Typophile

Historical accuracy: what is it?

bjornz

I am a doctoral candiate at Hong-Ik university, Korea. My interest is a certain typographic composition which, assumably, started in the early twenties(1920's). But it is not easy to find some available references and even know of the accurate term for it.

Belows are typical samples, which show the certain structure that use the same alphabet among two or more words.

In fact I am in trouble because I am planning to set it as a thesis theme. My thesis is about some possibilty that this can be adapted to Korean Typography. It has not been considered because the Korean, Hangul structure is quie different from the English's.

In the early stage of my thesis, the terminoloy and references about it is absolutely in need. It will be thankful if you give me even a simple comment on it.

Bjornz Li

sampes of the structure

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Nick Shinn

>assumably, started in the early twenties

In a way. Crossword puzzles were a huge fad at that time, which is probably related.

But actually, they go right back to ancient Rome:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

...and have a long cult history.

I've recently seen an astonishing Christian "poster" from 1500(?) years ago which was composed of a massive grid-field of normal-reading text from which various significant diagonal and vertical phrases are highlighted in different colours. Unfortunately, I am not the world's best note-taker, so I can't give you any further information, other than it was in an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge about 4 months ago.

There is also the traditional genre of "acrostic" verse, where the Initial character of each line, read vertically, spells out a message.

Check out "The Oxford Book of Word Games" and Willard R. Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play", to approach this phenomenon from the literary angle, which is, I believe, equally, if not more relevant than that of design.

bjornz

Thank you for your help.

I guessed it can be considered as "crossword puzzle, word game, and word play". But I meant it was revealed in the 1920's in terms of typography(printed type).

Now I am checking out more about your mentioned references. And I'd like you to suggest more relvant information in a typograhic way.

Hrant H Papazian

If you fail to find a decent term fo

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