Typography and topography - the Double Crown Club, London

Many thanks to Catherine Dixon, the President of the Double Crown Club, for inviting me to address the gathering of venerable printers, publishers, designers and illustrators at the Art Workers Guild this week. Typography has always been fundamental to my work, especially my letterpress projects, whether printing itself or casting type, forging texts out of vats of molten lead tin and antimony…

Inking up at Alembic Press, UK in 2009 

(photo by Mark Walton)

I spoke about working with endangered languages in the Arctic, and how the imminent loss of both polar ice and traditional vocabularies informed my books How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet and The Library of Ice. It was a humbling experience to bring my sensibilities as a printmaker within the context of an oral culture, and I learnt a great deal about typography from the fragmentary tales of Norse explorers and Inuit hunters.

“Poetry is not about language,” the writer Alice Oswald has said, “but what happens when language gets impossible.” This feels kin to Beatrice Warde’s reflections on typography - there is a way of working beyond language so that it is present, but invisible - not noticed by the reader, but relished and understood. Integrity is key to both arts. However, while Warde’s metaphor was a crystal goblet, mine has always been ice. The polar environment is the subject of my writing, but book arts have enabled me to weave this theme into the fabric of my books.

Traditionally the design of the printed menu for each of the club’s dinners, since its founding in 1924, has been handled by a member. Catherine Dixon’s elegant menu foregrounds Inuktitut seasonal words. (I regret not having taken a photograph in the elegant surrounding of the Art Workers Guild.)

November is traditionally tusaqtuut in Inuktitut or “the month of news-hearing”, when the surface of the sea freezes up to form solid ice sheets, providing a bridge between communities so people can travel and exchange news. Now that sea ice is freezing later and later, or not at all, these communications are prevented. Language gets impossible.