Barrie Tullet from Caseroom Press came to DMU on Friday and gave a talk to our undergrads on the history of visual language. In the main, Barrie's talk provided an luscious visual overview of the history of concrete writing, typography, and graphic design in literature and in magazine culture; a history that extended from Gutenberg in the 15th century through Tristram Shandy through Futurism and Modernism and into the contemporary graphic design of magazines.
As a scholar who examines multimiodal literature, it was fascinating for me to see this history from a different perspective. For a start, it mentioned a few books that I was unaware of (watch this space - reviews will follow once I have the pennies to buy them).
My own research focuses on multimodality in late 20th and early 21st century literature; This was an area largely untouched in Barrie's talk. Instead, as mentioned, his attention to works in our age turned to the magazine. I was really struck by his view that the most interesting work in graphic design today is going on in magazine culture - he mentioned the brilliant Emigre magazine and Raygun (which I hadn't heard of), and his top tip: Carson Magazine, one to watch!
Part of my research involves hunting out visually dynamic literary works: They do exist! But they're certainly deviations from the norm. Experimental, and not mainstream. I spend hours performing internet searches, chasing 'customers who bought X, also bought Y' links... Barrie is right in that in general, the full capacities of the book as a material and artistic artefact are not being explored. In terms of the future, I'll end this blog post with his words, "The next step is to design books like a magazine".
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