What is beautiful about typography is that it seems to be innocently unaware of its observer rather than violently so, like architecture, with which it shares a family resemblance. A building has its own powerfully directed gaze and looks beyond us (to a lesser degree than the statue, which looks at or through us), whereas the delicate lacework of text never flits away its attention other than within the smooth, virtually two-dimensional world of the contained page. The statue is a questioning subject who does not speak; the building is a judge whose verdict has already been passed; and the typography of a paragraph is a group of fairies conferring only among themselves, via their own secret language in the shade and light of an inaccessible grove.
Some writers are more sensitive to this tensional quality of typography than others. William T. Vollmann, for example, has an amazing ear for the secret music intimated by the curvature of a letter. The same can be said of William Blake, compelled as he was toward the masterfully totalitarian illumination of his own manuscripts.
It is frustrating to flip to the front matter, wanting to find the name of the type in which the book is set, only to find nothing. It is like trying to discover the name of an architectural style between styles that you cannot describe well enough to someone, though you can recognize it every single time you see it, who might otherwise be able to tell you what it is called. If your architectural or typographic lexicon was more extensive, you would probably know its name as well as those of its features.
This is the same irony encountered in the infinite Library of Babel: in order to look something up, you must already know it.
It is a strange, backward thing to want to know the mere name of any given assemblage of qualities, for the only thing described thereby is the name itself (by those qualities that it heads).
I have in front of me the new translation, by Gregory Martin Moore, of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind.1 It is one of the most beautifully designed books I have seen recently, and the typeface has a lot to do with it. I flip to the back of the book:
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book has been composed in Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe.
And so when I referred to the curvature of letters in the system of a typeface above as a secret music, I must have been quietly thinking2 of all the notes I have read in the backs of so many books that express it with such simplicity, all in the same way: that the text of a book is composed as music is composed, as thoughts are composed, as facial expressions are composed, that is, silently, hovering somewhere between the ear, the eye, and the understanding. Composition may even be the silent art par excellence.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Princeton University Press. 2024.
Freud: “Die Stimme des Intellekts ist Leise”.