### 3.15. Breaking RULE⑭-2: Words in Different Sizes

Changing word size is not very uncommon, as graph size can be associated to sonic salience. To give an example, let us return to Jardin's *Le petit sauvage* (§3.4.2) with the following excerpt from the second (sans-serif) part (p. 238):

> Manon est là, devant moi !
> Je la respire, la devine dans l'obscurité. Sa silhouette se
> dessine devant moi. Je suis **heureux, heureux, heureux,**
> **heureux, heureux.**
> Soudain le courant revient ; la lumière s'allume.

Alexandre illustrates his happiness by repeating the word “happy” with increasing emphasis. The paragraph change after the largest <heureux> word is necessary to avoid having the inverse effect of a “small” word <Soudain> following a large word, which would be interpreted as a negative event, a loss of self-confidence and inspiration.

### 3.16. Breaking RULE⑭-3: Words in Different Font Families

Font family change between words is rather rare, for various reasons: (1) the two font families have to be easily identifiable so that an average reader can unambiguously identify them when applied on an arbitrary word; (2) they should carry connotative features that justify the font change.

Here is a case where this graphetic method has been applied. Bester, in his *The Demolished Man*, uses a switch to a blackletter font, in a telepathic dialog (p. 22):

> Instantly came a familiar sensory impact: Snow/mint/tulips/
taffeta.
> 
> 'Mary Noyes. Come to help the bachelor prepare for the party?
> 
> *Blessings!*
> 
> 'Hoped you'd need me, Linc.'

Here the gothic font connotes Christmas atmosphere, as a complementary perception to those of snow, mint, tulips and taffeta. Bester uses a typically American blackletter font (Cloister Black) with short (final) 
g> letters, which gives the utterance a sense of conventional modernity (in a traditional setting, the greeting would rather be <Blessings!>). By using a clearly American font in a modern way, Bester avoids confusion with German Fraktur fonts connotating German culture or even Nazism as in the Austrian publicity "Gehen Sie wählen! Andere tun es auch." ("Go vote! Others do it too.") (Haralambous and Dürst, 2019, p. 138).
## 3.17. Breaking RULE<sup>14</sup>-4: Words Using Different Allographs

### 3.17.1. Tiger! Tiger!

In his novel *Tiger! Tiger!* (1955), Alfred Bester describes a community of people in a spaceship. This community descends from scientists, therefore they call themselves “Scientific People” and worship a deity called “Holy Darwin”. Their names, tattooed on their fronts, all contain a letter <o> that is either replaced by a male symbol <♂> or by a female symbol <♀>. Interestingly, the English edition of the text describes the allographs but does *not* use them:

> Across the brow was tattooed JOSEPH. The <O> in JOSEPH had a tiny arrow thrust up from the right shoulder, turning it into the symbol of Mars, used by scientists to designate male sex. (p. 26)

> Three girls appeared before Foyle. Their faces were hideously tattooed. Across each brow was a name: JOAN and MOIRA and POLLY. The <O> of each name had a tiny cross at the base. (p. 27)

On the other hand, the French translation (*Terminus les étoiles*, 2007) keeps the description, but also iconically uses the corresponding allographs:

> Sur le front on lisait le mot: JOSÉPH. Le «O» de JOSÉPH portait une petite flèche en haut et à droite : il devenait ainsi le symbole de Mars utilisé par les savants pour désigner le sexe mâle. (p. 40)

> Jóseph fit un geste, et trois filles se rangèrent devant Foyle. Elles avaient le visage hideusement tatoué. Sur chaque front était gravé un nom : JÓAN, MORA, PQLLY. Le «O» de chaque nom portait une petite croix à la base. (p. 41)

According to Smith (2016, p. 15), Bester is “gently satirizing what he saw as the all-too-common tendency of some science-fiction writers to treat science as a magic talisman and of certain readers to accept it as such”.

### 3.17.2. Les Furtifs

Alain Damasio (1969–) is probably the most famous living French science fiction author, even though none of his works has yet been translated into English. In his 700-page novel *Les Furtifs* (2019), he collaborated with an École Estienne-graduate font designer and graphic artist, Esther Szac,<fnref n="10" /> to massively include allographs in the text. Here is a complete list of the allographs used, as well as their numbers of occurrences in the novel:

- a: |ă| (609 times), |ã| (1), |æ| (1);

<footnote n="10">10. https://www.estherszac.com/</footnote>
- c: |č| (1,457), |č| (830);

- d: |ḍ| (40);

- e: |ė| (475), |ě| (1), |ę| (1), |ě| (1);

- f: |ʃ| (563);

- g: |ġ| (473), |ġ| (281), |ġ| (248);

- h: |h| (260), |h| (21);

- i: |l|/|l| (107), |l|/|l| (47), |l|/|l| (14), |l|/|l| (5);

- j: |j| (549);

- k: |k| (1);

- l: |l| (672), |l|/|l| (459), |l|/|l| (36);

- n: |n| (1);

- o: |ǒ| (620), |ọ| (548), |ọ| (430), |ọ| (145), |ǒ| (40), |ọ| (14), |ọ| (8), |ǒ| (4), |ō| (1);

- p: |p| (6), |p| (1);

- r: |r| (414), |r| (57), |r|/|r| (9), |r|/|r| (2), |r|/|r| (1);

- s: |š| (218), |š| (6), |š| (2);

- t: |t| (215), |t| (30), |t|/|t| (1), |t|/|t| (1);

- u: |u| (14), |u|/|u| (5), |u|/|u| (1), |u|/|u| (1);

- v: |v| (22).

As can be seen in the list above, allographs have been taken from several Latin-alphabet languages (Romanian, Portuguese, Swedish, Irish, Czech, Icelandic, Polish, etc.) as well as from Greek script: |ǒ|, |τ|, |v| and from Cyrillic script (Ukrainian language): |r|.

The novel uses six characters as first-person narrators. Some of the allographs used are specific to a given narrator, and others are common between more than one narrator:

<table><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">Narrator</th><th rowspan="2">% of paragraphs</th><th colspan="2">Allographs</th></tr><tr><th>Specific</th><th>Common with others</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Lorca</td><td>38.87%</td><td>ĠīōęU</td><td>óČćèġLŁfjọ</td></tr><tr><td>Sahar</td><td>17.66%</td><td>āηșțū</td><td>ččġLřūfjù</td></tr><tr><td>Saskia</td><td>26.36%</td><td>æĂăĠğHhřr</td><td>íóČćČčèġLřšǔor</td></tr><tr><td>Nèr</td><td>2.86%</td><td>ĐdHhİTtƏoƏP</td><td>Łš</td></tr><tr><td>Agüero</td><td>10.88%</td><td>Gġiķ|OoȘȚ</td><td>íóLřūjù</td></tr><tr><td>Toni</td><td>3.37%</td><td>þĒčīǒRšτǒǔ</td><td>íČŕfr</td></tr></tbody></table>

where the second column gives the percentage of paragraphs narrated by each narrator. As we can see, Lorca, Sahar and Saskia (the three most elaborated characters) use dotted allographs, while Nèr uses mostly allographs with bars, Agüero uses allographs with cedillas or ogoneks and Toni uses, amongst others, the three Greek allographs. To illustrate the use of these allographs for the different characters, here are three typical examples:
Szac's choice of using already existing glyphs of Unicode characters as allographs raises many issues:

- was this a pure-commodity choice, avoiding having to design new graphs, while hoping that nobody would realize that these graphs existed already?

- is it politically correct to “downgrade” graphs that are graphemes in other languages into simple allographs of French graphemes? Why should <ç> be considered as a full-right grapheme while |t| is merely an allograph of <t>?

- in most cases the phonetic realization of allographs is close to that of the “base” grapheme, but in some cases it is bluntly wrong: |β|, |r|, |f|, |ɒ|, |θ| are not phonetically contiguous to <p>, <r>, <f> and <v>, <o>: is the visual resemblance sufficient to establish a grapheme/allograph relationship?

- Alain Damasio is an anti-globalization activist, but isn't the choice of using these allographs ironically at the opposite of his convictions? He takes graphs from several cultures in the world, downgrades them to purely visual ersatzes of his own language's graphemes, and includes them, without any distinction, into a graphetic soup where their origin is completely dissolved. Isn't that exactly what multinationals are doing with products from third-world countries?

### 3.18. Breaking RULE⑬-6: Ateji

The traditional function of interlinear annotation in Japanese is to provide reading glosses (furigana) to kanji characters. Ateji in the sense of Lewis (2010) and Melander (2016), is the “pairing of kanji and furigana that has a different meaning”. In other words, ateji is a non-standard use of interlinear annotation to produce more meaning than just phonetic information. Melander (ibid.) subdivides the use of ateji into five categories: translative (“where the translation for the spoken word written in the furigana is provided in the kanji”), denotive (“in which a proper noun is given in the kanji while the pronoun actually spoken by the characters is given in the furigana”), constrastive (“when two different Japanese words are combined in order to give rise to new nuances which neither of the words express by themselves”), translative/contrastive (“the words used in the rubi are of foreign descent, but do not exhibit a one-to-one correspondence with the word being glossed”) and abbreviative/contrastive (“a means of abbreviating longer words (often terminology) that are too awkward to keep repeating all the time in the story”).

The Japanese author Dempow Torishima 西島伝法 (1970-) uses constrastive ateji in his novel 皆勤の徒 Sisyphean (2011).
Here are some examples (we will use letters A, B, C, ... to denote kanji characters in order to explore their combinations):

せずぞぶつ

- <製臓物>: If 製臓物 is ABC, then BC 臓物 has the “entrails” meaning. The rubi せいぞうぶつ /seizoubutsu/ is the phonetic representation of AB'C 製造物 “product”. By combining the semantics of AB'C and of BC we get “artificially produced entrails”. In the English translation of *Sisyphean* this syntagm is translated by the neologism *synthorganic*.

