My Typo­graphies

“The day was very hot and windy and there were scribbles of citrus blowing across the sky.”

— Bruce Chatwin, 1987

Typography may have entered the strato­sphere of a new age, but the inter­nal dyna­mic that propels it remains the same, a fusion of lang­uage and the alphabet. There is a linguis­tic impulse whereby the qual­ities we generally “ascribe” to one or the other - alpha­betic writing and lang­uage - cross over. The unassuming line from Bruce Chatwin, in which he sees the locks of cirrus cloud as a kind of wild writing on the sky, as if he put it there which in a sense he did, immedi­ately conjures the thread connect­ing us to our physical environ­ment via writing. Writing gives the impress­ion of things. Conversely, things can give the impress­ion of writing. This associ­ation between writing and things provides a crude basis from which to outline a reading / writing list of favourite “typographies.”

For me the collection is charac­terised less by any tradi­tional attributes of “typo­graphy” and more by a desire to inflect the idea of typo­graphy with a wider sense of what it is to read and to write. And neither are they “my typo­graphies” in the sense that I constructed them: in this case I’ve replaced the idea of a typo­graphy - the impress­ion of writing - of my own making with the impress­ion of a typo­graphical relation­ship to those rather prosaic acts of reading and writing: a relation­ship based on a literacy no longer contained by the litera scripta, the written text, and which, at times, extends beyond the written word alto­gether. A poetics of typo­graphy operates in the space between language and the alpha­bet and along the invisible networks that connect writing to the world. It is charac­terised by a sense of literacy that allows us to see cirrus clouds as “scribbles” of writing. Its typo­graphy emerges in moments of horror, as points of light in the tele­visual relay of a laser guided military assault, or in something as unexpec­tedly poignant, yet equally visceral, as the observation of Aleksei Leonov, the Russian astronaut, when he said: “I believe I never knew what the word ‘round’ meant until I saw Earth from space.”

The Shipping Forecast, prepared by the Met. Office and broadcast by the BBC, is one of my favourite typographies. It describes - in a combination of code and windswept location - an outline of the British Isles by reporting the weather condition from sea area to sea area, in a clockwise direction around the coast.

The voice and theme of this reassuringly familiar British institution - that of a “blessed plot... bound in with the triumphant sea” - carries the resonance of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II:

“Small show’rs last long, but sudden storms are short; this royal throne of Kings... this scept’red isle... This precious stone set in the silvered sea... Whose rocky shores beat back the envious siege Of wat’ry Neptune... this Low Fair Isle one thousand falling slowly...”

— William Shakespeare, 1595

In his book Strange Weather, Andrew Ross explores the role techno­logy plays in our relation­ship with the world. One of his intentions is to reconcile the cultural with the technical, to explore technology as a “fully cultural process”. Weather mapping systems are one of his examples. Typo­graphy, whose social meaning resonates with every part of everyday life, is part of the same network of connections. As an advanced model for communi­cations techno­logy, meteor­ology employs a reading/writing system that responds to the unstable character­istics of the weather.

I once approached the Meteorological (Met.) Office about reading a weather bulletin on BBC Radio 4 as a “talking typographer.”

“And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office at 23.58 on Saturday the thirtieth of September. There are warnings of gales in Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Plymouth, Finisterre, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle and Fareoes. The general synopsis at one-eight-double-o: Atlantic glow 974 moving steadily North, expected Iceland 971 by one-eight-double-o on Sunday. The area forecasts for the next 24 hours: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire; South Easterly seven to severe gale nine, occasionally six in North Utsire and South Utsire, occasional rain, good becoming moderate or poor.”

The names of the areas - Malin, Lundy, Fastnet etc. - and the names of the coastal obser­vation stations, including Channel Light-Vessel Automatic, Tiree and Ronaldsway, are part of a precise format and vocab­ulary which is almost picto­graphic. For example: Rockall / north backing north-west / five increasing six later / showers / good... lists in a diagram­matic order wind direction, wind change, wind force (the Beaufort scale, of which gale force is eight), general weather condition and visibility (either good, moderate, poor or fog).

And while the language of the Shipping Forecast broad­casts relies upon the fixed­ness of typo­graphy and the placed­ness of topo­graphy, it also continually reshapes as a permu­tational text dependent on one variable factor - the weather.

Recently, many of the coastal stations that use Morse code have given way to satellite navigation. Last year Le Conquet in western Brittany sent its final message: “Best wishes to all remaining on air... silent key forever.”

Silent key (dot­dot­dot dash­dot­dash), is code for “end of message”, prompting the image of Earth’s last typo­grapher, tapping out the vale­dictory message of a spent planet. It reminded me of another favourite (and radio-transmitted) typo­graphy. In 1974, a message was beamed into space from the Arecibo Obser­vatory in Puerto Rico, aimed at the cluster of 300,000 stars known as M13 in the Hercules constell­ation. The signal, a sequence of radio pulses, contained 1,679 bits of information. It was hoped that this number, the product of two prime numbers - 73 and 23 - would suggest a grid structure - 73 x 23 - that reveals a pictographic version of the message.

“It assumes, of course, that the communicative system of the receiving species is capable of responding to the same semiotic contrasts as are displayed in the pictogram (shape, length, etc.). If the entity receiving the signal happens to have a communication system based on, say, heat, the astronomers will have wasted their time! Although the message apparently raced past Pluto and sped out of our solar system within five hours and twenty minutes, the Hercules constellation is 24,000 light years away - which means that, if any one or thing is there to receive it, and chooses to reply, the response should arrive in about 50,000 years time.”

— David Crystal, 1987