Types of reading, types of pleasure: Pantographia and the specimens of globalization
Tim Cassedy
London typefounder Edmund Fry’s Pantographia (1799) is an extraordinary catalogue of all the known languages world, published on thousands pieces custom non-Latin type that book’s creator spent more than a decade cutting with his own hands. Though it now long since forgotten, sold hundreds copies and was reviewed approvingly in major periodicals its day. The book addressed to general audience, not printers. I argue gave readers permission look at printed language as source knowledge or words, but visual pleasure. Throwing scores unfamiliar scripts reader, one after another, savors exotics world’s reiterates strangeness contingency every writing system. work about verbal/visual interface, self-consciously troubling line between illustration text. It invites mode “reading” fixes reader’s attention inked lines shapes ordinarily through. This reading, pleasures, are aspects eighteenth-century print culture we have yet understood.
Word & Image