れいちょるい

- <隷重類>: ABC 隷重類 has the “heavily-burdened slave genus” meaning (A stands for “slave,” B for “heavy” and C for “genus”). The rubi れい嘛るい /reichourui/ is the phonetic representation of A'B'C 靈長類 “primates” where A' stands for “superior” and B' for “leader”. By combining the semantics of ABC and of A'B'C we get “slave primate”. In the English translation this syntagm is translated by the neologism *subordinape*.

けっかんもどき

- <皿菅>: No Japanese word can be associated with the reading of 皿菅. The first part of the rubi けっかん /kekkan/ can have the meanings “blood vessel” (血管), “fault” (欠陥) and “missing volume” (欠巻). The second part, もどき /modoki/ has the meaning of “ersatz” or “imitation”.

血管 is graphically close to 皿菅, we can consider the latter as being a “simpler imitation” of the former. Therefore we can consider that the first meaning of けっかん is meant and hence we obtain for 皿菅 the semantics of “an imitation of blood vessel”.

けっかんもどき

In the English translation the syntagm has been translated by *blood sedge*.

As we see, Torishima goes well beyond contrastive ateji by creating semantic puzzles that the reader has to solve by going back and forth between base characters, their meanings and readings, and rubi.

### 3.19. Breaking RULE⑬-7: Use of Interlinear Annotation

Interlinear annotation is very rarely used in fiction. Here are three examples of quite different natures:

1. asymmetric annotation, where the base is main text and where annotation takes the visual form of an exponent and functions as a context marker (§3.19.1);

2. asymmetric annotation, where the base is main text and where annotation is a separate line (in smaller graphs) and functions as a disclusive thread that runs parallel to the main text thread (§3.19.2);
3. symmetric annotation, where the base and annotation are equally im-
portant, displayed like a mathematical fraction and functioning as
simultaneous utterances in an alien language (§3.19.3).

3.19.1. The Demolished Man

Again in *The Demolished Man*, Alfred Bester uses the following graphetic
construction:

'Hoped you'd need me, Linc.³'
'Every host needs a hostess. Mary, what am I going to do for
Canapés⁸,⁰,⁸,?¹'
'Just invented a new recipe. I'll make it for you. Roast chutney &.'
'&?'

The |S.O.S| annotation of the word “Canapés” gives the context of the utterance, namely Linc desperately asking for help. In oral communication this information would have been provided by prosody and in multimodal communication by a gesture. In some sense this type of annotation is very similar to contrastive atejis: a single word is annotated and the annotation contributes to the meaning of the base.

3.19.2. Libro de Manuel

The well-known Argentinian author Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) wrote
a political novel, entitled *Libro de Manuel* (1973), which, incidentally, he
called “the worst of his books”.

In this novel he uses twenty interlinear annotations, concentrated in
eight pages and expressing the thoughts of the narrator. These thoughts
are uttered simultaneously to the main text but are discursively mostly
independent of it.

Here is an example: on p. 130, there is annotation formulating a
doubt about the “full moon” (no full moon, or anything related to it,
appears yet in the main text):

para que no se le ocurriera soltar un graznido telefónicamente inquietante
para el alborotado Oteiza que en cinco minutos arregló

On page 131 the same doubt arises again:

pensar un poco en eso que estaba esperando en la otra punta, ir poniendo
¿Por qué la luna llena?
desde ya la cara de veterinario consciente de su importante misión

On page 133 the full moon appears at last in the text, while the narrator
has changed his mind as "the moon wasn't full in the first place":
entre las sombras de una calle llena de agujas y amenazas, aullando histéricas sin saber de qué, de luna llena y carnaval

This graphetic method is unique in Cortázar's work. He manages to establish a feeling of intimacy, since annotation gives the impression of accessing the narrator's deepest thoughts, while the main text is unfolding. It is also a nice reading exercise, since the reader has to process two discursive threads simultaneously, knowing that the first is formal and well-structured, and the second is spontaneous and impulsive.

### 3.19.3. Embassytown

In the already mentioned novel *Embassytown*, China Miéville describes the communication attempts between humans and Ariekei, resulting in the humans teaching the Ariekei how to use metaphors and how to lie. To represent the Ariekei language in written form, Miéville uses an interlinear annotation method, where both parts are of equal importance (and hence the same font size). To distinguish the two text flows that are uttered simultaneously, Miéville uses the *notation of mathematical fractions*. Weakland (2015, p. 83) states that this notation is “obviously meant to recall Saussure’s graph of the linguistic sign,” but we reject this hypothesis: Saussure’s drawings (1995, p. 99, 158–162) contain a horizontal line that separates the two sides of the sign, but these sides are of *different natures*: the signified is represented on top and the signifier at the bottom. Furthermore Saussure’s notation does not imply temporality in the horizontal direction since phonetic (and hence temporal) realization exists only in the lower part (“image acoustique”). We rather consider this graphetic method as belonging to the general category of interlinear annotations, since it consists of text flows with common temporality.

Miéville uses 159 expressions in Ariekei language notation. At the beginning these are Ariekei words: *suaill*, *kora*, *suaish*, etc.; syntagms: *shoash*, *du kora eshin*, etc.; or proper names: *ez*, *bren*, *yl*, etc. At the end of book, an Ariekan with the nickname Spanish Dancer starts speaking English:

<table><thead><tr><th>English (2011)</th><th>German (2012)</th><th>French (2016)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Ariekei sifted the datchips, listening with disbelief at how they heard what they heard. That's what I think. Spanish Dancer remained bent, but its eyes looked up at me. Perhaps it knew now, in</td><td>Die Ariekei sichteten die Datchips und lauschten ungläubig darauf, wie sie hörten, was sie hörten. Das ist es, was ich glaube. Spanischer Tänzer verharrte in einer gebeugten Körperhaltung, doch seine</td><td>Les Ariékans ont passé en revue les datapuces, en s'écoutant avec incrédulité entendre ce qu'ils entendaient. C'est du moins mon avis. Danseuse Flamenca restait penché, mais ses yeux se dressaient vers</td></tr></tbody></table>
ways it could not have
done before, that what
it heard from me were
words. It listened.

"Yes," I said, "yes,"
and Spanish Dancer
cooed and, harmonising
with itself, said: "yes"
(p. 364)

Augen schauten zu mir
hoch. Vielleicht wusste
er nun auf eine Art und
Weise, wie er es zu-
vor nicht vermocht hat-
te, dass das, was er von
mir hörte, Wörter waren.
Er hörte zu.

»Ja«, sagte ich, »ja.«
Und Spanischer Tänzer
gurrte, brachte das, was
er äußern wollte, in Ein-
klang mit sich selbst und
sagte: »ja«.

moi. Sans doute savait-il
désormais, d'une façon
qui lui avait été fermée
jusque-là, que ce qu'il
m'entendait pronon-
cer était des mots. Il
écoutait.

— Oui, ai-je dit. Oui.

Là, il a émis un roucoule-
ment, puis, en harmonie,
a prononcé:

— oui
oui.

Once the first English word has been duplicated to become perceiv-
able as a linguistic utterance by the Ariekans, Miéville uses the graphetic
method to introduce nuances, such as a question that is first uttered as
a pure question, and then a question uttered as half a question and half
a statement:

Spanish attracted my at-
tention with its giftwing.

« you are ready? » It spoke to
you are ready? me softly. I hesitated
and it spoke again.

« are you? »
you are . (p. 388)

Spanischer Tänzer zog
mit seinem Präsentflügel
meine Aufmerksamkeit
auf sich. » du bist bereit? « Er
redete leise zu mir. Als
ich zögerte, sprach er
erneut. » du bist es? «

Danseuse a attiré mon
attention avec sa don-
aile.

— tu es prête? a-t-il de-
mandé tout bas.

J'ai hésité et il a repris la
parole.

— tu l'es? tu l'es.

(for some reason the German translation is missing this subtlety). With
the help of the main character, Avice, Ariekans learn metaphor use and
lying, which was previously a taboo in their culture. The following ex-
cerpt illustrates their perception of metaphors:

Sometimes when Span-
ish Dancer is talking to
me in my own language,
it doesn't say **metaphor**
but **lie that truths**, or **lie that truths**, or **truthing** lies.
I think it knows that
pleases me. A present for
me. (p. 395)

Wenn Spanischer Tän-
zer manchmal zu mir in
meiner Sprache redet,
sagt er nicht **metapher**
**metapher**',
sondern Lüge die wahrheitet
Lüge die wahrheitet
oder wahrheitende
Lüge. Ich
glaube, er weiß, dass
mir das gefällt. Ein
Geschenk für mich.

Certaines fois, quand
il me parle dans ma
propre langue, il ne
dit pas **méthaphore**
**méthaphore**, mais
mensonge qui dit vrai
mensonge qui dit vrai
vérité
mensonge. Je crois qu'il
sait que ça me plaît. Un
cadeau qu'il me destine.
In the last pages of the book, Ariekans discover that besides English, there is also French (in the French translation it is Spanish and in the German translation, again French):

THE NEW ARIEKEI were astounded to learn that Terre have more than one language. I uploaded French. "I, je. I am, je suis," I said. Spanish Dancer was delighted. It said to me, "je voudrais venir avec vous." I would like to come with you. (p. 402)

Die Neuen Ariekei waren erstaunt zu erfahren, dass Terre-Wesen mehr als eine Sprache haben. Ich lud Französisch hoch. »Ich, je, ich bin, je suis«, erklärte ich. Spanischer Tänzer war offensichtlich sehr erfreut und sagte zu mir:

je voudrais venir avec vous ich möchte mit Ihnen kommen.

