Not very much, but I know enough to adjust things like the kerning or spacing of an already existing typeface. I’ve never created my own font, and whenever I saw old drafts of existing fonts, I would realize that typographers took details into account that I had never considered.
Returning to Tschihcold, the chapter explains how influential he had been in the mass adoption of various typefaces for publishers. He had created something called the “new typography”, which was asymmetrical and challenged the current status quo. In 1933, Tschihcold was arrested in Munich by Nazi’s. Meggs writes, “Accused of being a “cultural Bolshevik” and creating “un-German” typography, he was denied a teaching position in Munich. After six weeks of “protective custody” Tschichold was released,” and at first, I was confused. Un-German typography? What does that even mean? But I quickly realized that it was because words have power, people trust writings and books. Even in modern times, certain fonts have certain uses and stereotypes surrounding them. I wouldn’t turn in an academic essay in comic sans, nor would I use a cursive font for a presentation. I don’t associate those activities with those fonts. I might not know why I think that way at first glance, but with some thought, we can come to understand how these perceptions form. Typography is not only about the text that is being written, it is an artform. And art can emotionally connect with people. If this font Tschihcold created felt un-German, and people began to associate this positive thing with other cultures or non-Nazi practices, then I can understand why it worried the Nazis. I’ve already established that typographers think about small details that the general populace don’t notice. It sounded paranoid at first, but if you desire power, that last thing you want is for the public to be able to read anything and everything.
After this incident, Tschihcold moved to Switzerland and work for a publisher. While doing so, he moved on from the new typography and began creating other projects. He still believed in new typography, but it was created as a response to the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, and he didn’t feel there was more he needed to add to it. For him, typography was about expression; “He continued to feel that the new typography was suitable for publicizing industrial products and communication about contemporary painting and architecture, but also believed it was folly to use it for a book of baroque poetry, for example, and he called reading long pages of sans serif “genuine torture.” And this is something that I agree with. I am currently typing in a sans serif font, and I definitely prefer serif fonts!
Overall, fonts are important. They are how a word is written, and they effect how a word is read and perceived. This is something I’ve always loved about writing. For example, I have a story in my community college’s literary journal in which the real story is in the marginalia, and each character is assigned a different font, as if it was there handwriting. I chose each font for a reason, and it was important to me because how the characters were writing was just as if not more so important than what they were writing. In the modern day, we take advantage of how many fonts are available to us online, and we tend to forget that all of those fonts were first an idea, than made by hand.
This week’s readings had various sections which detailed how text–or even the paper itself–comes from a heavily politicized place. For example, Meggs and Purvis write about Alexander Rodchenko who was an “ardent communist” and “abandoned painting and turned to visual communication because his social views called for a sense of responsibility to society instead of to personal expression” (chapter 15 page 7). He was one of a few named Russian artists who saw a need to utilize their talents for political means.
Meggs and Purvis’s description of his “strong geometric construction, large areas of pure color, and concise, legible lettering” (chapter 15 page 7) makes me think of “the dynamic relationship of materiality and mattering in the page” as said by Mak. The description of Rodchenko’s art, in this case, would be the materiality and his communist philosophy would be the mattering. The “strong geometric construction” and “concise, legible lettering” makes evident Rodchenko was removing himself from abstract art in favor of direct and loud communication. Painting often consists of a scene or close-up which leaves much of the message up to the interpretation of the viewer. In line with modernist perspectives, Rodchenko moves on to a more “objective” form of art which leaves much less room for subjectivity.
Even later in his life, Rodchenko continued to use “bold, blocky type and hard-edged shapes…” (chapter 15 page 7). It makes me think of the Uncle Sam posters which featured huge letters and imagery that almost made it impossible to not read it. Out of curiosity, I looked up some of Rodchenko’s art and it looks stylistically similar. Presumably, the political messages of both were a major factor in why they are as eye-catching as they are. For the creators, it was imperative that they be read. Here, the message dictated the medium.
Bonnie Mak’s exploration and discussion on the life of the page, in its many sociocultural evolutions, provides a starting point leading into how to think about the forever changing ideas of the page. While the construction of the page has transformed from scroll to codex and codex to digital, the page remains the integral form of communicating in society. In her introduction Mak writes, “The page hosts a changing interplay of form and content, of message and medium, of the conceptual and physical, and this shifting tension is vital to the ability of the page to remain persuasive through time” (5). Like the book, the page has an equally important history that requires intentional exploration in order to make ruminations about its future, especially as we shift towards a digitized culture. By analyzing the page in detail, as we have begun to do in our first half of the course, it brings meaning to the materiality and the form it takes.
