This year for Christmas Sunam bought me a copy of Gerrit Noordzij’s The Stroke: Theory of Writing. Somebody—I don’t remember who—had recommended this to me, and it’s been on my to get someday list for years. Sunam had tried to get it for my birthday a couple years back, but it went out of print, and used copies were crazy expensive, and then unbeknownst to me it went back in print… anyway, it was a wonderful and unexpected Christmas surprise, and brought much pleasure to my inner geek.
It is an illustrated monograph—a rather brief one—that suggests a framework for describing the shapes of hand-written letters: the expansion, contraction, and rotation of pen strokes. Built on this vocabulary about letters, then, is a framework for describing the formation of words: the shapes created by black ink and the white shapes (the negative space) within the words. It is these latter shapes, the white spaces, that Noordzij argues is the point of unification between typography and writing.
It was all very esoteric and heady stuff, and as is the case with many things that bring pleasure to my inner geek, I admit to having some difficulty following the book at first. Part of it may be the translation into English, and part of it is probably my own ignorance of the extant academic literature about theories of typography and calligraphy. But with some flipping back and forth and rereading passages several times, I am pretty comfortable that I get what Noordzij was saying. And the book was kind of funny in spots. In general Noordzij has a rather meek writing style, in which he qualifies a lot of his statements and talks about how he isn’t a master of this or that… and then occasionally he whips out a hammer and lays the smack down.
One of the things I found very fascinating was the discussion of the history of the word. And by word I mean word as in a ligatured (i.e. joined) grouping of letters that form a single distinct conceptual unit of written communication. I’d never thought about it before, but words as we think of them in contemporary written communication didn’t exist until the 7th century. The evidence (though Noordzij readily admits his research has not been exhaustive) indicates that the word was simultaneously invented in Ireland and Arabia in the seventh and eighth centuries. It spread as Irish-Anglo-Saxon Christianity spread through Europe, and as Islam spread through Northern Africa.
What it made me think about, though, was the first verse of the gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Greek word used for word is logos, and I’d always associated that with the written word. But clearly the written word (as we think of it today) didn’t exist when the gospel of John was written. Which may mean absolutely nothing, really, but it has been kicking around in the back of my head for a few days now.
Anyway, the book was cool. Well worth the read for anyone interested in writing systems or the relationship between handwriting and typography.