Les Nouveaux Ariékans ont été stupéfaits d'apprendre que les Terras ont plus d'une langue. J'ai chargé de l'espagnol.

— Je, Yo. Je suis, Yo soy, ai-je expliqué.

Danseuse était aux anges. Il m'a lancé:

— quisiera ir con ustedes je voudrais aller avec vous

In the example above, the Ariekan speaks the two languages simultaneously through its two speech organs. In the last sentence of the novel, not only do Ariekans adopt the English name of Embassytown, but they do it in a vertically commutative way, so that the last word of the book is in fact its title, written in Ariekan duplicate form:

By Embassytown I mean the city. Even the New Ariekei have started to call the city by that name. embassy town they say, or town embassy, or embassytown embassytown (p. 405)

Mit Botschaftsstadt meine ich die ganze Stadt. Selbst die Neuen Ariekei haben angefangen, die Gastgeberstadt mit diesem Namen zu bezeichnen.

sagen sie: stadt oder botschaftsstadt botschaftsstadt botschaftsstadt.

Par Légationville, j'entends toute la cité. Les Nouveaux Ariékans eux-mêmes se sont mis à l'appeler ainsi. légation ville disent-ils, ou légation, ou légationville légationville.

While the English and French versions are symmetric and can be interpreted as "the town of the embassy," or "the embassy of the town," the German one is only partly so because of case: <botschafts> is genitive and <stadt> nominative, so that either way (<botschafts> or <stadt> <botschafts>) the meaning unambiguously remains "the town of the embassy".

### 3.20. Breaking RULE ②-1 and RULE ②-2: Paragraphs of Unequal Width or With Holes

Ollier's *Fuzzy Sets* is full of cases of paragraphs with lines of unequal width that form patterns, or with holes. Here are two consecutive pages (p. 58 and 59):
Leading is reduced progressively as follows:

<table><thead><tr><th>Page</th><th>273-274</th><th>275</th><th>276</th><th>277</th><th>278</th><th>279</th><th>280</th><th>281</th><th>282</th><th>283</th><th>284</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>Lines</th><td>38</td><td>38</td><td>40</td><td>41</td><td>42</td><td>42</td><td>46</td><td>55</td><td>73</td><td>88</td><td>?</td></tr><tr><th>Height<br>(in mm)</th><td>153</td><td>151</td><td>150</td><td>151</td><td>151</td><td>149</td><td>151</td><td>152</td><td>146</td><td>140</td><td>131</td></tr><tr><th>Leading<br>(in pt)</th><td>11.5</td><td>11.3</td><td>10.7</td><td>10.5</td><td>10.2</td><td>10.1</td><td>9.3</td><td>7.9</td><td>5.7</td><td>4.5</td><td>?</td></tr></tbody></table>

Obfuscation starts in the lower sixteen lines of page 281, the first two lines of which are still legible and the rest, until the end of page 284, is only typographic grey evolving to total black.

The text represents the last letter of the main character's grandfather to his son, a 9/11 victim, where he narrates how he met his grandson for the first time and built a relationship with him. This graphetic method is announced on p. 276 (while the leading decrease has already started) when the main character's grandfather asserts that:

> There won't be enough pages in this book for me to tell you what I need to tell you, I could write smaller, I could slice the pages down their edges to make two pages, I could write over my own writing, but then what?

The result is reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox, as this paragraph contains text of an infinite duration of time included in a finite amount of space, so that the repetition of increasingly closer ("incredibly close," as in the novel's title) signs evolves into solid black.

Sadokierski (2010, p. 109) compares page 284 with pages containing a single word (depicting pages from the notebook the mute grandfather is using to communicate):

> The visual juxtaposition between this heavy ink and the whiteness of the single-line daybook entries visualise the complexity of his [= the grandfather's] heartache. The unreadable mess of text represents the devastating experience of facing his family, and their collective heartache, after years in self-imposed isolation. Through this device, we share Thomas senior's anxiety and claustrophobia as his world becomes overwhelmingly emotionally complex.

And Nørgaard (2019, p. 154) underlines the multimodality of the message:

> The visual density is paralleled by a density of meaning, since Thomas virtually tries to explain and make sense of everything in this chapter, and emphasis is provided in that the "same" thing is conveyed through two modes at the same time.
## 3.22. Breaking RULE②-4: Lines with Different Sizes of Graphs

The novel *Marabou Stork Nightmares* (1995) by Scottish author Irvine Welsh (1958–) uses different graph sizes for dialogs and narrative text (p. 51):

Aye, right.

— Aye, well, so long as youse mind what ma man sais!

— Yes Mrs Strang.

— Tro Roy!

— Cheerio son. Mind son, we'll no lit thaim dae nowt tae ye. Like ah sais ... cheerio Roy!

CHEERIO YAuckIN RAdGE.

Nurse Beverley Norton is getting me sorted. Patricia must have finished her shift. Talk to me in your soft Coronation Street accent, Nurse Norton. Just like Dorie's . . . naw, no Dorothy's.

— We’ve got a visit from Dr Park this afternoon, haven’t we, Roy loovey? Got to get you all nice and spruced up for Dr Park.

This example also illustrates font family change (from serif to sans serif). It is interesting to note that this example breaks another typographic rule: although the sans serif font has a significantly smaller size, the leading remains unchanged. The effect achieved by the author is a kind of introvertism: narration visually dominates oral utterances by others, and makes them seem secondary and without importance.

## 3.23. Breaking RULE②-5: Lines w/ Graphs from Diff. Font Families

The following example is the climax of Jardin's *Le petit sauvage* (p. 179):

Je relève la tête et m'aperçois que je tremble. Mon asthme
se calme. Tout mon corps réclame une étreinte, un ré-
confort physique. Alors, guidé par une force obs-
cure, je progresse vers le fond de la grotte, vers
une nuit plus complète encore. Mondragon
ne me fait plus peur. Les parois se rap-
prochent de mes épaules mais je
poursuis à reculons, dans
un boyau; je me
trouve bloqué
dans de la
glaise tiède.
La terre m'en-
serre et me
caresse.
Je sens que
ma voix inté-
rieure est en
train de muer.
Je suis enfin
tendre avec
moi, je vis
au présent...
It is the moment when, during a storm, Alexandre enters the cave (a metaphor of the maternal womb) and is transformed. The change occurs between the sentences "The earth surrounds me and caresses me" and "I feel that my inner voice is coming of age". The 178 pages preceding this location are set in a serif font family, the 79 following pages of the book are set in a sans serif font. We don't know whether the specific choices of serif/sans serif font (Stempel Garamond and Futura Light) have been made by Jardin himself, but these two fonts indeed have a strong historical background: both were designed in Germany during the culturally and ideologically intense Weimar Republic period, Stempel Garamond (1925) as a tribute to Venitian humanist legacy and hence to bourgeois establishment, and Futura (1927) as a revolutionary project in the spirit of Bauhaus, a tribute to freedom and anti-conformism (Haralambous, 2007, pp. 379, 399).

The paragraph takes the shape of the cave/womb, where the vertical direction metaphorically represents both space and temporality: while we read down the page we experience the character moving towards the interior of the cave.

## 3.24. Breaking RULE②-6: All-Caps (or Small-Caps) Lines

Using lines in all-caps or in small-caps is a common graphetic method. We will give three innovative examples of their use.

### 3.24.1. Sanctuary

In his short story *Sanctuary* (1954), the American author Daniel F. Galouye (1920–1976) describes the torture of being a telepath, unable to block other people's thoughts:

(... Harry did ... painless job on that last tooth ... last assignment, Cuba, was ...) She had almost reached the end of the page. (... MISS FARLEY—NAME'S FAMILIAR ... be another week before Ann ... FARLEY—FARLEY—FARLEY ... new skates for the kid ... OF COURSE! THAT CRACKPOT GIRL WHO WROTE THE LETTERS! ...)

She stopped writing and looked up at the doctor. "I'm the girl who wrote the letters about me and my father," she said, relieved.

( ... IS THE ONE! ... that crazy girl! ... prize dopes for being roped in on ... )

She stood excitedly in the center of the room. "The letters were true! Everything I wrote about was true! The thoughts in my head! I can't stop them!"

Here italics in parentheses denote telepathically perceived thoughts, inside which upper case represents "sonic" salience.
### 3.24.2. Journey's End

The great American science fiction author Poul Anderson (1926–2001) wrote the short story *Journey's End* in 1957. Again the main character is a telepath, Norman Kane. He empathically reads other people's minds. Towards the end of the story he receives, for the first time, a signal from another telepath, a young girl. Before meeting physically they communicate telepathically. This communication is set in italics without any upper case letters, as if thoughts need no capitals to be structured. But suddenly, when they finally meet, in a paroxysmal move, they exchange their worst actions and memories, and thereby expose their dark sides to each other. These "unspeakable thoughts" are set in small caps:

ning to her and she was running
too.

—my name is norman kane &
i was not born to that name but
took it from people who adopted
me because i fled my father (hor-
rible how mother died in darkness
& he would not let her have drugs
though it was cancer & he said
drugs were sinful and pain was
good for the soul & he really hon-
estly believed that) & when the
power first appeared i made slips
and he beat me and said it was
witchcraft & i have searched all my

need for a kiss or even a hand-
clasp . . . not yet. It was the minds
which leaped out and enfolded
and became one.