From a modern perspective, the form of the page in web browsing takes on an identity that places algorithmic code as an equal to the stability once introduced with the printing press. Mak writes, “… the advent of the printing press heralded a new epoch in the diffusion of knowledge because a text could apparently be ‘fixed’ and replicated with no degradation” (5). In the digital era, the page is now crossed as an interface that invites the reader’s thoughts and even instant engagement. The latter is the most glaring difference between the technologies of printed and digital works, but the on-screen page serves the same purpose which is to communicate with with an audience. By recognizing that the space of the page historically ties together cultures, it leads to better utilizing the advancements that are enjoyed today with the contemporary interface of the page.
In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak discusses the page as separate from the book, and the different forms it takes depending on its use and interaction. I was most struck by the detail of the papyrus scrolls and the way the paginae was formatted based on genre, with verse texts having wider columns than prose texts (12). The formatting of the interface of the page is meant to communicate and facilitate the genre. Page formatting based on genre is something that is somewhat inhibited by the typical mode for writing today, which is through a digital word processor on a computer. There are specific ones I can think of, like Scrivner, which I remember allow for templates for different genres such as plays. However, this feature felt limited to me. I think I often think of any ‘abnormal’ formatting in a book as superfluous and somewhat childish, but I suppose this is because of the influence of authoritarianism of the book and modern print. I expect the formatting of the book to follow some kind of an axis, either up and down or side to side.
In turn this makes me think of what Mak had to say about “specific letter forms can infuse a text with social or political suggestion” (15). Specific texts and the way this text is formatted can be used to communicate meaning, outside of the way that printed language communicates meaning. Mak uses an example of the way that gospel texts are organized, by paragraphs and chapters. Ultimately this makes me think of the influence of religion on what kind of visual language I view as normal or necessary and which I see as unnecessary.
The expansiveness of The Book as an idea, as an interface, as art, as an all-encompassing medium to which is molded for us, by us, to serve our needs. I found so many things intriguing in this reading, namely the expansiveness of the book as an Interface and how the page seems to be, not only a filtration system for human thinking but a shapeshifting medium at that. At the very basis, I like how Bonnie Mak grounded the page in its existence as being more than just mattering due to meaning or significance, “To matter is not only to be of importance, to signify, to mean, but also to claim a certain physical space, to have a particular presence, to be uniquely embodied.” (3) Similarly in Megg’s History of Graphic Design, there was sections of extensive research about how art expanded, evolved, and therefore become a direct influence to political and idealogical movements.
The idea of art being a proponent of ideological and social change isn’t new, but the literal influence of the page as space and a literal reflection of a harmonious future is. The De Stijl movement in particular stuck out, “Schoenmakers defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two fundamental opposites shaping our world, and called red, yellow, and blue the three principal colors. Mondrian began to paint purely abstract paintings composed of horizontal and vertical lines. He believed the cubists had not accepted the logical consequences of their discoveries; this was the evolution of abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality.” (931-932) Art and Modern Art itself has really pushed the boundaries of its own medium (Comtemporary art/Abstract art) but I never really thought about its implications in terms of the evolution of the page as space and material. Abstract Art seems to be a space that can not only push the bounds of Art itself but also expand our thoughts and ideas upon which we frame or facilitate societal needs, demands, and exploration. Mak states, “Readers interpret text, space, and image, as they are inclined, but the meanings that they formulate are predicted upon the materiality of each carefully designed page.” (21)
The page has never been so multifaceted in my eyes, let alone The Book itself. I can now see the correlation between the page and so many other different ideas (Politics, the humanities, Science, etc.). It is an all-encompassing medium, both changing and willing to change for our (humanity’s) sake. The expansiveness of the book just keeps growing exponentially, much like Borges’s short story it feels infinite. For me, a quote that really highlighted just how grand a vision artists have in their art to not only influence art itself but people, was on page 937 of Megg’s History of Graphic Design: “Malevich and Mondrian used pure line, shape, and color to create a universe of harmoniously ordered, pure relationships. This was seen as a visionary prototype for a new world order. The unification of social and human values, technology, and visual form became a goal for those who strove for a new architecture and graphic design.”
“From a young age, we are trained to believe that the boundaries of the interface are always identical to the edges of the material platform of the page – namely, that the cognitive space and the physical dimensions of the page are necessarily conterminous.” (Mak, p.3) This was the sentence that really stayed with me this week, as immediately connected to what I have been thinking about lately: The book as a space, a sequence of rooms where every page could almost feel like its own small book.
“Boundaries,” “interface”, “conterminous”, Mak’s choice of words here make the sentence feel almost like architecture. The words sound like they are building something, setting up walls and lines that shape how we imagine reading. By calling the page an “interface”, Mak turns it into a place where the physical and the mental meet, where what we see starts to touch what we imagine. When she says that the “cognitive space” and the “physical dimensions” of the page are the same, it feels as if she is describing how we have learned to let our thoughts stop where the page ends. Where last week I thought of each page as a room, Mak now makes me realize that I have also been taught to treat the edges of that room as the limits of my thinking.
