Keith Haring

ABC of Typography (2019)

ABC of Typography (2019)
David Rault
Casebound, sewn, illustrated paper-over-boards cover, endbands, sewn, red doublures. H265 x W195 mm. 128 pages. London: Self Made Hero [Translated from French (Gallimard, 2018)]. Acquired from The Saint Bookstore, 29 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

David Rault’s ABC of Typography traces 3,500 years of letters and type from pictographs and cuneiform through Roman lettering and Gutenberg to the Bauhaus and beyond. For the Books On Books Collection, it enriches the focus on the alphabet, typography and artists’ books — in particular, that subset of illustrated histories of the alphabet and type. These include Tommy Thompson’s The ABC of Our Alphabet (1952), William Dugan’s How Our Alphabet Grew (1972), Tiphaine Samoyault’s Alphabetical Order (1998), James Rumford’s There’s a Monster in the Alphabet (2002), Ada Yardeni’s A-dventure-Z’ (2003), Don Robb and Ann Smith’s Ox, House, Stick (2007) and Renzo Rossi’s The Revolution of the Alphabet (2009).

While enhancing that subset of illustrated reference works, ABC of Typography also highlights a gap in the collection. Rault and his team of invited artists hail from the Franco-Belgian tradition of les bandes dessinées (BDs), which the French and Belgians call la Neuvième Art (“the Ninth Art”). English-language readers will likely be familiar with BDs from seeing Hergé’s Tintin or René Goscinny’s Asterix. Other than Chiavelli’s Arthur R./Un Coup de DÉS Jamais N’Abolira le HASARD (1988) and its two companion volumes, the collection has no BDs. The Rault volume does, however, deliver a mini-survey of styles among contemporary bandes dessinateurs with its assignment of chapters to eleven different artists.

Artists from left to right from the top: Aseyn (“The Birth of Writing”), Singeon (“The Romans and their Writing”), Libon (“Form the Middle Ages to Frakturs”), Seyhan Argun (“The Gutenberg Bible”), Delphine Panique (“From Humanist to Didone”), Olivier Deloye “Newspapers and Machines”), Hervé Bourhis “From Gills Sans to Bauhaus”), Alexandre Clérisse (“The ‘Rencontre de Lure”), Anne Simon (“Maximilien Vox’s System”), Jake Raynal (“Letraset and Phototypesetting”) and François Ayroles (“Typography Today and Tomorrow”)

The book’s overall design by Jean-Christophe Menu simultaneously embraces and sets off the individual styles of drawing and lettering. Menu’s consistent use of a slab serif font (Lubalin Graph Std?) for chapter titles alongside oversized chapter numbers that bleed off the facing page signals his intent and success.

The variety of “strip” layouts pushes the boundaries of unity. Some, like Libon’s and Clérisse’s, float on the page. Others, like Singeon’s and Simon’s, are ruled off. Within the strip layouts, panels vary in shape, and the images within them tilt at different angles, all creating as much of a sense of movement as any action comic. Even where a strip is ruled off, sketches sometimes encroach across panels as well as the book’s margins or gutter to give depth and perspective as well as movement. as happens with the gulls in flight below from Aseyn’s chapter.

Note how the gulls in flight in Aseyn’s chapter appear within panels but also cross them and the gutter.

Evident from Clérisse’s recounting of “Les Rencontres internationale de Lure” (an influential annual forum in Provence), Simon’s homage to the typologist Maximilien Vox (one of the forum’s founders) and Ayroles’ positioning of the typeface DIN, the volume’s European roots are never far from the surface, which also makes ABC of Typography a useful and necessary addition to this collection or any shelf of Anglo-centric works about the alphabet, type or design. It’s interesting that, while the French have categorized BDs as the ninth among the ten officially designated arts, typography and design do not yet rate a category. Neither does the livre d’artiste for that matter, which raises a question:

Between the traditional BD and livres d’artistes by graphic artists, is there fertile ground for artists’ books that blend subject, material, form and metaphor into innovative works of book art? The above-mentioned BD by Chiavelli, paying homage to Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, represents one end of that spectrum. Hervé di Rosa, part of the Figuration libre movement, associated with Keith Haring and graffiti artists, can provide the other end of the spectrum with his Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (2021), published by Virgile Legrand. For the work of book art between them, Nanette Wylde’s Babar Redacted: ABC Free (2020) might be a case in point. Likewise, Catherine Labio’s curated exhibition in 2013 — “From Bande Dessinée to Artist’s Book” — finds earlier exemplars in the works of Lars Arrhenius, Felicia Rice, Omar Olivera and Mamiko Ikeda.