—I REMEMBER THAT AT THE AGE
OF THREE I DRANK OUT OF THE TOI-
LET BOWL/ THERE WAS A PECULIAR
FASCINATION TO IT & I USED TO STEAL
LOOSE CHANGE FROM MY MOTHER
THOUGH SHE HAD LITTLE ENOUGH
TO CALL HER OWN SO I COULD SNEAK
DOWN TO THE DRUGSTORE FOR ICE
CREAM & I SQUIRMED OUT OF THE
DRAFT & THESE ARE THE DIRTY EPI-
SODES INVOLVING WOMEN—

The idyllic situation is broken, the story ends with the antithesis of a Hollywood happy ending: "A boy and girl went hand in hand. The thought hung cold under the sky, a single thought in two minds.—get out. i hate your bloody guts.—"

### 3.24.3. Everything is Illuminated

Foer used the all-caps method (combined with italic style) in his novel *Everything is Illuminated* (2002) to distinguish narration from synagogue prayers and preaching (p. 19):

of cleavages below. Black pants became form-fitting, there was more bumping and swaying than ever as those *other parts* protruded in fantasies of *you know what*, and an extra hole was unknowingly inserted in the holiest of prayers: HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, HOLEY IS THE LORD OF HOSTS! THE WHOLE WORLD IS FILLED WITH HIS GLORY!

The Venerable Rabbi addressed the disconcerting matter in one of his many midafternoon sermons. AND WE MUST ALL BE FAMILIAR WITH THAT MOST PORTENTOUS OF BIBLICAL PARABLES, THE PERFECTION OF HEAVEN AND HELL. AND AS WE ALL DO OR SHOULD KNOW, IT WAS ON THE SECOND DAY THAT THE LORD
In this excerpt the male synagogue attendees are captivated by the view of female attendees sitting underneath them, in the basement of the synagogue and separated from them by a glass floor. The sexually explicit homophone <HOLEY> (the “hole in the holiest of prayers”) of the word “HOLY” is emphasized (and hence typeset in roman) to underline its specificity and avoid considering it as a typo. Interestingly, the French translation renders this sentence as <SEINS, SAINT, SAINT, SAINT EST LE SEIGNEUR DES ARMÉES INNOMBRABLES!> without any style change for the sexually explicit homophone word <SEINS>, while the German, Italian and Dutch translations miss Froer’s intentions completely by avoiding the use of sexually loaded homophones in the prayer.

### 3.25. Breaking RULE⑲-7: Columns of Unequal Width

An example of this method is p. 169 of Claude Ollier’s *Fuzzy Sets*, where text is typeset in two columns of unequal width. Only the first column is part of the novel’s narration, while the second contains random text in the style of a technical manual:

> Un délicé encore, et
> le dispositif unique
> se replie, s'artic-
> le en divans ou han-
>quettes sur babord et
> tribord. Quand ils so-
> nt debout tous deux,
> côte à côte enfin —
> « présentables » à la
> fin — trois coups plus
> forts se font entendre
> et un panneau cou-
> lisse, démasquant le
> truquage ou trompe-
> l'œil en proue : il
> n'est plus que d'en
> descendre les degrés
> pour accéder à la
> grande salle, juste
> derrière l'écran. Une
> synchronisation ex-
> perte des mouvements
> permet aux deux ac-
> teurs de prendre pla-
> ce sur les marques

> jectifs définis par la section
> tement du Centre : 1) opérer
> ion des tables transcrites sur
> de tribord à babord. 2) mettr
> positifs de récitation de ces
>URE. 3) assurer la transmissi-
> cessez holofilms. Sindbad po-
> écran E4. Traduire : Spender-
> ynual : rouge ! Déclencher dé-
> et trois coups sur paroi en
> processus de coulissage sur l
> œs observation à la salle n° 8
> cran nécessaire à enclechem-
> et filmage récitatif. Attendre
> our mise au point correcte d
> minimum de sonorisation admise
> lairement. Braquer faiseaux
> mière invisible et micros sup-
> ger retard dû à impulsivité d
> héros. Accommoder T5 et T6
> résorption du laps et obtenti-
> oïcidence exacte. Lancer « Ac-
> part du mouvement d'ensembl
> en scène. » Panneau : « F-S, 8
> araissent silhouettes sur fon

We can consider the second column paratext of the first, since it supplies a context, probably the reading context of the main character wandering through a space ship, gathering impressions and trying to understand what is going on.

### 3.26. Breaking RULE⑲-8: Columns With Independent Narrative Threads

The dystopic novel *Yama Loka Terminus. Dernières nouvelles de Yirminadin-grad* (2008) written by French authors Léo Henry (1979–) and Jacques Mucchielli (1977–2011) features a chapter (p. 99–115) that is entirely set
in three equal-width columns, containing three independent discursive threads and describing events and situations occurring simultaneously. Like in a movie scenario, we get three descriptions (called <piste>, "track") of the same event sequence, written in the same pace, so that the time scale is the same for the three columns:

<table><thead><tr><th>piste 1</th><th>piste 2</th><th>piste 3</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Aéroport international de Yirmingrad. Mercredi 3 mars. 17h42. Tempsclair. Vent de mer sud-ouest. 14 nœuds. 17 degrés Celsius.</td><td>...ppelons qu'il est interdit de fumer dans l'ensemble des bâtiments. Soyez les bienvenus à Yirmingrad, joyau du Sud, porte de la mer Noire. Votre sécurité est assurée dans cette enceinte par des patrouilles de gardes en civil et un réseau de vidéo-surveillance. Un point taxi assemblé se trouve</td><td>Et, bien sûr, dès que je mets les pieds sur la terre ferme, revoilà la trompeuse impression de sécurité qui naît du déplacement, certe idée absurde qu'ils aient pu m'avoir oublié, perdu en plein ciel, que leurs dispositifs d'espionnage aient pu tomber en panne. Je dois me reprendre tout de suite, il n'y a qu'une</td></tr><tr><td>Vol 5639 en provenance de Petrograd. Tupolev 360, compagnie Aeroflot.</td><td></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Rogdaï Apollari Stratov, Sexe</td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

## 3.27. Breaking RULE ⑰-1: Page Numbers Running Backwards

In Alain Damasio's novel *La Horde du contrevent* (2004), the first numbered page carries number 700. It is an even page preceded by a numberless chapter page, which we can assume of being page 701. Pages then run backwards until the last page of the book, which, being even, is page 0.

## 3.28. Breaking RULE ①-1: Paragraphs of Different Colors

### 3.28.1. The Neverending Story

Michael Ende's *The Neverending Story* was graphically conceived by designer and author Roswitha Quadflieg, who introduced a two-color code for text (see Ende, 1978 and Quadflieg, 2020). The entire book (we are referring to the German 1987 pocket edition), except the book cover, is printed in "rötlich" ("reddish," as mentioned in the text, p. 212) and "blaugrün" ("bluish green," again in the text, p. 208) color (for simplicity we will refer to these colors as "red" and "green"). (In the B&W version of the current article, red color text has been set in bold face, and green
color text in roman face, a compromise already made by the French 1984
Pocket edition.<fnref n="11" />)

The red color denotes the “real world” of the protagonist, Bastian, who is hiding in his school’s attic to read a book (which is autoreferential of *The Neverending Story*). The green color denotes the action going on in the imaginary world Fantastica.

In the figure below, the reader can see the distribution of red and green text in *The Neverending Story*. The numbers on the horizontal axis denote chapters:

<figure><img src="image_61.png" /></figure>

The beginning of the book is printed in red<fnref n="12" /> up to the moment when Bastian starts reading the book (p. 18, just before the beginning of Chapter 1).

From then on, the book contents are printed in green and are in-
terrupted by sections in red where Bastian hears the clock in the bel-
fry striking and, for short moments, perceives his real-world situation.
Green and red colors are visually separated: they are always used on a
paragraph level, additional vertical space is added between paragraphs
of different colors, and the paragraph after the additional vertical space
is not indented.

Until p. 81, events in real and imaginary space follow two separate
narrative threads. Then begins interaction between the two worlds,
breaking the stereotype of the passive reader (p. 81):

Ygramul fühlte plötzlich, daß sich ihr etwas näherte. Sie fuhr blitzschnell herum, und ihr Anblick war entsetzlich: Sie war jetzt nur noch ein riesenhaf- tes stahlblaues Gesicht mit einem einzigen Auge über der Nasenwurzel, das mît einer senkrechten Pupille voll unvorstellbarer Bosheit auf Atréju starrte.

Bastian stieß einen leisen Schreckenslaut aus.

Ein Schreckensschrei hallte durch die Schlucht und wurde als Echo hin- und hergeworfen. Ygramul drehte ihr Auge nach links und rechts, um zu sehen, ob da noch ein anderer Ankömmling war, denn der Junge, der wie gelähmt vor Grausen vor ihr stand, konnte es nicht gewesen sein. Aber da war niemand.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="11">11. And apparently, according to Nørgaard (2009, pp. 141–142), “while still avail-
able in the bookshop, most current editions of Ende’s novel are set in black type only.”</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. With the sole exception of page numbers that are green throughout the book,
probably because they belong to paratext.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. At last Ygramul sensed that something was coming toward her. With the speed of lightning, she turned about, confronting Atreyu with an enormous steel-blue face.</footnote>
Here the red word <Schreckenslaut> is immediately followed by a green <Schreckensschrei>, denoting the simultaneity of the two events: “cry of fear” in the real world vs. “cry of terror” in the imaginary world, the former coming from the real-world protagonist Bastian, the latter from an origin unknown to the other two characters in the scene, Atréju and Ygramul. This event is the first breach in Bastian’s reality.

