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Typoo;: A novel
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2014
I think Conrad had hella fun making this book.
I wonder if my typewriter is still in my parents' garage somewhere?
June 29, 2014
I. Microhistories of Typographical Art
We know the history of art through studies of people, movements and historical contexts. Like studies of any marginal cultural groups, it’s always the people who interest us the most. Van Gogh chopped his ear off in the name of love, Duchamp submitted a urinal to an exhibition and Warhol was almost assassinated by a paranoid schizophrenic radical feminist who thought he was stealing her work.
The history of typographical art is no different in offering a glut of colourful eccentrics. Take for example Gwang Hyuk Lee, ‘a very talented Korean’ who turned the entire text of the Book of John into a giant hand-drawn picture of Jesus, every letter repurposed in service of some grand religious undertaking. The first and last mention of this impossibly apocryphal tale was on a Geocities website sometime in the 1990s.
Another luminary of typographical art is Julius Nelson, a postwar instructor in Secretarial Sciences at Windber Highschool in smalltown Pennsylvania. Nelson was a leading proponent of Artyping, ‘anything from simple cover designs to the most elaborate scenes or portraits’ made on a typewriter. His 1939 book, Artyping, is the closest typewriter art comes to having a manifesto. In a dazzling display of technical brilliance, Nelson guides us through the various techniques Artypists can use to achieve the most realistic results. The book has been lovingly (and mercifully) digitised for your enjoyment.
Surprisingly, microhistories of typographical art aboud. Tom McCormack's got an interesting bit over at Rhizome about Baudelaire's Calligrammes, wonderfully playful 'pictograms in which the text echoes the image'.
Before diving into the smut-filled word of 80s BBS ASCII art, Alexis C. Madrigal, writing in The Atlantic, presents the most comprehensive chronology of typewriter art to date. According to Madrigal, almost a century of portraits of presidents and twee nature scenes created on typewriters is rounded off by the advent of concrete poetry in the late 60s.
Writers of concrete poetry made typographical layout—something which was taken for granted—just as important as rhyme, rhythm and meter in communicating the message of a poem. Concrete poetry’s canon ranges from proto-works like George Herbert’s East Wings (1633) (not typewritten) to labours of gargantuan creativity like Steve McCaffery’s Carnival (1967-1970)—which is made available for free through Coach House Books.
II. Typoo
Conspicuously missing from the history of typographical art is a prime candidate for the typographical narrative canon (does such a thing exist?), Earl Conrad’s Typoo. The novel chronicles the life of the eponymous main character Typoo—who is named so because of his Double O blood type. The story is told using a mixture of typewritten illustrations and fragmented narrative prose (image via Alison Gibbons).
Conrad’s breezy plot twists and turns as it tells the surreal life story of Typoo, whose somewhat heroic path takes him from studying botany at Berkley to Olympic champ to coveted circus performer.
By now we’re used to playful typography as a storytelling tool, with works like House of Leaves (2000) and The Raw Shark Texts (2007) enjoying critical acclaim. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Conrad’s book no longer seems as novel as it may have back in 1969 upon publication. No doubt it was a novelty then too—but it had the advantage of being unprecedented and genuinely sui generis.
It’s no surprise that it faded into obscurity. It hasn’t even had the pleasure of dipping in and out of obscurity over the decades like many of our favourites. Typoo vanished soon after publication.
III. The Vanished Author
Conrad himself was an obscure fellow, his inconsequentiality to mainstream literature epitomised by the fact his papers are held at the small community college in his hometown in New York. But who gives a damn about the mainstream, anyway? We know everything worthwhile happens on the margins.
Very little can be unearthed about Conrad online. After an initial search I concluded that he was an African American because one of the only scholarly mentions of Typoo is in a bibliography of literature titled ‘Afro-American Fiction: Errata and Additions’ published in a 1971 edition of American Studies by Robert A. Corrigan.
Conrad’s oeuvre is saturated with meaty social commentaries on African American issues, including a collaboration with Haywood Patterson, a philological investigation of the ‘Negro Dialect’ and several volumes on Harriet Tubman. He fiercely believed that:
I can be forgiven by making the assumption, I hope. There’s a picture of him on page 200 of Milton Sernett’s Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History and he’s snowy for real. Sernett’s deconstruction of the mythologisation of Tubman is helpfully lathered with biographical scraps about her mythmakers—Conrad having been the first to ‘rescu[e] Harriet Tubman from the dustbin of history’.
Conrad discovered he had what he later called called the ‘gift of wordiness’ at a young age, and ‘attempt[ed] a neighbourhood newspaper at the age of twelve’. He was also one of the only members of the white intelligentsia to recognise and react against the ‘incubus of racism from the late 1930s into the civil-rights era’.
With Sernett’s rather effusive accidental biography, it’s difficult to say Typoo was anything more than a dot in the career of quite a remarkable writer. Resuscitating Tubman and reimagining her as the hero she undoubtedly was gave a powerful mythological tool to black historians and community leaders who weaved her life into the inspiring narratives of anti-slavery which formed such a vital part of black consciousness was certainly a more impressive feat than his typographical experimentation in Typoo, a book which seems out of character against the backdrop of the rest of his works.
IV. A Plea For Help
So we’re left wondering why the bloody hell he wrote it and why the flipping hell no one has paid any proper attention to it since? Any ideas?
