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Do you have news you would like to publish? If so enter it using our news form. Palatino, Optima oust Fraktur, Antiqua as Danish dons rekey KierkegaardWhile many typographers search for the philosopher’s stone that will turn their workaday efforts into the pure gold of D&AD pencils, few philosophers, one would think, worry too much about typography. But Niels Jørgen Cappelørn proved the opposite in his intriguing and engaging opening lecture yesterday. Director of the Søren Kierkegaarde Research Centre, Dr Cappelørn is bringing out a new edition of Kierkegaarde’s complete works. And because he considers that the philosopher was highly conscious of the appearance of his printed works, considerable effort has gone into analysing their appearance and transforming it into a modern equivalent for the new edition. Kierkegaarde had, like many authors, contradictory views of the competence of his typesetters. (And they were his – he paid for the printing and published the books himself.) Sometimes they showed so much interest he wanted to reward them with a special offprint of his writing. But when they insisted on replacing his unconventional, rhetorical punctuation with the more normal ‘grammatical’ standards of the day, he revolted and laboriously corrected their incursions into his style. Unity of type was not a notable feature of Kierkegaarde’s works. Although the overall style of Danish printing of the 1830s and 1840s was black-letter, Kierkegaarde used subtle variations of style and size to articulate his text. In common with other philosophers, he saw the relationship of parts, chapters, and sections as highly significant in explaining the structure of his works, and laid out his manuscript copy for contents lists with extreme care. Not only were hierarchical indents indicated, but a system of multiple underlining reinforced the value of heading levels, and typeface instructions were added in the margin. Obsessed with balance and symmetry (and, it must be said, with gloominess), the philosopher would publish each book under his own name in tandem with another under a pseudonym. And always open to the ironic gesture, the volume that is called Postscript to the philosophical fragments was some 320 pages longer than the Philosophical fragments themselves – and in a larger format. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn’s new edition reflects the typographic synaesthesia [spelling ae or e in the middle?] of the original by modern means. Clearly understanding that a black-letter edition was not practical, Cappelørn and his designer [check name sounds like Ben Drole] selected Palatino to represent the original base font, with Latin and French text set in Optima. Bold stands in for the bolder black-letter fonts, An ingenious system of horizontal rules separates Kierkegaarde’s own text from the editor’s surrounding apparatus. And Cappelørn was happy to break the standard format width of the series to set Kierkegaarde’s journals, with their many annotations, double column. Kant would never rant That Swift would make his reader’s pant; And Sartre said his auntie Favoured Rousseau set in Dante. Posted on: 8:05, 21 September 2001 |