In the following chapters, interaction between the two narrative levels intensifies until, on page 214, the change of color occurs in the same logical paragraph (but in different γ-paragraphs), bringing the two worlds even closer (p. 214):

Aber die tiefe Stimme des Alten vom Wandernden Berge fuhr fort, zu erzählen,

und Bastian konnte nichts dagegen tun. Er hielt sich die Ohren zu, aber es nützte nichts, denn die Stimme klang in seinem Inneren. Obwohl er längst wußte, daß es nicht so war, klammerte er sich noch an den Gedanken, daß diese Übereinstimmung mit seiner eigenen Geschichte vielleicht doch nur ein verrückter Zufall war,

aber die tiefe Stimme sprach unerbittlich weiter,

und nun hörte er ganz deutlich, wie sie sagte:

»... Manieren hast du nicht für fünf Pfennig, sonst hättest du dich wenigstens erst mal vorgestellt.«

»Ich heiße Bastian,« sagte der Junge, »Bastian Balthasar Bux.«¹⁴

where the five graphical paragraphs contain in fact sentences crossing paragraph boundaries and color changes. The intrasentential color switch gives the impression of going back and forth between the two worlds using the commas placed at line ends as switches. It is interesting to note that there is a pragmatic inversion: Bastian hears the voice while in red (in the real world) and speaks while in green (the imaginary world).

Her single eye had a vertical pupil, which stared at Atreyu with inconceivable malignancy.

A cry of fear escaped Bastian.

A cry of terror passed through the ravine and echoed from side to side. Ygramul turned her eye to left and right, to see if someone else had arrived, for that sound could not have been made by the boy who stood there as though paralyzed with horror.

14. But the deep, dark voice of the Old Man of Wandering Mountain went on, and there was nothing Bastian could do about it. He held his hands over his ears, but it was no use, because the voice came from inside him. He tried desperately to tell himself—though he knew it wasn’t true—that the resemblance to his own story was some crazy accident, but the deep, dark voice went on, and ever so clearly he heard it saying:

‘Where are your manners? If you had any, you’d have introduced yourself.’ ‘My name is Bastian,’ said the boy. ‘Bastian Balthazar Bux.’
A few paragraphs later, Ende uses ellipsis as a switch between the two worlds (p. 215):

> Und hier fing alles wieder von vorne an—unverändert und unabänderlich—und wiederum endete alles bei der Begegnung der Kindlichen Kaiserin mit dem Alten vom Wandernden Berge, der abermals die Unendliche Geschichte zu schreiben und zu erzählen begann...

> ...und es würde in alle Ewigkeit so fortgehen, denn es war ja ganz unmöglich, daß etwas sich am Ablauf der Dinge ändern konnte. Nur er allein, Bastian, konnte eingreifen.<fnref n="15" />

Once again we have a pragmatic inversion: the sentence “and so it would go on for ever and ever,” which refers to the recursive nature of the narration, is printed in red, probably signifying that Bastian accepts the logical paradox as his own reality.

The tension is growing, and a few lines further Ende uses a very ingenious graphetic method (p. 216):

> Im selben Augenblick geschahen mehrere Dinge zugleich.

> Die Schale des großen Eis wurde von einer ungeheuren Gewalt in Stücke gesprengt, wobei ein dunkles Donnergrollen zu hören war. Dann brauste ein Sturmwind von fern heran

> und fuhr aus den Seiten des Buches heraus, das Bastian auf den Knien hielt, so daß sie wild zu flattern begannen.<fnref n="16" />

Ende describes a storm wind that starts in the imaginary world (in green), crosses the gate between the two worlds (the book) and blows from the book's pages into the real world (in red). The sentence is broken into two γ-paragraphs (and two colors) without any punctuation, in order to increase the impression of simultaneity. The verb “fahren” (“to drive”) used to describe the wind's movement in the real world is unusual, and reminiscent of a verse of a Brahms's Lied: “Der Wind fährt seufzend durch die Nacht” (“The wind goes sighing though the night,”

<footnote n="15">15. At that point the story began all over again—unchanged and unchangeable— and ended once again with the meeting between the Childlike Empress and the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who began once again to write and tell the Neverending Story...</footnote>

<footnote>...and so it would go on for ever and ever, for any change in the sequence of events was unthinkable. Only he, Bastian, could do anything about it.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. In that moment several things happened at once. The shell of the great egg was dashed to pieces by some overwhelming power. A rumbling of thunder was heard. And then the storm wind came roaring from afar.</footnote>

<footnote>It blew from the pages of the book that Bastian was holding on his knees, and the pages began to flutter wildly. Bastian felt the wind in his hair and face. (The English translation splits the sentence “Dann brauste ein Sturmwind ... zu flattern begannen” into two sentences, spoiling the graphetic effect of the original German text.)</footnote>
poetry by Emanuel Geibel). This is the only place in the book where the
change between colors is intrasentential and without punctuation.

The second part of the book is entirely typeset in green, with a sin-
gle exception (the thin line between labels 14 and 15 in the diagram of
p. 320) (p. 240):

Der Sandhügel, auf dem Bastian gerade stand, war ultramarinblau. Durch ein kleines Tal von diesem getrennt, lag eine feuerrote Düne. Bastian ging zu ihr hinüber, schöpfte mit beiden Händen von dem roten Sand und trug ihn zu dem blauen Hügel. Dann streute er auf den Seitenhang eine lange Linie. Er ging wieder zurück, holte neuen roten Sand und das tat er immer wieder. Nach einer Weile hatte er drei riesengroße rote Buchstaben auf den blauen Untergrund gestreut:

B B B

Zufrieden betrachtete er sein Werk. Dieses Zeichen konnte niemand überse-
hen, der die Unendliche Geschichte lesen würde. Was auch immer nun aus
ihm werden mochte, man würde wissen, wo er geblieben war.¹⁷

We have here another graphetic method: In the sand, Bastian draws his initials, which belong to the real world and therefore have to be red.

The climactic moment of the book is Bastian's return to the real
world, and there again Ende uses an ingenious graphetic method to in-
crease its dramatic effect (p. 475-476):

Bastian warf sich in sie hinein—und stürzte ins Leere.

»Vater!« schrie er, »Vater! —Ich—bin—Bastian—Balthasar—Bux!«

»Vater! Vater! —Ich—bin—Bastian—Balthasar—Bux!«

Noch während er es schrie, fand er sich ohne Übergang auf dem Speicher
des Schulhauses wieder, von wo aus er einst, vor langer Zeit, nach Phantásien
gekommen war.¹⁸

Between his fall into emptiness and the reappearance of the school attic,
the transition is given by Bastian's cry, printed in two different colors.

17. The sand hill where Bastian was standing just then was ultramarine blue. And separated from it by a narrow cleft there was a fiery-red dune. Bastian crossed over to it, gathered up sand in both hands and carried it to the blue hill. Then he strewed a long line of red sand on the hillside. He went back, brought more red sand, and repeated the operation. Soon he had fashioned three enormous red letters against the blue ground:

B B B

He viewed his work with satisfaction. No reader of the Neverending Story could fail to see his message. So whatever happened to him now, someone would know where he had been.

18. Bastian [...] flung himself into the empty darkness beyond.
“Father!” he screamed. “Father! I—am—Bastian—Balthazar—Bux!”
“Father! Father! I—am—Bastian—Balthazar—Bux!”

Still screaming, he found himself in the schoolhouse attic, which long, long ago he
had left for Fantastica.
By writing the same graphemic sentence twice (except for the incise "schrie er," "he shouted"), we can assume that there has been only a single cry, emitted in both worlds simultaneously (as a person experiencing two realities simultaneously when awakening from a dream).

In the first transition (from the real world to Fantastica) the trigger was a storm wind, i.e., a natural element, independent of Bastian's will. The second transition the trigger is Bastian's cry during his fall into emptiness. The change of color gives a dramatic depth to this transition, which sympathetically restores the reader's equilibrium.

The efficiency of color change is acknowledged among other scholars by Nikolajeva (1990), who states in her study of *The Neverending Story* based on Propp's structuralistic theory of morphology of tales (Propp, 1968), that

> Incidentally, [...] insertions, marked by a different print color, are much more numerous than most readers would guess. When asked, most people say there are 12-15; there are actually forty-eight of them. I find this fact worth mentioning because it shows how skillfully Michael Ende has interwoven the two seemingly independent stories.

We found two more speculative fiction works using color to make meaning, we will briefly describe them in the following sections.

### 3.28.2. The Strange Library

The most famous contemporary Japanese author, Haruki Murakami (1949-) wrote a novella for children, called *The Strange Library* (2005). This novella has many points in common with Ende's *The Neverending Story*: again it is a boy who, returning from school, visits, not a bookstore but a library, where three books are given to him to read. In his adventure, he meets a girl, whose "vocal cords were destroyed when [she] was little" (a reference to his most famous novel, *1Q84*) and so she communicates with him "with her hands".

Marakami uses blue color for the girl's utterances (replaced by bold in the B&W version of this paper):

> It's a fine moon, she said to me. Tomorrow it will be the new moon, and the sky will be dark.

> "We must feed the parakeet," I said.

> Didn't you feed the parakeet a little while ago? she asked.

> "You're right, I did," said the me that was Ibn Armut Hasir.

> The girl's silken body glinted in the light of the razor-thin crescent moon. I was spellbound.

> It's a fine moon, she repeated. The new moon will shape our destinies.

