Types of reading, types of pleasure: Pantographia and the specimens of globalization

Abstract

London typefounder Edmund Fry’s Pantographia (1799) is an extraordinary catalogue of all of the known languages of the world, published on thousands of pieces of custom non-Latin type that the book’s creator spent more than a decade cutting with his own hands. Though it is now long since forgotten, Pantographia sold hundreds of copies and was reviewed approvingly in the major periodicals of its day. The book is addressed to a general audience, not to printers. I argue that the book gave its readers permission to look at printed language not as a source of knowledge or words, but as a source of visual pleasure. Throwing scores of unfamiliar scripts at the reader, one after another, Pantographia savors the visual exotics of the world’s languages and reiterates the strangeness and contingency of every writing system. The work is about the verbal/visual interface, self-consciously troubling the line between illustration and text. It invites a mode of “reading” that fixes the reader’s attention on the inked lines and shapes that readers ordinarily look through. This mode of reading, and its pleasures, are aspects of eighteenth-century print culture that we have not yet understood.