COUNTERTYPE

THE LEAD LETTERS OF NASTA’LīQ

Experiments with Movable Type and Debates over Modernity in Hyderabad

Andrew Amstutz

In 1933 the Osmania Type Foundry in Hyderabad attempted to create movable type technology for Urdu that could approximate the handwritten aesthetics and slanting style of the nasta‘līq form of the Perso-Arabic script. Specifically, the Osmania Type Foundry experimented with different fonts of typeface to render Urdu’s nonlinear script into metal typeset printing and mechanical typesetting. The Osmania Type Foundry was based in the Hyderabad State, which was one of... Read more...

THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK NEVER WRITTEN

A Media History of Saul Kripke’s ScholarlySamizdat

Margie Borschke

Socrates was a talker not a writer. All he claimed to know was that he knew nothing. We are still talking about this insight – the value of epistemic humility – primarily because his pupil Plato, wrote down the words of his teacher. Plato’s dialogues documented (and no doubt embellished and restructured) actual conversations with Socrates and his interlocutors using the latest technology: reed quills and papyrus. Today when undergraduates... Read more...

THE SUBVERSIVE PRINTNIANHUA

Haihong Li

China’s agrarian culture celebrates the lunar New Year as the most important time of the year. Nianhua (New Year pictures), a woodblock art form widely consumed by the rural and sub-rural population, constitutes an essential part of such celebrations. At the peak of its popularity in the 19th century, nianhua employed woodblock printing to produce large amounts of pictures that were sold throughout the country, although the subsequent introduction of... Read more...

A TRULY MODERN MEDIA

Avant-garde Visual Culture and the Printed Character in the 1930s Shanghai Pictorial Magazine 時代漫畫Modern Sketch

Kelly W.S. Ritter

How do you unlock a desire to read? Persuading individuals to engage in activities they initially resist is a compelling challenge; one way to transform aversion to enthusiasm is to make an activity fun. According to the research emerging from Chinese reformers and educators prior to and during the 1930s, many Chinese people during this period considered reading of little value, though some basic literacy was needed in particular circumstances.... Read more...

UNREASONABLE CHARACTERS

Tyler Shoemaker

  Graphic muddle is the death of real characters. – Rhodri Lewis1 The real characters of the Unicode Standard are in a class wholly of their own. Unicode’s authors follow a practice that defines modern character encoding: when they assign numbers to the individual elements of writing systems, “transform[ing] characters from being a random collection of bits into things of meaning,” they only specify the semantic information of those elements.2... Read more...