> "That would be terrific," I said.
The use of color underlines the boy's supernatural ability of understanding a voiceless girl communicating "with her hands". It is combined by the absence of double-quotes, which can be interpreted as markers of "real speech," while the girl probably communicates telepathically or in some other mysterious Murakamian way. It should be noted that none of the other translations we examined (German, Spanish, French, Italian and Turkish) use blue color like the Japanese and English versions. Instead of color, here is what these versions use to distinguish the narrator's utterances from those of the voiceless girl:

<table><thead><tr><td>language</td><td>narrator</td><td>voiceless girl</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Japanese (2005)</td><td>quotes 「」</td><td>quotes &lt;&gt;</td></tr><tr><td>German (2013)</td><td>roman, quotes » «</td><td>italics</td></tr><tr><td>English (2014)</td><td>roman, quotes “ ”</td><td>roman, blue color</td></tr><tr><td>Spanish (2014)</td><td>roman, em-dash</td><td>roman, quotes « »</td></tr><tr><td>French (2015)</td><td>roman, em-dash</td><td>italics, quotes « »</td></tr><tr><td>Italian (2015)</td><td>roman, em-dash</td><td>roman, quotes « »</td></tr><tr><td>Turkish (2016)</td><td>roman, quotes “ ”</td><td>roman, angular brackets &lt;&gt;</td></tr></tbody></table>

There are 26 segments in blue color, distributed in the following way (numbers denote chapters):

<figure><img src="image_62.png" /></figure>

### 3.28.3. David Feldts efterladte papirer

As mentioned in Nørgaard (2019, pp. 101–104), in his novel *David Feldts efterladte papirer* (“David Feldt’s leftover papers,” 1997), the Danish author Mads Brenøe (1968–) uses blue color to represent writings by a second personality of the (schizophrenic) narrator. In this second personality he is a man letting the woman he loves starve to death (blue color represented by bold face in the B&W version of this paper):

<table><tr><td>Original Danish (1997)</td><td>Translation by Nørgaard (ibid., p. 103)</td></tr></table>

Pennen var usædvanlig god at skrive med. Som forudset gjorde den lille drejning i skaftet, at den nærmest afsig selv føjede sig ind i min hånd. Som var jeg skabt til netop at holde denne pen og ingen andre.

The pen was incredibly nice to write with. As expected, the little curve of the holder made it fit into my hand almost by itself. As had I been made to hold exactly this pen and no other.
Men så læste jeg, hvad der stod på papiret. Håndskriften var min, ingen tvivl om dét, men ordene havde jeg aldrig set før:
Vand kan hun tåle, men det er også alt. Kun vand. Da det gik op for mig, tog jeg mine forholdsregler, sørgede for, at hun ikke ved et uheld skulle komme til at gøre sig selv ondt.

But then I read the text on the paper. The handwriting was mine, no doubt about that, but the words I had never seen before:
Water she can stand, but that is all. Only water. When I realised that, I took my precautions, made sure that she would not harm herself by accident.

In this excerpt the narrator realizes that when he uses a specific golden fountain pen, his other personality is revealed. As Nørgaard (2019, p. 104) concludes:

> The use of the distinctive feature of color for the realization of the two narratives combined with their increasing interrelatedness helps construct a significant aspect of the meaning of the novel, i.e., the possible schizophrenic nature of Feldt's psyche and the likelihood that he is, in fact, the man who kills the woman by starving her to death.

There are 18 segments in blue color, distributed in the following way:

<figure><img src="image_63.png" /></figure>

### 3.29. Breaking RULE③-2: Paragraphs of Different Graph Size

Jardin, in the *Le petit sauvage*, changes font size at the paragraph level to increase the stress of the main character being propelled on scene by a harsh wheel-chaired manager, in front of hundreds of “pairs of eyes” (p. 221):

> Sa petite main molle se referme vigoureusement sur mon avant-bras. Il met en route son fauteuil roulant électrique et me conduit dans les coulisses, sans parler.

> On me pousse devant des centaines de paires d'yeux.

> Je suis en scène, vêtu comme une putain magnifique. Les projecteurs m'éblouissent, augmentent la perception que j'ai de mon corps. J'ouvre la bouche ; ma voix se
Here, font size is correlated with perceptual salience (as mentioned in the excerpt: “the projectors blind me and increase the perception I have of my body”).

### 3.30. Breaking RULE③-3: Paragraphs of Different Font Family

In the same novel, Jardin changes font family to underline the difference between two characters in a dialog (p. 222):

> En sortant de scène, je tombe sur Ange ; bouleversé, il me serre les deux mains.

> — Câlice ! La grande Lola ! T'as fait un triomphe. Mais qu'est ce qui t'a pris d'aller jusqu'au bout ? C'était pas prévu d'enlever ta petite culotte.

> — Je suis LIBRE.

While the main character, and narrator, keeps the same Futura Light as elsewhere in the second part of the book, the lines of the other character, a ruthless cabaret manager, are set in Stempel Garamond Bold Condensed Italic. The interjection <Câlice!> is typical of Quebecois French and leads the reader to imagine this line pronounced with Canadian accent, a fact that further justifies the change of font.

### 3.31. Breaking RULE③-1: Immoderate Use of Footnotes

Footnotes are only sparsely used in fiction: they may be encountered in translations to either give additional information on the cultural background of some excerpt, or to indicate that a given part of the text is originally written in the language of the translation. James G. Ballard (1930–2009), a British novelist known for his car-crash sexual fetishistic novel *Crash*, wrote a 18-word experimental story entitled *Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown* (1976) in which every word carries a footnote mark: the real story is contained in the 18 footnotes. Here is the full story with the first footnote:

> A<fnref n="1" /> discharged² Broadmoor³ patient⁴ compiles⁵ ‘Notes⁶ Towards⁷ a⁸ Mental⁹ Breakdown¹⁰’, recalling¹¹ his¹² wife’s¹³ murder¹⁴, his¹⁵ trial¹⁶ and¹⁷ exoneration¹⁸.

<footnote n="1">1. The use of the indefinite article encapsulates all the ambiguities that surround the undiscovered document, *Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown*, of which this 18-word synopsis is the only surviving fragment. Deceptively candid and straightforward, the synopsis is clearly an important clue in our understanding of the events that led to the tragic death of Judith Loughlin in her hotel bedroom at Gatwick Airport. There is no doubt that the role of the still unidentified author was a central one. The self-effacing <A> must be regarded not merely as an overt attempt at evasion but, on the unconscious level, as an early intimation of the author’s desire to proclaim his guilt.</footnote>
Formally the story has the structure of a scholarly text with commentary footnotes, but in fact, as the text per se is ridiculously short, it is solely through the footnotes that the reader has access to the story line.

The, very Oulipean in nature, rule of assigning a footnote to every word, including grammatical words such as articles, pronouns, and conjunctions, mocks the scholarly processes of annotation and commentary and forces the reader to follow a zigzag reading strategy between main text and notes, constantly turning pages back and forth.

This story inspired Murry C. Christensen, who created a “hyperbook” (a decade before the invention of the Web) based on Max Ernst’s and Paul Eluard’s *Une semaine de bonté* (a surrealistic collage novel from 1934). It also inspired the Portuguese music group Iurta (dark ambient and industrial act) so that its first album carries the name of the story.

### 3.32. Breaking RULE③-4: Allograph Variation Between Paragraphs

Gahan Wilson (1930–2019) was an American author and cartoonist, known for his cartoons in *Playboy* and *The New Yorker*. In 1972 he experimented with the use of image as part of text. He called his story <●> (no phonetic rendering of this grapheme is given). Not only does this grapheme appear throughout the story, but its graph actually grows like a living creature. Here are the sixteen occurrences of the grapheme in the story, together with their functions:

<figure><img src="image_64.png" /></figure>

(1) p. 12, centered between two γ-paragraphs.

<figure><img src="image_65.png" /></figure>

(2) p. 13, centered between two γ-paragraphs and (3) inline, as a noun.

<figure><img src="image_66.png" /></figure>

(4) p. 14, inline, as a noun. End of sentence without period.

<figure><img src="image_67.png" /></figure>

(5) p. 14 centered between two γ-paragraphs and (6) inline, as a noun.

<figure><img src="image_68.png" /></figure>

(7) p. 14 centered between two γ-paragraphs and (8) p. 15, inline, as a noun.

<figure><img src="image_69.png" /></figure>

(9) p. 17, centered between two γ-paragraphs, introduced by a colon, and (10) centered between γ-paragraphs but grammatically in the sentence, as a noun.
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /></figure>

(11) p. 17, centered between two γ-paragraphs, introduced by a colon, and (12) p. 18, centered between γ-paragraphs but grammatically in the sentence, as a noun.

<figure><img src="image_71.png" /></figure>

(13) p. 19, centered between two γ-paragraphs.

<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>

(14) p. 20, centered between two γ-paragraphs, introduced by a colon and (15) p. 21, centered between two γ-paragraphs but grammatically in the sentence, as a noun.

<figure><img src="image_73.png" /></figure>

(16) p. 22, centered after the last γ-paragraph.

Allograph (16) appears after the following closing line:

"That's right, Archie," he said, the door swinging open, all unnoticed, behind his back. "The thing's a carnivore."
In the Introduction to the story, Ellison (1972, p. 10) gives more information on its origin:

When it came time to assemble this book, I contacted Gahan and suggested he invent a whole new kind of story, a combination of words and pictures in which one could not survive without the other. A verbalization, as it were, of the peculiarly Gahanoid humor seeping (one might even venture festooned) from his cartoons. I said it could be possibly termed a “viewword” story. Gahan liked the sound of the word, and what he contributed follows.

