Letraset as Aleph

For quite a while now British artist Paul Noble has been building a town from the Letraset typeface Block Up. He calls the place “Nobson.” The enormous, detailed pencil drawings (they bear a passing resemblance to the work of M.C. Escher) turn the shaded, chunky, funky, laid-back Block Up letters into monuments, houses, sepulchers, ziggurats. To some it may seem strange that Noble has been able to build a whole world around a few scaled-up letters, but to me it seems perfectly natural. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been free-associating while staring at alphabets. Blame Letraset.

(From left) Nobson and Block Up typeface.

I must have gotten hold of my first Letraset Catalogue sometime in my mid-teens. It was a thick A4 volume with a bottle-green cover and white sans serif (Folio Bold?) spelling out the brand name. Inside, three to a page, were the dry-transfer fonts on which Letraset based its business. I couldn’t afford to buy the sheets with their little rub-off plastic letters, but the catalog came free, and you could trace or copy the faces. Copying them also had the advantage that you were never left with three “K”s but no “E” on a sheet, with your local dry-transfer lettering dealer closed for the weekend. You had to be careful you didn’t smudge or score the pages, though, as you pored over the letters like a monk over his illuminations.

Adolescence was, no doubt, the ideal time to discover such a powerful metonym for individuality. For although each page of the Letraset Catalogue repeated the same impersonal mantra—A to Z lower case, A to Z upper case, the numerals, a few symbols and punctuation marks, examples of various point sizes—what jumped off the page was nothing less than personality itself. How could two faces as different as Lazybones and LCD, one a happy-go-lucky hippy, the other a tight-assed accountant, share the same page? How was it possible that the same sequence of letters could be so differently embodied in so many different forms, and still remain legible? How could different ways of drawing the letter “A” represent entirely different visions of the universe? The Letraset Catalogue seemed to represent, in the clearest and most visible form, the secret of style itself.

Already, as I began to frequent and familiarize myself with them, learning their names and their intimate curves, these faces were heavy with associations: Vag couldn’t help but evoke the self-deprecating copy in dry, droll Volkswagen advertisements, Profil, the title sequence of my favorite childhood TV show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But even without external references, the fonts oozed personality. There was Shatter, literally shattered, electrified and schizoid. There was Traffic, a deco flapper with a diagonal slice. Now, as I flip through the catalog twenty-five years later, I’m struck by how groovy and ’70s it all looks. There’s a party on every page. I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’ definition of poetry: “essential gaudiness.”

Cover of Nick Currie’s band’s debut album—The Happy Family’s The Man on Your Street—with song titles set in Clarendon.

Surprisingly, considering my weird fetish for fonts and faces, I never became a designer. But making pop records did have a hidden bonus: you got to specify the font you wanted to see on your record sleeve. Out came the Letraset Catalogue once more, followed by long, pleasurable hours mulling over those familiar flavors and personalities, those quirky friends. I chose Clarendon for my band’s debut album, hoping to capture the retro ’60s look of Benoit Hennebert, the genius in-house designer for cult-Belgian label Les Disques du Crepuscule. (According to legend, Benoit lived at Interference, the club Crepuscule operated on the Brussels Grand Place, got paid in food, and never went out. He also never seemed to use any faces but Clarendon and Times New Roman.) For my first solo album, it had to be Gill Sans (it looked classical, but the perversity of certain aspects of Gill’s personal life fit the record too). For my EP of Jacques Brel cover versions, I chose the most ghastly combination Letraset could offer: Microgramma Bold and Brush Script. ’80s pomo, you see; not so much mix-n-match as jam-n-clash.

Much later, I realized that I had been overestimating the importance of fonts, attributing almost magical properties to them. In a process resembling the Marxist sin of “reification,” I’d been attributing to inanimate objects properties that can only belong to social relationships. I should have been going out more probably, dating girls instead of tracing typefaces. But for a while there in my teens, it really seemed as if the Letraset Catalogue might be something magical: a kind of Aleph.

“Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the whole world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?” asked Georges Perec. He was referring to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Aleph, published in 1945. The “aleph” is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but for Borges it’s “one of the points in space that contains all other points ... the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.” The story’s narrator goes hunting for the aleph down in a dark cellar.

I knew better: it was right there in the Letraset Catalogue.