AMODERN 12: COUNTERTYPE

Typography, Alternative Print Technologies, and Everyday Ephemera

Andrew Amstutz

This issue of Amodern turns to new scholarship on typography in the expanding 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. 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.”

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. 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. 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.” 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.

THE SUBVERSIVE PRINT NIANHUA

Haihong Li

Nianhua, a native woodblock print made with the technique of polychrome xylography, also known as “douban” (饾版), was invented by Hu Zhengyan around four hundred years ago, to celebrate the beginning of a new year. This paper focuses on nianhua print in the late Qing and early Republican periods, when the art’s popularity reached its peak, and on north China, where the most influential printing centers were congregated. It argues that the genre allowed artists to represent common people and their life in a pictorial art form customarily reserved for elites. It examines the revolutionary and subversive potential of the art through investigating the theme of human agency, the depictions of dissidents as social criticism, and the portraits of the “new women.” A close look at the prints shows that nianhua artists, who often came from humble backgrounds, used their cultural resources to actively interpret and participate in the social and cultural changes that took place in the cities. While late Qing-era Chinese intellectuals regarded the genre as vulgar and superstitious and the Nationalists tried to contain it through censorship, the Communists attempted to tap into its popularity.

A TRULY MODERN MEDIA

Avant-garde Visual Culture and the Printed Character in the 1930s Shanghai Pictorial Magazine 時代漫畫 Modern Sketch

Kelly W.S. Ritter

This article examines the influential 1930s Shanghai pictorial Modern Sketch and its owner Shao Xunmei's vision for promoting literacy and political engagement among Chinese citizens. Shao viewed pictorials as a tool to make reading enjoyable and cultivate politically aware readers, contrasting with more didactic and staid literacy efforts. The article argues that Modern Sketch uniquely combined high-quality printing, avant-garde art, and carefully structured text to appeal to readers of all literacy levels while delivering sophisticated political and social commentary. Through a case study of a 1937 photomontage, the article demonstrates how intricate and incisive critiques of society and culture could be interpreted at different literacy levels. It positions Modern Sketch as an important alternative public space capturing the complexities of life in semi-colonial Shanghai.

THE LEAD LETTERS OF NASTA'LīQ

Experiments with Movable Type and Debates over Modernity in Hyderabad

Andrew Amstutz

This article follows the discussions over history and comparisons to other languages that were part of experiments with type technology for the Urdu language in late colonial India. Specifically, it examines how some Indian Muslim printers and intellectuals in Hyderabad crafted movable type technology for Urdu that could approximate the handwritten aesthetics and slanting style of the nasta‘līq form of the Perso-Arabic script in the early 1930s. This article explores how Urdu’s script became the site of technological experimentation, debates over transregional Islamic ties, and articulations of local Muslim sovereignty in India. In so doing, it addresses a less studied aspect of Urdu print culture in which lithography predominated, namely how some Urdu printers experimented with movable type for nasta‘līq.

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK NEVER WRITTEN

A Media History of Saul Kripke’s Scholarly Samizdat

Margie Borschke

This article considers the significance of informal publication and circulation in the work of the philosopher Saul Kripke (1940-2022). It argues that everyday copying technologies (e.g. tape recording, photocopying) enabled academics in the 1970s and 1980s to create living documents whose private preservation and circulation maintained a community of interest and makes a case for understanding these technologies and techniques of reproduction as essential to the composition of Kripke’s ground-breaking published work. Kripke lectured a great deal, usually without notes, and was known to be reluctant to commit his ideas to print; this so-called samizdat preserved a space for the oral as the preferred mode of communication for philosophical discourse, connecting the modern tradition with the ancients, while the recordings, transcripts and photocopies archived Kripke’s ideas and secured access outside of institutional publishing channels.

UNREASONABLE CHARACTERS

Tyler Shoemaker

The Unicode Standard relies on a key design principle: its authors encode character information, not characters’ visual forms, their glyphs. But ultimately, character and glyph are not so distinct. User interfaces and artistic practice often obscure their differences – and in the process, show Unicode for what it is: a historical record bound by prior standards and computing technology. Combining technological history with discussions of artists’ interventions in the standard, I trace in this record Unicode’s gaps, ghosts, and politics. For, the character–glyph distinction has governed what elements of writing Unicode supports, and its instability, I conclude, renders visible the decisions that make this so.