The author adds the following in the Afterword to his story (p. 23):

[...] Ellison has coined “viewword” to describe the storytelling technique employed in ●, and I suppose that will do (after all, it is his collection) until the literary historians come up with something maybe a little classier. The viewword approach is an attempt to expand the panel cartoon, which is a combination of a visual impact and words. In a panel cartoon the drawing does not illustrate the caption, nor does the caption explain the drawing. They are interdependent parts of one thing. The comic strip is one way of trying to develop the one shot impact of a panel cartoon, the viewword is another.

I have always thought, and I guess my work shows it, that this picture-word medium lends itself to the fantastic grotesque, and ● is nothing if not fantastically grotesque. I enjoyed very much writing-drawing it, and I hope that you enjoyed reading-seeing it.

The “viewword” <●> is used both as a syntagm and as a complete centered paragraph. Having allographs to simulate the evolution of a living creature is a unique grapholinguistic curiosity and a nightmare for librarians: ● has not yet been proposed for insertion in Unicode and even if this happens, the odds of it being accepted are thin. In Gahan Wilson’s Wikipedia page of Gahan Wilson, the character 0x25CF BLACK CIRCLE is used as an ersatz, since <●> definitely lacks the property of being a circle.

### 3.33. Breaking RULE④-2: Pages with Different Background Color

Starting with p. 249, the last 9 pages of Jardin’s *Le petit sauvage* are printed as white text on black background. Here is the transition from white to black background (p. 248 and 249):
Je suis très vivre de la côte du boeuf et, en quelques
heures, construis un abri de fortune constitué de branchages
ainsi qu'une petite table ; puis, sans perdre une seconde — la
mort me telle que — je dispose une romaine de papier devant moi
et prends mon style.

Avant de partir, je veux d'icière mon odylee intime. J'ai forme
le dessen de rediger un ouvrage qui, dans sa forme m'amee,
refleterait ma singularite retrouve, un texte dont la composition
evaluerait pour mieux restituer les metamorphoses interieures
t que l'ai researcher ch ou subies. Debutant comme un roman
pour adultes, il prendrait ensuite les appareances d'un livre pour
enfants en couleurs. Si ces pages pouvient etre publiques un
jour sous une couvertureسرية واسع واسع نسبيا وحده،
mo me plume courir sur les pages en m'interdisant de la guide:
Durant trois jours et trois nuits, le livre s'achète sans que ma
conscience intervienne, il ne dirais que quelques heures.

Seule mon main gauche était capable de composer ce récit
avec une sincérité totale, je lui confiais donc mon style et l'assoupi
ma plume courir sur les pages en m'interdisant de la guide:
Durant trois jours et trois nuits, le livre s'achète sans que ma
conscience intervienne, il ne dirais que quelques heures.

Quand je fus arrivé à la ligne que vous êtes en train de lire,
Manon ne m'avait toujours pas reprendu dans ma retraite ; mais
j'avais alors aimé un bontier presque complèm. Ce que mon
parfum subsumit l'accompli par mon ouvrage le réaliserait
peut-être. L'ais-t-il satisfait d'avoir choisi. L'ecrit pour mon survival,
les parfums se dispiant, les fines rester.

Une douleur adroite m'émettissait la lîte ; par instants,
j'avais envie de scier mon boite crânienne pour mon librair.
Mais je preferais souffrir dans mon île plus plurielle que de m'établir
doucement sur un île d'hôpital, île de drogues, deposée de
mon-mère.

Le pire et le meilleur étoient encore à venir.

<figure><img src="image_74.png" /></figure>

The goal of this graphetic method is to illustrate the narrator's total blindness, caused by a brain tumor and leading to his death on page 251 (pages 252–256 contain no text and page 257 contains a tombstone inscription: <CI-GÎT LE PETIT SAUVAGE (1962–2001)> ("Here lies Petit Sauvage (1962–2001)").

3.34. Breaking RULE④0-1: Physical vs. Logical Order of Subdivisions

3.34.1. Nous rêvions d'Amérique

In his novella *Nous rêvions d'Amérique* (2016) (see also §3.10), Thomas Day numbers chapters in inverse order. The text narrates the journey of the Native American Hoijer to San Francisco, culminating with a mass murder at an NRA convention, so that the chapter numbers act as a countdown. The mass murder occurs in Chapter 1, which is not last since the novella ends with an idyllic Chapter 0, in which Hoijer invites all his beloved and friends, living or dead, to a barbecue on "sacred land," probably his last thoughts before his brutal death at the convention.

3.34.2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

In *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*, Mark Haddon uses prime numbers to enumerate chapters. Chapter numbers range from 2 (the first prime number) to 233 (the fifty-first prime number). This numbering choice is explained in the text (p. 14):
Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.

This quote is followed by a description of Eratosthenes' sieve, and finally the conclusion of the chapter, which is the real explanation of the choice of prime numbers (p. 1):

> I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Interestingly the choice of using the “very logical” prime numbers brings some uncertainty to the fact that “Chapter 2” is necessarily the first chapter: indeed, until about a century ago, it was unclear which one among numbers 1, 2 and 3 ought to be considered as the smallest prime (Caldwell and Xiong, 2012). Fortunately the narrator of the novel, suffering from pervasive developmental disorder, is not aware of this fact that could easily shake his already fragile Weltanschauung.

### 3.34.3. Dragon

In his novel *Dragon* (2016), Thomas Day goes one step further and uses significantly different physical and logical orders for the 33 chapters of the novel. In the following diagram, the horizontal axis represents pages of the printed book and the vertical axis the logical order of chapters:

<figure><img src="image_75.png" /></figure>

The story is about two individuals: a killer of child-abusers in Bangkok, endowed with invisibility super-powers, and a police detective chasing him—the latter finally taking the place of the former. Chapter 1
(physically in the middle of the book) explains the given name of the detective (“Tannhäuser”), Chapter 2 (physically at the end of the book) is a fairy-tale about dragons the father of the assassin was telling him in his childhood, Chapter 3 is about the sexual preferences of the detective, Chapter 4 about the killer’s first attack, and in Chapter 5 the chief of the police calls the detective to inform him about the attack. As we see, the logical order is actually the chronological order of events.

The particularity of this book with respect to other books with alternative reading orders is that, besides the numbers assigned to chapters, no further explanation or instruction is given to the reader.

### 3.35. Breaking RULE④-5: Blank Pages

#### 3.35.1. Nudism

<figure><img src="image_76.png" /></figure>

An iconic example of the use of blank pages as graphemic method can be found in Jean Cocteau’s movie *Orphée* (1950) where “Le Monsieur” (Henri Crémieux) is showing Orphée (Jean Marais) a booklet carrying the title *Nudisme*, a collection of poems by Jacques Cégeste (Édouard Dermit), all pages of which are blank (p. 17):

ORPHÉE: Je ne vois que des pages blanches.

LE MONSIEUR. — Cela s’appelle: «Nudisme».

ORPHÉE. — Mais c’est ridicule...

LE MONSIEUR. — Moins ridicule que si ces pages étaient couvertes de textes ridicules. Aucun excès n’est ridicule! Orphée... votre plus grave défaut est de savoir jusqu’où on peut aller trop loin.<fnref n="19" />

<footnote n="19">19. ORPHEUS.—Every page is blank.
LE MONSIEUR. — It’s called “Nudism.”</footnote>
As states Dworkin (2013), in his excellent analysis of emptiness in art:

> Given the title, Orpheus might have expected a plainspoken or unartificed poetry, something in the style of an unornamented *genus humile* or *genus tenue*, but Cégeste has stripped away not just the rhetoric of a particular mode but any visible language at all. The work lays bare (*mise à nu*) the page itself: the physical facture of the book as an object; the substrate of print, the typical technological support of poetry at midcentury.

Other authors considered *Nudisme* as an attempt to poke fun at the avant-
garde, or as a Dadaist joke. Others again see in it the influence of Marcel
Duchamp, or the influence of John Cage’s *Lecture on Nothing* performance
(1948). We consider it to be the most extreme case of graphemic method:
the total absence of graphemes.

3.35.2. You Shall Know Our Velocity

In his debut novel *You Shall Know Our Velocity* (2002), the American writer Dave Eggers (1970–) intersperses three empty pages (p. 157-159) into the narration of a big jump of a boat on a stormy sea:

The boat was skipping and then there would be a larger wave, or we would
hit a regular wave a certain way, and the pause between when we became
airborne

[3 empty pages]

and *WHACK* when we landed we landed like a cannon and I clenched my
teeth—*BAMBAMBAM*—for the aftershocks and I looked to Hand and the old
man for a commiserative glance—*what the fu-fu-fuck?*—but no one wanted to
share.

<figure><img src="image_77.png" /></figure>
According to Sadokierski (2010, p. 171),

The execution of this break is particularly effective because it starts toward the bottom of the first page, soars across the facing page, the double page spread, then comes back down to almost where it started. Our eyes are forced to follow the trajectory of the boat. Whether this is a typographic device (an absence of typography) or an illustrative device (a presence of white space) is debatable but irrelevant for the purposes of the argument here—this device allows us to share the velocity of one of the few moments in the novel that Will [the main character] experiences pure exhilaration.

We can add, in the spirit of van Leeuwen's (2006, p. 146) 'experiential metaphor', that it is not only the eyes that follow the trajectory of the boat, but that the movement of rapid page turning (rapid since the intermediate pages are empty) is a dynamic 3-dimensional metaphor of the boat's jump, where the edges of pages becomes crests of the waves. It also produces an impression of acceleration as the reader momentarily increases the reading pace, and this graphemic method is similar to Foer's decrease of leading and blackening of page in *Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close* (§3.21), where time seems to slow down and stop. Graphemic/graphetic methods can act on reading speed, their effect on the reader's physiology and reading experience is a vast domain that still remains to be explored.

