The Non-visual in Typesetting

The defining characteristic of publication design in the past quarter century or more has been the computer screen: the Desktop Publishing paradigm, invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and brought to market by Apple and Adobe in the late 1980s, utterly changed the printing and publishing industries. PostScript, a language originally developed for controlling laser printers, provided a uniform platform for both text rendering and graphics, offering a scalable, device-independent model for designing and producing books, magazines, newspapers, and print-oriented documents of all kinds. The PDF is the apotheosis of this paradigm: it has become a standard that has effectively replaced the earlier “camera-ready” concept. What you see is what you get.

The Desktop Publishing revolution had enormous consequences for typesetting, both as a practice and an industry. The International Typographers Union was already on its last legs; but a host of print, pre-press, and typesetting firms simply vanished in the face of the new technology, which anyone could purchase for a few thousand dollars. In one sense, this was a “democratizing” moment; it was also a time of great destruction – perhaps visible mostly these days to people like those who come to letterpress printing workshops!

For many years, during which I have been immersed in the techniques and traditions of text processing,^[1] I have wrestled to articulate a concept that I think underlies most successful work with text: what I have called the ‘textual imaginary,’ a more-or-less immediate mental model of the structure of a text that one is working on. Anyone who has ever worked with TEI or other markup technologies can probably easily grasp this: there is a conceptual layer (over or under, I’m never sure) the text (by ‘text’ I mean the sequence of words themselves) which we create, recognize, read, and play with when we are doing something with a text: marking it up; searching it; transforming it into a different format, typesetting it. Even, I think reading and writing involves this textual imaginary. The text is never simply “what you see is what you get”: not in reading, not in writing, and certainly not in processing or producing it for an audience. Rather, the text is always accompanied by a ghostly counterpart, which we carry in our minds when we read, write, and so on – a counterpart that exists in some interesting tension with the screen before our eyes.

I had an important insight into this issue when I took a brief typesetting workshop at SFU, using old-school composing sticks and type cases. It occured to me, assembling tiny bits of metal into rows with my fingers and assembling these in a press forme, that one can’t really rely on one’s eyes – at least not at speed. A typesetter with enough experience to actually do the job effectively is going to be working largely by feel and by muscle-memory: the arrangement of the type case, the orientation of the individual sorts on the composing stick, the positioning of type in the forme – backwards – and then the redistribution of type back into the case, all done by feel and muscle memory. Only when a proof sheet is pulled do we get a proper look at what’s been done.

One could argue that the ability to see exactly what you’re doing in real time is the great achievement of the “what you see is what you get” interface, and certainly this has been its appeal. But this does not disqualify the fact that books were successfully printed for over five hundred years without real-time visual feedback. Not does it take into consideration a hundred years of technological history – from Linotype through phototypesetting and into modern markup languages – that does not rely on real-time visuals either. One could even argue that in a dynamic reading environment like the WorldWide Web, the introduction of WYSIWYG authoring interfaces (as early as 1994) was a distraction more than a helpful innovation.

My conjecture is that the vast mainstream of typographic production – from letterpress printing right into today’s web and mobile app environments, form a continuous tradition that does not privilege real-time visual feedback, and that the Desktop Publishing tradition is better thought of as an odd offshoot from that tradition. That offshoot provided enormous benefits to poster designers, display advertising, and the magazine industry that (again, briefly, in the scheme of things) flowered in the late 20th century. But in the world of text-based media (books, journalism, scholarship, etc.) it has been more an incidental innovation than a substantive one.

That said, the impact of the Desktop Publishing or WYSIWYG interface on our textual imaginaries, and on our expectations of publishing software, has been to me a bigger and more interesting deal. The very idea that a WYSIWYG authoring tool was thought to be needed for the web (it manifestly has not), the fact that our “word processing” tools give us endless, mostly useless formatting options, and that lots of people apparently think that publishing a book has something to do with selecting the right fonts, gives us some idea of how this particular technology has colonized our minds. Indeed, the way we have come to think about “design” involves an image of shapes being pushed around onscreen. And yet…

The letterpress studio presents a useful corrective. It presents a completely different kind of materiality for text: which is not to say that letterpress is ‘material’ and digital text isn’t. The supposed ‘immateriality’ of digital text is the result of a very successful marketing campaign. But of course digital text is material too: the difference is that we’ve all agreed to not pay attention to the pixels, file formats, Unicode codepoints, alignment algorithms, and so on that make this illusion possible. It’s harder perhaps to ignore the weighty presence of type metal in wooden cases, perhaps. And yet, for the average person, is letterpress any more or less accessible than the digital underpinnings of a Word doc?

Part of the magic of publishing – which is manifest in the finished product, whether a hardcover book or a slick PDF or an interactive website – is its seeming timelessness. A finished publication, print or digital, seems (pretends) to transcend its own material history, existing now and forever exactly as it is. Until, of course, we look more closely. When we study the history of the book, or the history of the web, the degradation of old paper over time, or the broken links and orphaned technologies that litter our online environments, we begin to notice the material realities that make publications possible.

The letterpress studio is an opportunity to glimpse the time-scale of a publication in a unique way. That the ephemeral dance of tiny bits of lead and smears of ink can result in a thing that resists history is indeed magical… and maybe the process is even more magical than the product itself.