Peripatético gráfico

Abstract

I embark on a pilgrimage through the design of the book, tracing the type area. What draws me in is the kaleidoscopic interplay between spaces, bodies, and times that emerges from the images, which sometimes leap forth and at other times scape. Belonging to the territory of the book and governed by the laws of the page and the printing process the visuality of the type area is revealed by the imagination, the queen of the faculties of memory, capable of touching all the others. At the morphological crossroads of the type area and its deep pathetic-archaeological layers, a game between knowing and unknowing arises. I question this space, which is capable of marking by contact, or even provoking a loss in the mists of the senses. I use montages method to reflect on the origins of the type area, its survival, migration, and the processes to imprint in memory. I owe my panoramic observations to Robert Bringhurst’s work entitled The Elements of Typographic Style, which enables me to scrutinize the relationship between the reader’s body and the design of the book. However, the axes of arguments that give rise to this work (and that sparked my desire for adventure) are rooted above all in the research of culture and image scholars. Georges Didi-Huberman, Hans Belting, and Vilém Flusser have pointed me towards new possibilities for framing, apprehending, and discussing type area as images. The goal is to make us see. And whether fleeting or not, it leads us to a concept that I call Graphic Peripatetic, which was coined during my theoretical experiments. The nomadic element in the design of the book yields a supreme theoretical and epistemological consequence: opening the printed page also means opening and imprinting the reader’s body.