Babar Redacted: ABC Free (2020)
Nanette Wylde
Based on an altered copy of the board book B is for Babar: An alphabet book by Laurent de Brunhoff. French link exposed spine on tapes. 9″ x 9″ x .5″ closed. Edition of 3.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Top row: A, C and E from Alphabetto Latino Schizzato a Bena da Antonio de Pian, reproduced in Antonio Basoli: Alfabeto Pittorico 1839, edited by Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel, published as part of the boxed set Alphabets Buchstaben Calligraphy by Ravensburger Buchverlag (1998). Hardback, sewn. H275 x W255 mm, 144 pages. Acquired from Antiquariat Terrahe & Oswald, 14 March 2021.
Bottom row: A, C and E from Alphabetto Pittoresque (1842) by Giovanni Battista de Pian, reproduced in Ein Schmuckalphabet aus Wien“Alphabet Jewelry from Vienna” by Anton Durstmüller, published by Fachhochschule f. Druck (1973). Perfect bound with pages in Chinese fold. H245 x W220 mm, 72 pages. Acquired from Versandantiquariat K. Stellrecht, 22 March 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Father and son, Antonio de Pian (1784-1851) and Giovanni Battista de Pian (1813-57)) worked in Vienna during the 18th and 19th centuries. Born in Venice, Antonio came with his father to Vienna, where he became a court-appointed set designer and scene painter and was inducted by the Academy of Fine Arts in 1843. Giovanni Battista (or Jean Baptiste) was not as professionally or academically successful as his father, but his Alphabetto Pittoresque portfolio outshines his father’s Alphabetto Latino Schizzato a Bena and rivals the earlier Alfabeto Pittorico by Antonio Basoli, the elder Pian’s Bolognese contemporary, who was also an accomplished scenographer as well as an internationally honored academic. All three artists’ portfolios are scarce, and as they represent the next link in the chain of complete architectural alphabets that began with Johann David Steingruber’s Architectonisches Alphabeth in 1773, it is fortunate that the facsimile works produced by Durstmüller and Kiermeier-Debre/Vogel are available and accessible.

Antonio de Pian’s architectural alphabet portfolio is the rarest of the four. With its frontispiece/title page and twenty-two letters (B, D, J and W are missing), the only copy resides somewhere in Vienna. Fortunately, all of the twenty-two appear in the Basoli facsimile produced by Kiermeier-Debre/Vogel in 1998. The brown-tinted lithographs of the elder Pian’s portfolio echo not only the Basoli portfolio’s monochromatic character but also its emphases on Near or Middle Eastern or Oriental settings and on antiquity. As Kiermeier-Debre/Vogel point out, the dual emphasis was ushered in by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1801) and also showed itself in opera’s subject matter during Basoli’s and the Pians’ lifetimes. Twelve of Antonio’s scenes have settings in antiquity or the distant past, and seven in the Near or Middle East. Fifteen are based in Europe.

Letters M, N, O and P by Antonio de Pian

The original of Giovanni Battista’s portfolio is less rare, coming up for auction at five figures occasionally in the last few decades. It, too, appears in the Kiermeier-Dobre/Vogel’s Basoli volume but more prominently than his father’s. Anton Durstmüller’s earlier Ein Schmuckalphabet aus Wien/“Alphabet Jewelry from Vienna”(1973) showcases Giovanni’s portfolio. With its Chinese-fold leaves and laid paper, Durstmüller’s book matches and enhances the warmth and color of Giovanni’s invention and the chromolithographs by the Viennese lithographers Leopold Müller, Johann Höfelich, and M.R. Toma. Giovanni’s use of the arch’s reflection in the water to form the letter O, Pian places himself firmly in his father’s and Basoli’s company regardless of any lack of appointment or honors.

The Chinese fold of pages in the Durstmüller volume; the letter O by Giovanni Battista de Pian.

Sixteen of Giovanni’s scenes have European settings; eleven are Middle Eastern (he has an extra S). Of these, at least nine represent antiquity. From Basoli to the elder Pian and to the younger, there is the subtle shift in their scenes from the Classical to NeoClassical to Romantic styles, reflected in the diminishing emphasis on antiquity and growing emphasis on rustic European scenes. Typographically (or really calligraphically), the shift is less subtle. With almost every letter, Basoli used or tended toward a slab serif letter shape with blunt tips and sloping brackets. The Pians, however, leaned toward block serifs and sharply curving brackets, as seen in the letters A, C and E, above, and the letter M, below.

Kiermeier-Debre/Vogel’s side-by-side presentation of the letter M by Giovanni Battista de Pian and Antonio Basoli, respectively. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

Basoli’s serifs do not vary with the scene’s region, which might have created anomalies but somehow that does not happen. Only with certain letters do the Pians vary their letters with the region. At the top here, the serifs in the elder Pian’s letters C and E reflect their different regional settings. Below, his two S’s, however, fail on this score. The block serif S belongs more with the antique Roman scene; the nearly sans serif S belongs more with the antique Egyptian scene. The more exotic the setting from a Western perspective, the more the block serifs present difficulties — as in Giovanni’s letter G (the Turkish pirates below decks appear fed up with it) and letter T (the Africans depicted are certainly looking askance at the architecture) below.

Basoli’s and the Pians’ use of slab serif letter shapes reflects both their theatrical profession and the period’s infatuation with the shape in advertising in newspapers and on posters. Slab serifs were called Egyptian serifs, not that those letter shapes appear anywhere in Egyptian antiquity, but neither do the Keith Haring-like figures on the flanking columns in Giovanni’s L scene. See Further Reading for the story of slab serifs and their moniker.

For more on the operatic and theatrical context in which Basoli and the Pians worked, see the entry for Antonio Basoli in the Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – David Rault

ABC of Typography (2019)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Antonio & Giovanni Battista de Pian

Further Reading