The word that stands out to me most is “trained.” It shows how much this way of reading is something we have learned rather than something natural. Words inside, white space outside. I never really thought about that before, but it is true. We have been trained to read like that from the very beginning. And what Mak reminds me of here is that this is just a habit. It is not something fixed. Habits can change. You can start to notice the frame and once you see it, you can move past it.
That’s what this sentence does for me. It makes those boundaries visible so we can start to think beyond them. It connects perfectly to what I felt last week. The idea that reading is not just about moving through pages but about moving through spaces. If each page is a room, then it also has a door. The edges do not only hold the text in, they also open it up. Seeing the page as more than a flat surface makes reading feel like a space again. One that does not end where the page does but moves past it. Into thought, into memory, into the next room that quietly waits to be entered.
In considering books as an interface, it is important to recognize the parts of this humanitarian whole and understand the material that allows for information transmittal– paper. As paper has shifted form and composition across cultures, its significance in transmitting ideas and sharing ideas remains unwavering yet flexible in its strength to sustain changing messages and mediums. One aspect I have been interested in over the past few Special Collections labs is marginalia and later additions to books that were not present in the work’s initial printing. As the blank spaces on the page allows for marginalia to be added, it allows for insights outside of the author to be contributed and conversations are fostered with the original work produced. As Bonnie Mak describes, “these patterns remain fluid as readers-cum-designers marked up their pages as they were inclined. Thus revised and augmented by different hands over time, the page emerges as evidence of its own production, performance, and consumption. The markings on the page are part of the ‘cultural residue’ left by a battery of authors, scribes, artists, booksellers, book owners, and readers, and can be read as a compelling narrative about the social history of thought,” (15). As readers add marginalia and mark up pages, they join the act of creating through their contributions rather than remaining in a state of passive consumption. With these additions, readers reshape and add new contexts to a given work, making the page a living artifact, as Mak points, “the page emerges as evidence of its own production, performance, and consumption”. Through the many hands it reaches, the page continues to “perform” its production duties of transmitting information, yet it also “performs” the thoughts of its readers as they go through the consumption process that is reading. Such “cultural residue” suggests that the page may be continually expanded beyond its initial message to carry cultural and historical insights and contexts that add to the initial story at hand. Marginalia, thus, informs us of the page’s ability to represent many voices and keep record of differing “social history of thought” across time and cultures.
The aesthetics of the page are important. This is something innately understood by most readers, even if they do not have the understanding of why. When we open a book and see long blocks of text, readers are subconsciously aware of a kind of gatekeeping taking place within its passages. Those who do not read often will think “this must not be for me,” or “this information is too complex for my understanding.” When we see smaller paragraphs, more white space, a simpler lexicon, the reader approaches it as if by warm invitation from the author. The page itself says, “come with me.” As Bonnie Mak says on page 5 of her introduction to How the Page Matters, the page “influences meaning by its distinctive embodiment of those ideas [on the page].” The page exists as “an ongoing conversation between designers and readers. As writers, artists, translators, scribes, printers, booksellers, librarians, and readers configure and revise the page, in each case they leave redolent clues about how the page matters to them and how they wish it to matter to others.”
When we open a book, look at a flyer, without reading a single word we can likely know who the work was created for and who it was created by. The modernist movements of literature, art, and design were integral to this. Among the most prominent writers of modernist literature is Ernest Hemingway, whose style was inspired by the work of impressionist painter Claude Monet. Monet’s later works, such as “The Water Lillies” would evolve to set the foundation for what would become expressionism. Both of these art forms have been very enduring in their wider appeal, much as Hemingway is often credited with doing “more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century” and whose works were published in clear, easy to understand, accessible formats. The Old Man and the Sea was published in Life magazine, so as to be accessible to more readers, and one anecdote in Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly recalls a late-night reading of the book at a truck stop, of all places, to a room full of greasy drivers and people from the sticks and hollers of West Virginia: A waitress reads from the copy of Life. People are trying to order coffee from her, a jukebox is playing and is unplugged from the wall to better hear. “She says, ‘Shut up and listen’ And in the middle of the night, in this truck stop, she starts reading The Old Man and the Sea” (236). This work was for everybody. It has been enduring. Just like Monet. Just like the expressionists.
Other forms of modernism did not last, and their fates mirror those of the political parties they ascribed to. The Dadaists fractured into many smaller groups in a way that calls to mind the Communists’ sectarian splintering during the Spanish Civil War. Dada work was staunchly anti-bourgeoise, but it was created in a way that did not allow the proletariat to understand.
