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7. Recognizing the cultural values inherent in design elements

The theme of Stanley Morison's 1957 Lyell Lectures Politics and Script
likewise is that details of physical artifacts can reveal the past. Morison
achieves breadth through focus: his specific topic is the revelatory power
of the very forms of alphabetical letters, but he tracks his narrow subject in
calligraphic, inscriptional, and printed forms over twenty-five centuries and
on surfaces of papyrus, vellum, paper, stone and marble, and precious metals.
The appearances of printed letters play an important but relatively small
role here, for printed forms occur only in the final half millennium of this
grand sweep. His premise is that "The grammatically or philologically accurate
transcription of a set of alphabetical signs may not always exhaust
the suggestions of the text"; more specifically, "the physical form of an
inscription, manuscript, book, newspaper, or other medium of record" can
"reveal considerations that appertain to the history of something distinct
from religion, politics, and literature, namely: the history of the use of the
intellect. So far, that is, as intellect has made its record in script, inscription,
or type" (p. 1). His book is not a paleography manual, he points out, but
"rather, a detection of some of the causes outside the artists' and workmen's
shops that have changed the alphabetical lettering employed in the West
for literary and other purposes" (p. 2). Our alphabet, in other words, has
been shaped by large cultural factors, chief of which Morison's wide survey
leads him to infer as political and religious authority. Morison therefore
attempts "to select the forms that are in common use today and to show that
much of their long career has been conditioned by movements in religion
and politics, friction between Church and State, and schisms between Eastern
and Western Christendom" (p. 3). By examining these markers carefully,
then, we can find patterns behind them, and ones of far greater significance
than might first appear.

The grand scale of Morison's study makes it difficult to comprehend the
full force of his argument by stepping into it mid-stream, but one convenient
place to observe his approach is in Chapter 2, where he addresses a
particular historical question. In the aftermath of Constantine's rule as
emperor in the early fourth century, significant changes occurred in the
dominant letter forms; why? By working back from the artifactual evidence,
Morison is able to reconstruct the likely thinking of the era. Earlier he
showed that square capitals conveyed the official authority of the Roman
empire, and that for efficiency of speed and space a form known as Rustic
("a supreme invention of the Latin mind in the field of practical learning"
[p. 43]) had also developed. "Rustic progressed from the second to the fifth
century," he says. "It thereafter declined, except for use in incipits and explicits.
Why did this capital script lose favour?" (p. 56). "The answer," he
continues, "is that a change of attitude in authority occurred which involved
changes in texts and scripts. The change in Court calligraphy followed the
change in Court religion" (p. 57). Destruction of Christian libraries by earlier
emperors as well as the development of an extensive body of Christian
theology generated a great need for the production of books. "For writing this
mass of new books the appropriate script would clearly not be one closely

associated with the persecutors nor with the books which they had honoured,"
and thus "what was looked for by the organizers as the basis of this
mass of writing was a new script" (p. 58). Morison then goes on to trace the
sources from which such a set of letterforms could draw.

Despite his main interest, Morison does in fact look at what goes on in
"artists' and workmen's shops" and makes equally interesting inferences
about quotidian activities of these fourth- and fifth-century people. For
instance, he observes that the characteristics of ink marks on vellum are a
function of the way the nib of the pen is cut and therefore reveal its shape.
The nature of the cut, meanwhile, affects the kinds of letter forms that can
be made and the time and materials required to inscribe a text. From examples
of those letters Morison is able to infer that the way the nib was cut
gradually changed. From the characteristics that resulted he is able in turn
to postulate motives: "Economy of speed, effort, and material was bound
to effect a change, and, in time, the old roman Square Capital, as a text
script, would first be accelerated and next superseded" (p. 52).

In using Morison's book, readers should be aware of the benefit of consulting
the original 1972 printing instead of the 2000 "Special edition" that,
according to the copyright page, the Oxford University Press produced "for
Sandpiper Books Ltd." In the reprint, the photographs (which are crucial
to following Morison's arguments) have lost considerable quality, and some
(such as the lower image of plate 37 on p. 47) have become nearly illegible.
Interestingly, although the online catalogues of OCLC, RLIN, COPAC,
and the British Library report hundreds of copies of the 1972 impression,
none of them includes the Sandpiper printing. It may be that not one of
the thousands of member libraries owns a copy, but it seems more plausible
that cataloguers simply have not paid adequate attention to the details of
these artifacts.