{typography} – Page 37 – { feuilleton }

Seminal art and design

Fountain (2011) by John Coulthart.

seminal, a. and n.

A. adj. Of or pertaining to seed; of the nature of seed.

1. a. Of or pertaining to the seed or semen of men and animals (applied Phys. and Anat. to structures adapted to contain or convey semen); of the nature of semen.

Oxford English Dictionary

The Dirty Comics exhibition curated by Jon Macy opens today in San Francisco so here at last is my non-comics contribution to Jon’s erotic art show. This is something I’d had in mind for a while so it was good to have the opportunity to actually tackle the thing, and also have an outlet for it outside this website. Below I explore some of the intent and inspiration which led to the piece.

Creating some sort of gay erotica was an idea I’d had in mind for a while but it suffered from the usual syndrome whereby work with no immediate outlet gets shunted aside by the pressure of paid commissions and ongoing personal projects. It’s also the case that pieces of work I create for myself I tend to want to sell or see reproduced via a service such as CafePress. The trouble is that most of those services are based in the US which means they’re subject to that tiresome puritan attitude towards sexual content: anything other than “artistic” nudity is forbidden at CafePress, and the same applies to many other self-publishing services. There are outlets for gay erotica but I’ve not had chance to explore the best options. If anyone has any tips then please leave a comment.

This angel figure was something I’d drawn back to 2008 when I’d made a start on a similar work which fell by the wayside. One of the great things about computer graphics is being able to work on part of something which can then be picked up later and dropped into a new composition.

So the intention was to produce a follow-up to the Dodgem Logic cover I created last year which presented a same-sex take on various Art Nouveau stylisations. The figures above are from one of the early drafts which takes a border design from Alphonse Mucha’s Documents Decoratifs (below), a series of sample borders and frames Mucha produced for the use of artists and designers.

Continue reading “Seminal art and design”

Index, fist or manicule?

Third revised specimen book and price list of printing material (1887), Palmer & Rey, San Francisco.

Browsing through old type foundry catalogues recently reminded me of a question posed by Callum James a few years ago over at Front Free Endpaper, namely: what is the official description of those pointing hands favoured by pre-20th century typesetters? Writer Mark Valentine in a follow-up post mentions a term invented by William H Sherman—”manicules”—since Sherman also believed that the pointing hands were nameless. That’s not quite the case, however, as these pages show, with two descriptors being used: “indexes” and “fists”. Just to confuse matters both terms are used on different pages of the same catalogue which implies that the names may have been a convenience term to avoid having to repeatedly discuss “those pointing hand things” with customers. “Manicule” seems a better choice since “index” already has a standard meaning in printing, while “fist” doesn’t suit at all.

These catalogues contain many pages of similar type decorations and embellishments. All can be downloaded at the Internet Archive, just follow the links.

Third revised specimen book and price list of printing material (1887), Palmer & Rey, San Francisco.

Catalogue and book of specimens of type faces and printing material and machinery (1895), Cleveland Type Foundry.

Copper alloy type book (1901), Pettingill & Co., Boston.

Update: Thanks to Alan in the comments for pointing the way (so to speak) to William Sherman’s Toward a History of the Manicule.

Update 2: See this manicule Flickr group for many contemporary examples.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Victorian typography

Joseph Balthazar Silvestre’s Alphabet-album

Monsieur Silvestre’s Alphabet-album, a collection of decorative alphabets, has a lengthy subtitle—Collection de Soixante Feuilles d’Alphabets Historiés et Fleuronnés, tirés des Principales Bibliothèques de l’Europe—and is a good example of how the 19th century, always characterised as a period of over-elaborate decoration, contains the seeds of 20th-century design. Silvestre’s book dates from 1843 yet contains several examples of sans serif or rectilinear lettering which wouldn’t have looked out of place a hundred years later. There’s also some fine examples of over-elaborate lettering, of course, with the usual embellishments and calligraphic flourishes, and also a page of letterforms based on tree shapes, a common sight in Victorian graphics.

