A picture’s worth a thousand words? The thought crossed my mind when I saw the so-called summary cards with large images, one after another, on Twitter. Even the New York Times and Reuters are using big images to get attention on Twitter. Twitter users will, of course, say that’s nothing new. Instagram, Vine, Meerkat, Periscope, all show the importance of visuals on Twitter.
Texts have married words and pictures from time immemorial. Think of the Egyptian hieroglyphics. And the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Like this page from the Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. See how decorative it is.
The printing press dispensed with the scribes, who produced the mediaeval manuscripts, but needed illustrators and engravers. Artwork continued to adorn books in the form of woodcuts.
Artists illustrated Victorian novels and children’s books. Think of Alice in Wonderland, and you immediately recall Humpty Dumpty, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse — figures drawn by Sir John Tenniel. His illustrations are probably even better known than the story itself.
Dickens’s novels were also illustrated by artists — Hablot Brown (Phiz), George Cruikshank, Marcus Stone and Sir John Tenniel, to name only a few. Penguin once published an edition of Dickens’s novels with the original illustrations.
I love paperbacks, especially Penguins. They are light and easy to carry around or curl up in bed with. The Penguin paperbacks, which first appeared in 1935, usually had no illustrations on their covers or in their inside pages for a long time. They were popular, nevertheless. Good writers can entrance readers with words alone. But pictures can add to the enchantment, like Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.
We read the words, see the pictures, but seldom notice the type in which the book is set. It’s like air and water. Books can’t be set without type just as life will be impossible without air and water. But only environmentalists talk of air and water unless there’s a problem. Similarly, only artists and publishers generally take an interest in typefaces or fonts.
But look at the Google Fonts. Each has its own character. The same word will look different, depending on the font it is set in. We can choose our own fonts in Microsoft Office, Google Docs and other software programs, so typefaces are no longer known only to professionals. Still, we are only treading water when we change typesettings. It takes experts to go deeper into typography.
Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat, Roboto, Lora, Merriweather, the names sound so mysterious! These Google fonts are young, following old typefaces such as Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon, Garamond and countless others. Microsoft brought in Calibri, Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS…
I know nothing about type but love the names, their ascenders and descenders, their back stories.
Seeing them is temptation to put words on a page. I am reminded of this poem by Dylan Thomas:
In My Craft or Sullen Art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
What are spindrift pages? What would words look like on them? Some things are probably best left to the imagination. Words suffice from a poet like Dylan Thomas. There’s no need for art.