What’s Your Type?

It might take an exhibition on typography to make you fall in love with letters again.

Why should you want to go to an ugly commercial complex (mid-1990s DDA) in an unlovely corner of south Delhi, past nullahs, keechad and malba dumps? Because, as Hindi proverbs assure us, that’s where lotuses grow. Instructions follow:

1. Make for the basement, and take in creative studio Wieden + Kennedy’s now-famous office. They’ve commandeered a part of this complex and created something right out of Office and Garden magazine (no, there isn’t such a mag). The lobby has a ‘Work is Worship’ installation, made of several thousand pencils, and lives out the creative ad agency office fantasy. Be blown away. But the best part is an in-house public gallery, with the stellar aim of making ‘art accessible to everyone’. Recover. Go in.

2. Enter the Typographica/Seminar show. See, mounted in unremitting row after row, reproductions of black and white magazine spreads, with some use of background colour. Feel the anti-climax, soak it in.

The spreads are from Typographica magazine; they contain pictures of… typographica. Of signage, hand lettering, views of streets and piers, ephemera, with lettering everywhere. See the greyness of magazine printing of the 1950s and 1960s. Realise from the yellowed pages that Typographica’s last issue was in 1967. Aaah, one of those intellectual shows. Wrong.

3. Turn around and take in the Seminar magazine section. You have missed them on the way in. These are the real issues (don’t touch)—arranged with perfect monotony, like a year’s worth of newsletters in the lobby of a sarkari office. Seminar’s covers are printed on grey packaging paper, designed entirely with typography.

At first glance, there’s more to see here than in Typographica. If you have half an eye open for public affairs in India, you’ll find signposts of the past few decades here. Unfailingly stark, often beautiful and, thankfully, in colour.

4. Let 10 minutes pass. If you’d caught the opening day, there would have been beer. Regret.

5. Reflect on this: every major civilisation or rule in history is associated with a way of writing, drawing, inscribing and, for the past 573 years, of printing letters. It’s the shapes we’re talking about here, not just the scripts. The printed English you’re reading here evolved relatively recently (as did Devanagari, or Hindi to you). Roman capitals, Arabic numerals and Italics (yes, from pizzaland). Over six centuries, trade, technology, fashion, art, war and politics have left their impress on letters, as they in turn leave theirs—on paper or metal or on us.

So, typography is no less than the snapshot of an age. We’re changing faster and faster, and we need a lot of snapshots.

Now, look at the Typographica spreads again.

6. Think about your computer. Thanks to the desktop revolution, everyone understands what typefaces (or ‘fonts’) are. Before the revolution, it wasn’t so. Like kids who believed milk came from bottles, and needed to be taught about cows and grass, we needed to know type is designed by specialists. From Gutenberg to Goudy, their art has been cross-bred and has evolved. Like cows need grass to make milk, so type designers need commerce, technology and inspiration. Where does this last come from? Everywhere.

7. Notice, therefore, the importance of the quotidian. Type designers draw their ideas from the street as much as from architecture or art; from fishermen, signmakers, sellers of kulfi; and from the advertising from marriage bureaux, with its man-sized letters, painted with flair and iron oxide slurry on cement pipes alongside a railway track. What would you pay per letter?

8. You may now enjoy the photo-essay on the effects of ‘weather, wit, accident, lack of judgement, bad taste, bad spelling, necessity, and good, loud repetition’ on design; understand why a fishing boat’s signage uses fish-hook serifs (what are those?).

Typographica reminds us that typography is an industrial art, a product or a service. It’s about men, materials and money. See the spread on the design of manhole covers; and another on the devices used by newspapers to get you to notice the latest, most final, and final final edition. Say out loud the seven-year-old’s favourite riddle: what’s black and white and re(a)d all over? A newspaper.

9. Think period. Typographica is about a time when type was physical. Metal and wood types for printing; signs crafted in wood, stone and cement or iron. Letters respected the materials; commerce, popular culture and wit all merged merrily. Homework: what would a 2010 issue be about?

10. Recall the street from where you came down. No, don’t leave yet. You walked past signs made from crappy plastic, using the typefaces that came with your PC. Despite all the typefaces to choose from, our public spaces are far poorer than the ones you’ll see in the photos, devoid of invention and joy. Type brought a sense of place to the city, back in the day. Today, handmade signs are extinct. You’ll have to go to parts of Calcutta for glimpses of these collectibles; Kolkata, in contrast, has none.

11. Stay and spend a few silent minutes on this exhibition. Turn, again, to Seminar.

12. Realise what a commitment Seminar represents. Not just to independent scholarly and critical writing, but to the letter form; as a carrier of meaning, both as a symbol in a script and as a shape, which with visual wit, can bring an idea to life.

13. Know the people. Seminar was started by Raj and Romesh Thapar in 1959. Typographica was then 16 issues old, over 10 years. Coincidentally, the issues after this year are called the ‘New Series’, and there were to be just 16 more till its end. Seminar continues under daughter Malvika Singh. Romesh believed his magazine could use type as expressively as image. Herbert Spencer was 25 when he began Typographica; he edited, designed and wrote for it.

Seminar’s design was tended by Dilip Chowdhury Associates. For typography loving designers, this design practice is a spiritual ancestor to all the many around today. After Dilip Chowdhury’s passing, his partner Madhu Chowdhury minded the covers.

14. Think similarities and differences. Both magazines deal with ideas, but connect the world to their central subject in opposite ways. For Spencer, typography was everywhere—at the centre of commerce, art, literature, poetry—elevating commonplace lettering to learned dissertation and making the radical accessible. In Typographica, typography is about everything; for Seminar, everything is about politics.

15. Appreciate how timeless the best of Seminar’s covers are, and how durable the type-as-image concept is. The best of the covers from the early 1960s are as vital and modern as those in the noughties, by when the baton passed to the bold and sure hands of designer Akila Seshasayee and her studio.

Then wonder why: Typographica didn’t record the 1960s of the Beatles, Rock’n’Roll, and psychedelia, preferring, instead, to look at, say, medieval lettering in a very modern way. Homework: does Seminar reflect the times?

16. Make for the door. Before you leave, take a quick last look again. Resolve, once outside, to see letters good and bad, and not ignore them. Now and then, you’ll feel their vitality, and more often you’ll curse the lack of it. But the world may look different. That’s what happens when you’re in love.

(Typographica/50 Years of Seminar will show at W+K Exp, New Delhi, till 9 March)

The author runs a design company based in Delhi. You’ll find the impress of his unseen hands on this website and its offline avatar.

About The Author

Itu Chaudhuri