Wednesday, July 17, 2013

103. Transporting Ideals of Typography

On Thursday 18 July the annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) will be opened at the University of Philadelphia. 

Friday morning the actual conference starts with a great variety of papers. One of the early sessions is titled 'Typographic Travels'. There are three presentations by Michael Knies (University of Scranton), Nicholas Kendall Morris (The State University of New York-Buffalo) and me.

My talk is called 'Transporting Ideals of Typography: The Case of The Ideal Book'. After the first edition of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson's The Ideal Book had been published in 1901 (dated 1900), a long row of new editions was published, especially in the United States. There were in fact more reprints of this text than of William Morris's lecture with the same title. I will be looking at the way the intentions and design of the manifesto were changed after they crossed the Atlantic, and how this effected the status of the text.

Extracts from the Book Beautiful, with an initial by F.W. Goudy (Village Press, 1907)