Adventures in Type

Slide 1: is is not a list of my favourite books or of the books I enjoy as guilty pleasures. It is a list of five books that make interesting use of their type.

Slide 2: 5 in Mind Part 5 Adventures in Type

Slide 3: For a sense of scale, my hand is included in several of the pictures.

Slide 4: However, I am aware that most of you have never seen my hand but many will have visited the city of London.

Slide 5: So to give you a sense of the scale of my hand, here it is in front of London.

Slide 7: You will have to adjust for perspective.

Slide 8: #5

Slide 10: A classic science fiction novel of brutal monomania, e Stars My Destination is conventionally typeset for almost its entire length.

Slide 11: Only towards the end do things go strange, as the protagonist begins to suffer from synaesthesia.

Slide 12: His senses merging, the text unmoors from its grid to match his confusion.

Slide 14: So while, for the character, light is becoming movement and sound is becoming pattern, for the reader, text is becoming illustration.

Slide 16: #4

Slide 18: For A Humument, the artist Tom Phillips took the Victorian novel A Human Document and treated the pages - working over the top of them so that only some of the original text and none of the original meaning remains.

Slide 20: It is more a beautiful object than a captivating read

Slide 21: but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Slide 24: #3

Slide 26: More type appropriation: Woman’s World is entirely made up of (about 40,000) clippings from women’s magazines of the 60s.

Slide 28: It isn’t an unnecessary gimmick, either – making it into an obsessive clippings book of borrowed phrases constantly reinforces the narrator’s obsession with these magazines and the womanly concerns to which they are devoted.

Slide 30: And the ransom note aesthetic is a handy reminder of her rather fragile state of mind.

Slide 32: #2

Slide 34: Four books (to be read in the order 3,1,2,4) telling two very different stories (Gray perhaps combining them, the text itself suggests, because ‘the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones’) there’s plenty brilliant oddness about Lanark that could be discussed.

Slide 35: But, as this list’s about typographical storytelling antics, I will direct you to the fourth book, where a fraught meeting occurs between protagonist and author.

Slide 36: Here Gray inserts an embedded column indexing the works he has plagiarised, while simultaneously hijacking the running heads to narrate a condensed account of the doings of each page.

Slide 39: God, I love Lanark.

Slide 41: #1

Slide 43: is might sound implausible but House of Leaves manages the neat trick of being both a lengthy explication of Derridean theory and a creepy, readable horror story.

Slide 44: It is also an impressive exercise in typographical excess.

Slide 45: ere are two narrators, each with their own typeface, there are footnotes referencing footnotes referencing footnotes that you have to chase around the page, there is writing mirrored, sideways or upside down and layouts that mimic the events of the story or the handwriting of a distressed, frantic hand. e word house always appears in blue, the word minotaur always in red.

Slide 48: e story concerns a house that starts out inexplicably a quarter of an inch larger, when measured from the inside, than it is when measured from the outside, which then becomes infested with other unreliable spaces. It’s very good.

Slide 49: I am sorry I used the word ‘Derridean’.