Script, Print and Letterforms in Global Contexts

Introduction

The global history of text-based communication constitutes a particularly exciting facet of material culture, given the myriad ways in which its production, transmission and consumption have been – and continue to be – accomplished across cultural and political boundaries. However, critical engagement with script and print outside the Western world has remained relatively limited despite a burgeoning interest in the interrelated areas of printing, publishing, design and type history. Studies of the ‘global’ and ‘regional’ cultures of print have tended to mostly accommodate only summary accounts and generalizations in relation to considerable material production of text in different languages and scripts.

In 2018, with the support of the Centre for Printing History & Culture, we held a two-day international conference at Birmingham City University that addressed the relative sparsity of scholarly discourse around the various facets of text-based production and consumption in a global context. During this event, the plurality of engagements with, and interpretations of the printed and written word in various writing systems and artefacts – whether handwritten, lithographed, typographically printed, or digitally manifested – were considered across broad geographic contexts and various eras of textual production. This book is the result of that conference, a logical progression for such narratives to expand and address the rich variation and particularity of global practices. Featuring chapters by both scholars and practitioners broadly in the areas of design, printing, publishing, typography, print culture and history, this book brings critical perspectives and presents fresh approaches toward the study and discussion of the visual and material aspects of print in the diverse linguistic contexts of the world.

It was never our intention to attempt a volume that presumes to provide for all the various writing systems and their appearance on the page across the world. Such an undertaking would be too ambitious in the first place, and unrealistic through any practical lens. However, as stated, this volume stands as an examination of various allied disciplines that are entwined with the study of letterforms, printing and print culture: economics, politics, international relations, anthropology, technology, form and aesthetics, and history, to name a few. Necessarily this means that this volume also covers a vast range of topics across different eras; what weaves these seemingly distant threads together is their fascination with the printed word, and the cultures that produced and consumed them.