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.

After Light at Southbank Centre

A new exhibition at the National Poetry Library celebrates 75 years since the 1951 Festival of Britain and the inauguration of the Southbank Centre.

Poetry Buildings includes one of my first books After Light, a collaboration with the photographer Paula Naughton. Paula and I met while working at The New York Center for Book Arts, and this was an early edition for the AM BRUNO project. In a previous post on this blog, I wrote that Paula’s strength as an artist lay in “an impetuous, sharp intelligence” and readers of The Library of Ice may recognise her in the person of “Claire”, who is instrumental in my decision to depart London for Greenland. “I turned my attention from optics to ice. From light to darkness…”

After Light (photograph above by Sarah Bodman) examines the variety of ways in which light moves and the art of photography: refraction, reflection, absorption, irradiance and diffraction. I responded to Paula's photographs by writing about scientific endeavour and empirical wonder: five lyric poems and five “poetic equations” finding emotional equivalents for the scientific terms. The poems are printed in the most ancient of book forms, a scroll, and the more recent technology of a slide viewer displays Paula’s photographs of an abandoned building in Ireland. It’s a pleasure to see this book brought back out from the library's rare books archive and I am grateful to Chris McCabe and Emily Wood at the National Poetry Library for the care they have taken in presenting the work.

After Light, text by Nancy Campbell

 

After Light, photograph by Paula Naughton