Continue reading “Joseph Balthazar Silvestre’s Alphabet-album”

Anna & the Juniper Dog

The Juniper Dog strained its twisted roots against an ember red sky, snarling out swarms of night moths, barking flocks of owls from its splintery jaws. It howled the sea. Spat stars. Clouds roiled and clotted through the tree dog’s teeth.

Anna & the Juniper Dog was published this summer although it’s a tale which seems more suited to the gloom of autumn. (Having said that, summer this year was so persistently cold, wet and dreary it’s been autumn in all but name.) The story is by Geoff Cox, and the slim clothbound volume from Blackmaps Press comes profusely illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason, and with an accompanying CD containing 30 minutes of beautiful instrumentals by Martin Roman Rebelski. This is the second book in a trilogy of tales about Cox’s Anna character, wherein we follow Anna through a succession of dream-like episodes freighted with mysteries, epiphanies and ritual moments.

“Thorns burst from the Old Man’s mouth.”

The combination of another character named Boy, and various encounters with anthropomorphic animals, reminded me of Mervyn Peake’s wonderful Boy in Darkness, while the illustrations bring to mind the cross-hatched art of Edward Gorey. Eason’s drawings add a great deal to the fairytale atmosphere without merely replicating Cox’s evocative descriptions. The icing on the cake is a book design by La Boca with the attention to detail this kind of self-contained project requires: the typesetting uses the ligatures common to better typefaces but which one seldom sees employed today. A great example of the book as an object to be treasured, and ideal reading (and listening) for longer and chillier evenings.

Any Gun Can Play by Kevin Grant

This was something I put together last year for FAB Press but the book has only been published in the past month. The design was little more than an assembly job on my part, with Harvey at FAB requesting a montage of the three poster-art gunmen plus suitable Western typography. We went through a number of generic fonts then I added a little creative touch with the background for the title type which was a sheet of paper scorched and stained using tap water, a tea bag and a gas-ring. Forget Photoshop filters, you still can’t beat the trusty tea bag for random stains.

Cynical and stylish, bloody and baroque, Euro-westerns replaced straight-shooting sheriffs and courageous cowboys with amoral adventurers, whose murderous methods would shock the heroes of Hollywood Westerns. These films became box-office sensations around the world, and their influence can still be felt today.

Any Gun Can Play puts the phenomenon into perspective, exploring the films’ wider reaches, their recurrent themes, characters, quirks and motifs. It examines Euro-westerns in relation to their American ancestors and the mechanics of the Italian popular film industry, and spotlights the unsung actors, directors and other artists who subverted the ‘code’ of the Western and dragged it into the modern age.

Based on years of research backed up by interviews with many of the genre’s leading lights, including actors Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma and Gianni Garko, writer Sergio Donati, and directors Sergio Sollima and Giuliano Carnimeo, Any Gun Can Play will satisfy both connoisseurs and the curious.

Despite my minimal contribution, this is a very handsome volume to be connected to. I’ve had Christopher Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns (1981) book for years so I’m already disposed towards the subject. Frayling’s book is a semi-academic analysis which for a long time was the only serious study of the subgenre. Additional studies by Frayling and others have followed but Kevin Grant’s book, subtitled The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns, looks like a tough one to beat: 480 pages, detailed analyses, a who’s who section, filmography, and a huge quantity of photos and poster graphics, many in colour. There’s also a foreword by actor Franco Nero, threatening everyone on the cover in his Django guise. To test the author’s thoroughness I looked up Se sei vivo spara (1967) (If You Live, Shoot!), a film also known as Django Kill! even though it’s nothing to do with the Django series. Giulio Questi’s film is a very bizarre (and occasionally inept) blend of Spaghetti tropes and horror-style scenes of graphic gore, featuring (among other things) a crucified hero, a vampire bat, and a band of black-clad homosexual cowboys. Frayling’s book devotes a few paragraphs to the film while Grant gives it two-and-a-half pages plus pictures. IMDB may tell us the facts about a film’s production but the barely-literate reviews and troll-filled discussion boards on that site are useless. For authoritative review and analysis you still need a book like this. Any Gun Can Play can be ordered direct from FAB Press where they’re selling a limited number signed by Franco Nero and the author.