Equally incomprehensible are the futurist works of Filippo Marinetti, and a look at any of his works should hopefully let us know who they were created for and who Marinetti was. Let us begin our analysis of Marinetti by making something very clear, Filippo Marinetti was a literal co-author of The Fascist Manifesto, a fact that was startlingly omitted from Phillip Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Filippo Marinetti and Futurism helped give the world fascism, helped give the world Mussolini, helped give the world Hitler, helped facilitate the violent deaths of over fifty million people. He volunteered multiple times to serve in the military of fascist Italy, fighting on the front at over sixty years old.
He is one of the worst people who ever existed.
A viewing of his poem “After The Marne, Joffre Visited The Front By Car” immediately greets the reader with his psychosis. It is nearly impossible to read and was designed as such, much the same as fascism is designed to be hidden within a society before takeover. Marinetti once stated, as quoted by Meggs on page 4 of chapter 13, “a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samoth-race.” The past was shunned by Marinetti so much that all its beauty was lost, and the world became nothing but a forward machination. (A copy of that statue, quite fittingly, was once given as a gift to Texas Woman’s University to celebrate the “defeat of autocracy.”)
When we look at the design of Meggs’ work through the lens of How the Page Matters, what is it saying to us? Text is presented plainly in large blocks, which can be an overwhelming intake of information for the layperson. The referenced images in the text are located at the very end of the book, and this says, quite apparently, that you must conduct an extra level of research to even comprehend or be aware of Meggs’ points or what he is talking about. This information is not supposed to be easy to process, nor is it meant to be easy to find.
But this clearly well-researched section on the history of Futurism somehow omits a very important aspect of the movement entirely. An omission this large is not an accident. The death of Antonio Sant’Elia is lamented. “Tragically,” Meggs’ writes of the futurist architect’s death in World War One. If Saint’Elia was a compatriot of Marinetti and Mussolini the only thing tragic about his death is that he did not meet the bludgeoning fate of the latter. The design of the pages of History of Graphic Design is constructed to not clearly give us the information in it. We have to work for it. This knowledge is not intended for the everyman. This section of Chapter 13 reads as an apologia for fascism, but this apologia is hidden behind a series of smokescreens and baffling omissions. Much as the meaning of Marinetti’s work was hidden in its layout, and how we are often unable to comprehend works of Dada or Futurism.
The fixity of text, as we discussed in class, enables it to be difficult to challenge, this lack of challenge allows for stability and a common basis of knowledge. Some of the most fixed texts are textbooks. A central hallmark of fascism is erasure of the past. It is extremely disappointing to find this kind of omission, let alone the lauding of these architects of destruction, in a textbook, somewhere it is unlikely to be challenged, and almost certain to be made canon.
You have to dig to uncover fascism. Even through the very layout of the page. Complexity often hides an untruth.
Perhaps at the end of this very long and, admittedly, a little heated, blog post, maybe it is time to turn back to a style of modernism that valued the construction of the page and wanted its content to be easily discernible for the reader, and I will close with a quote from page 66 of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, something important to remember in these trying times, a very simple exchange of dialogue between Robert Jordan, the protagonist, and Pilar, the leader of a band of Spanish guerrillas during the country’s civil war, surrounded by white space on the page, easy to pick out, clear to understand, and unfortunately, still timely:
The way a page is used is essential for how the content is digested. In this week’s readings, the discussion of the page and its graphic design revealed how every aspect of a book can influence the consumption of the book itself. In Phillip Megg’s History of Graphic Design, he explains Modernist art movements from Cubism to Bauhaus and how each movement had a hand in the experimentation of typography and graphic design.
After reading the excerpts from How the Page Matters, History of Graphic Design, and considering the books we looked on Tuesday’s lab, I couldn’t help but wish for more interesting designs in books. When interacting with the average book today, it is a somewhat simple task of opening the cover and flipping through the pages with a standard font. Although there are many ways to approach the construction of a book, not many are formatted in an interesting way that really draws in a reader; usually, the content does the heavy lifting. There is no problem with that at all, but after interacting with artists’ books, I just wanted more, even if it was just the typography.
This also made me consider how children’s books are arguably one of the easiest ways for artists to play with form for a book and their own art. An example of this in the History of Graphic Design was in Chapter 15, which discusses the “father of the twentieth-century Russian picture book” (pg 8), Vladimir Vasilevich Lebedev. Lebedev used principles of constructivism and Bolshevism to create children’s books that indulged in lots of white space, primary colors, and basic geometric shapes, which doesn’t sound like the typical children’s book that uses the full page to contain illustrations. Instead, Lebedev created something fresh and refreshing to look at while satisfying his own artistic itch. Similarly, when rifling through the pop-up books in special collections, I imagined how much fun and satisfying creating a piece of art like could be for an artist. Books are simply another medium to play with and should be utilized more in that way, rather than just an information receptacle.