We know the history of art through studies of people, movements and historical contexts. Like studies of any marginal cultural groups, it’s always the people who interest us the most. Van Gogh chopped his ear off in the name of love, Duchamp submitted a urinal to an exhibition and Warhol was almost assassinated by a paranoid schizophrenic radical feminist who thought he was stealing her work.
The history of typographical art is no different in offering a glut of colourful eccentrics. Take for example Gwang Hyuk Lee, ‘a very talented Korean’ who turned the entire text of the Book of John into a giant hand-drawn picture of Jesus, every letter repurposed in service of some grand religious undertaking. The first and last mention of this impossibly apocryphal tale was on a Geocities website sometime in the 1990s.
Another luminary of typographical art is Julius Nelson, a postwar instructor in Secretarial Sciences at Windber Highschool in smalltown Pennsylvania. Nelson was a leading proponent of Artyping, ‘anything from simple cover designs to the most elaborate scenes or portraits’ made on a typewriter. His 1939 book, Artyping, is the closest typewriter art comes to having a manifesto. In a dazzling display of technical brilliance, Nelson guides us through the various techniques Artypists can use to achieve the most realistic results. The book has been lovingly (and mercifully) digitised for your enjoyment.
Surprisingly, microhistories of typographical art aboud. Tom McCormack's got an interesting bit over at Rhizome about Baudelaire's Calligrammes, wonderfully playful 'pictograms in which the text echoes the image'.
Before diving into the smut-filled word of 80s BBS ASCII art, Alexis C. Madrigal, writing in The Atlantic, presents the most comprehensive chronology of typewriter art to date. According to Madrigal, almost a century of portraits of presidents and twee nature scenes created on typewriters is rounded off by the advent of concrete poetry in the late 60s.
Writers of concrete poetry made typographical layout—something which was taken for granted—just as important as rhyme, rhythm and meter in communicating the message of a poem. Concrete poetry’s canon ranges from proto-works like George Herbert’s East Wings (1633) (not typewritten) to labours of gargantuan creativity like Steve McCaffery’s Carnival (1967-1970)—which is made available for free through Coach House Books.
II. Typoo
Conspicuously missing from the history of typographical art is a prime candidate for the typographical narrative canon (does such a thing exist?), Earl Conrad’s Typoo. The novel chronicles the life of the eponymous main character Typoo—who is named so because of his Double O blood type. The story is told using a mixture of typewritten illustrations and fragmented narrative prose (image via Alison Gibbons).
Conrad’s breezy plot twists and turns as it tells the surreal life story of Typoo, whose somewhat heroic path takes him from studying botany at Berkley to Olympic champ to coveted circus performer.
By now we’re used to playful typography as a storytelling tool, with works like House of Leaves (2000) and The Raw Shark Texts (2007) enjoying critical acclaim. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Conrad’s book no longer seems as novel as it may have back in 1969 upon publication. No doubt it was a novelty then too—but it had the advantage of being unprecedented and genuinely sui generis.
It’s no surprise that it faded into obscurity. It hasn’t even had the pleasure of dipping in and out of obscurity over the decades like many of our favourites. Typoo vanished soon after publication.
III. The Vanished Author
Conrad himself was an obscure fellow, his inconsequentiality to mainstream literature epitomised by the fact his papers are held at the small community college in his hometown in New York. But who gives a damn about the mainstream, anyway? We know everything worthwhile happens on the margins.
Very little can be unearthed about Conrad online. After an initial search I concluded that he was an African American because one of the only scholarly mentions of Typoo is in a bibliography of literature titled ‘Afro-American Fiction: Errata and Additions’ published in a 1971 edition of American Studies by Robert A. Corrigan.
Conrad’s oeuvre is saturated with meaty social commentaries on African American issues, including a collaboration with Haywood Patterson, a philological investigation of the ‘Negro Dialect’ and several volumes on Harriet Tubman. He fiercely believed that:
‘the only significant books in America have in one way or another dealt with the Negro. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to Gone with the Wind and again to Native Son' (source, p353).
I can be forgiven by making the assumption, I hope. There’s a picture of him on page 200 of Milton Sernett’s Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History and he’s snowy for real. Sernett’s deconstruction of the mythologisation of Tubman is helpfully lathered with biographical scraps about her mythmakers—Conrad having been the first to ‘rescu[e] Harriet Tubman from the dustbin of history’.
Conrad discovered he had what he later called called the ‘gift of wordiness’ at a young age, and ‘attempt[ed] a neighbourhood newspaper at the age of twelve’. He was also one of the only members of the white intelligentsia to recognise and react against the ‘incubus of racism from the late 1930s into the civil-rights era’.
With Sernett’s rather effusive accidental biography, it’s difficult to say Typoo was anything more than a dot in the career of quite a remarkable writer. Resuscitating Tubman and reimagining her as the hero she undoubtedly was gave a powerful mythological tool to black historians and community leaders who weaved her life into the inspiring narratives of anti-slavery which formed such a vital part of black consciousness was certainly a more impressive feat than his typographical experimentation in Typoo, a book which seems out of character against the backdrop of the rest of his works.
IV. A Plea For Help
So we’re left wondering why the bloody hell he wrote it and why the flipping hell no one has paid any proper attention to it since? Any ideas?
bbc-selections
June 15, 2014Some information about this typographically striking novel here:
http://iconnote.blogspot.co.uk/2011/0...
http://iconnote.blogspot.co.uk/2011/0...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews