It’s amazing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we raised it to our lips to drink to the world and tell each other what we taste, what it’s like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and shaped it so we could hear it with our eyes and see it with our minds, creating meaning from shapes and sizes for sounds.
We take it for granted now, this temporary miracle permeating every foundation of our lives, and continue to employ these small concrete things to express our most vast and abstract thoughts. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archaeological artifact, touching more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters hold the history of our species and our world, their shapes shaped by the interaction between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.
Kelly AndersonA creator of physical magic, bringing that layered history to life The alphabet in motion: how letters get their shapes – a large-format two-volume marvel, years in the making and countless prototypes, filled with paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate each character’s biography.
Through a kaleidoscope of subjects, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelly shines a bright light on how we went from ink to pixels, drawing on everything from Plato to Cratylus From an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom (which gave rise to the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to spark the digital universe.
In a wonderful short essay accompanying each letter she writes:
For many cultures over time, the triangular form of the A has represented strength and stability. This connection probably originated in the physical world. The triangle is the most stable load-bearing shape because it distributes force and tension on both sides of its wide base. In terms of physics, most simple machines use the intrinsic morphological power of triangles: wedges, inclined planes, and levers all work because of their triangular forms.
Long before physics provided a solid explanation, early human civilizations observed and used the structural strength of triangles in their architecture and simple machines. By extension, for hundreds of years throughout the Hellenic world, A was believed to have the power to curse and heal, and it appeared regularly in religious and medicinal rituals. The letter A neatly combines symbolic mysticism with the demonstrative power of the created world. (An analogy exists between “to cast a spell” and “to cast a spell”.)
Noting that “each letter has a long history,” Kelly traces the lineage of A:
The ‘A’ we recognize today is the result of different cultures remapping this shape to sights and concepts of local environments.
The triangular form of the A began in Egypt around 3100 BC as a pictograph of a seated eagle, the central bird of ancient Egyptian religion.
The more agriculture-oriented Phoenicians adapted the falcon Aleph (From the Hebrew word for “bull”). Now rotated, it appears in bovine profile, with horns on the right and nose on the left. A vertical line defines the back of the bull’s head, which introduces the horizontal crossbar of the A.
One of the great blind spots of our cultural vision is the continuity of ideas – we look back and gasp at what appears to be a breakthrough, failing to see its combinatorial nature, building on the way everything came before. Kelly writes:
The word “text” comes from the Latin verb texrayMeaning “to weave” (hence the origin of the expression “to spin”). Computers, which were first used for typesetting and are the direct technological descendants of knitting, seem to bridge the dual meanings of textray perfectly. Weaving is a binary technique: its vertical warp and horizontal weft (and the way those two components, together, make a thread visible/invisible) is a precursor to how the 1s and 0s of today’s computers work. The woven binary code memory serves as the primary computer navigation system on the ship apollo 11 Objective.
As well as a paper playground of ideas, it is also a deeply researched magazine detailing the history of technology and the evolution of typography. What emerges is entirely unrepeatable: part pop-up exploratorium, part encyclopedia, part Wunderkammer with twenty-six compartments of wonder, part tribute to the unsung heroes who shaped the modern world while working in the shadows of their time and place.
alphabet in motionWhose tactile joy is perfectly translated to the digital screen, lives in that rare place where imagination and light meet to become a gateway to wonder – the gift of a lifetime.