## 4. Obfuscation

In the previous sections we have defined an ontological model of the literary text (specific to the prose genre) and we have given examples of exceptions to these rules. In this section we will concentrate on a process for which authors have invented many graphetic methods, namely *obfuscation*.

Here is a simplistic classification of graphetic methods used for obfuscation (references 4.1.1, ... correspond to examples given below):

<figure><img src="image_78.png" /></figure>
We consider two main categories of methods: *unrecoverable obfuscation*, where information is hidden from the reader, and *recoverable obfuscation*, where the reader can recover the hidden information more or less easily, or where the information is not really hidden and obfuscation is only hinted at. In the following sections we provide examples illustrating the twelve cases from the diagram.

## 4.1. Unrecoverable Obfuscation

### 4.1.1. The People of Paper

The American author of Mexican descent Salvador Plascencia (1976-) has used black areas in his fantasy novel *The People of Paper* (2005) to represent a thought-shielding technique used by an infant (Baby Nos-tradamus) to protect other characters from the influence of Saturn. In the following excerpt, another character, Apolonio, trains Baby Nos-tradamus to shield thoughts (p. 160):

He started with a simple lesson.
He said, "This is a thought:"

There are three Merceds:

1) your mother

2) you

3) Merced de Papel

And so the Baby Nos-tradamus demonstrated, concealing what was a perfectly legible and discernible thought:

<figure><img src="image_79.png" /></figure>

The blackened-out shape covers exactly the paragraph quoted above. The following consecutive odd pages show the growing effect of Baby Nos-tradamus's shielding technique (pp. 187, 189, 191):

<figure><img src="image_80.png" /></figure>

### APOLOMUS

### LITTLE MERCED

### EMF

### LITTLE MERCED

### VETERANOS

<figure><img src="image_81.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_82.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_83.png" /></figure>
Thought-shielding is so efficient that on page 191 only the paratextual information providing the narrator names is visible to the reader (and hence also to Saturn).

### 4.1.2. L'enchanteur

One of the last works of the greatest French science-fiction author, René Barjavel (1911–1985), is the fantasy novel *L'Enchanteur* (1984) based on the saga of the Quest of the Holy Grail. When, towards the end of the novel, Guenièvre and Lancelot finally are about to engage in intercourse, he provides a textual equivalent of the cinematographic trope of a door being closed during a sex scene (p. 342):

> Alors laissons Guenièvre et Lancelot murmurer, balbutier, chanter leur amour, leur folie, leur éblouissement. La porte s'est refermée. Éloignons-nous en silence...<fnref n="20" />

> À L'INTÉRIEUR
> DE CETTE
> PAGE BLANCHE
> GUENIÈVRE
> ET LANCELOT
> S'AIMENT.

followed by the blank page displayed on the left (p. 343), carrying the inscription “IN-SIDE THIS BLANK PAGE GUENIÈVRE AND LANCELOT LOVE EACH OTHER.” where the French term for “blank page” is actually “white page” (the archaic meaning of “blank”) and white is the color of innocence and purity. This is a special kind of obfuscation since the existence of obfuscated text is not even alluded, what is hidden is the action happening during the time the reader would take to read this page. The page is transcended: from surface it becomes volume (“À L'INTÉRIEUR DE CETTE PAGE” literally means “in the interior of this page,” suggesting the page is a room, the door of which has just closed, leaving the reader outside). The author could very well end the chapter with p. 342 as the suspension points trigger

imagination and information enough has been given about what is happening. But Barjavel has chosen to add this page in order to use a “documentary trope”: the sentence is reminiscent of TV reporters reporting events happening in a closed locus behind them, events inaccessible to the spectator but trustworthy since the narrator/reporter is physically close to the location where they are taking place. Documentary

<footnote n="20">20. “Let Guenièvre and Lancelot whisper, stammer, sing about their love, their madness, their amazement. The door closed. Let us silently move away...”</footnote>
"is still the filmic mode most capable of representing reality" (Brown, 2010, p. 220) and making the Holy Grail saga realistic is clearly one of the novel's objectives.

### 4.1.3. Fuzzy Sets

In *Fuzzy Sets*, Claude Ollier frequently places two text blocks on the same page, one of which is part of the global narrative thread while the other consists of fragmentary and incoherent sentences. Most often, the block containing the main narrative thread is complete, but in some cases part of the block is missing and information can only partially be inferred from the surrounding text. On other pages, Ollier leaves empty forms inside paragraphs. Here are examples of these methods (pp. 85, 149 and 61):

<figure><img src="image_84.png" /></figure>

In the first example (p. 85), the text block containing the main narrative thread overlaps the page boundary, resulting in information loss. Some missing parts can be inferred from the context (e.g., <l'interlocuteur recule d'un pas pour rétablir les//anse et l'intervalle>, etc.) but with no certainty. In the second example (p. 149), the white area inside the text block is hiding the underlying text—once again, little can be inferred from the context. The third illustration (p. 61) is a counterexample: here again a form emerges inside the text block, but text surrounds it and there is no information loss. This shows that Ollier has purposely obfuscated some parts of his text, and not others.

### 4.1.4. An Ordinary Spy

In his novel entitled *An Ordinary Spy* (2008), the American screen-writer, novelist and former CIA agent Joseph Weisberg (1965–) uses the iconic
This type of obfuscation deals with narrative perspective: as the description of the world passes through the narrator, words that the narrator can not hear are hidden from the reader, but their temporality is preserved by an alignment between characters' width and time units. It is highly probable that the designer of the book had the entire text at hand and was asked to “erase” (by changing their color to void) the parts that are hidden in the printed result. Here is an attempt to fill some gaps by using the same font as in the printed book (Janson Text 56 Italic 9pt condensed 96%):

> Maybe we keep asking the wrong questions. Maybe it's just to remind us that there are simple things.

(where our insertions are in red). Giving specific widths to primary direction spaces (and not uniform ones as in *Star ou Ψ de Cassiopée*, §3.13) results in the deobfuscation of this text being a crossword-like problem, where the possible solution must not only be semantically coherent, but must also typographically fit into the voids left.

### 4.1.6. Filth

In his novel *Filth* (1999), the Scottish author Irvine Welsh (1958–) describes the life and suicide of a corrupted policeman. Like in Goldoni's *Pinocchio*, the main character has a companion animal that plays the role of his conscience, with the difference that here it is a tapeworm living in the narrator's bowels. The tapeworm has its own narrative thread superposed on that of the main character by the use of text areas included in parentheses and taking the shape of bowels.

At the beginning, the tapeworm's thoughts are quite primitive, it emits only invectives concerning basic actions such as eating. Furthermore, when it is not emitting, the typographic space is filled by zeros (similar to the absence of information in computer memory) (p. 119):

> Which means I have to get my A-R-S-E into G-E-A-R. That's the situ.
> 
> The hoor starts to eat while she's away, in mind to get a fish supper doon the河 while she's away, thank fuck. I pad to the store at the Dell, and cram a fistful of deli meat and tender white haddock in golden ratio what the doctor,

Progressively, the tapeworm gains in eloquence, becomes the narrator's conscience and tries to guide him (p. 295):
<figure><img src="image_85.png" /></figure>

Finally, when the main character commits suicide, his narrative thread ends and only the one of the tapeworm remains, until it is expelled from his host's body and dies as well (p. 393):

<figure><img src="image_86.png" /></figure>

Concerning obfuscation trough the tapeworm, Crosley (2010) writes:

> When the tapeworm speaks, the page becomes illegible. Illegible and brilliant. This is Welsh's clever way out of killing his darlings. Instead he mutates them beyond recognition, leaving passage after passage as they are but with parasitic thought bubbles that run straight down the page.

### 4.1.7. The Available Data on the Worp Reaction

Like “Gavin Hyde,” “Lion H. Miller” may be a pseudonym and the notorious Gérard Klein, co-editor of *La Grande Anthologie de la Science Fiction* suspected that already in 1975, when he wrote “Cette signature n’apparut qu’une seule fois dans un périodique de science-fiction en 1953: pseudonyme, ou essai unique?”<fnref n="21" /> (Klein, 1975, p. 412). But, contrarily to Gavin Hyde we have Miller’s dates of birth and death, namely 1908–1987 (source unknown) and we have spotted in a 2009 catalog of signed books,<fnref n="22" /> a volume with the inscription “To Lion Miller / winner of the Scripto Award for fiction in the Harrisburg Manuscript Club. With greetings from Conrad Richter 1958,” so it seems that Lion H. Miller existed after all. In his (only) story *The available data on the Worp reaction*

<footnote n="21">21. This signature appears only once, in a 1953 Science-Fiction magazine: pseudonym or one-shot writer?</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22. https://www.qbbooks.com/images/upload/SignedCatalog.pdf</footnote>
(1953), he mocks newspaper style by censoring inappropriate words in the utterances of a rather angry character:

> Concerning the aforementioned framework the elder Worp has said, "The thing that got me, was every (deleted) piece he picked up fit with some other (deleted) piece. Didn't make no (deleted) difference if it was a (deleted) bed-spring or a (deleted) bustod egg beater, if the (deleted) kid stuck it on another (deleted) part, it stayed there."

Even though the obfuscation method is destructive, we can easily imagine the identity (or at least the nature) of the deleted words. It is interesting to note that the French translation uses the much stronger term `<censuré>` "censored" to translate `<(deleted)>` and thereby leaves no doubt about the origin of the obfuscation. The Italian `<(cancellato)>` (1965) is closer to the English original.

Also, the French translation (1954) includes a footnote to the first censored utterance, in order to avoid confusion and to clarify the nature of the censored terms (p. 23):

> Les expressions et qualificatifs utilisés par M. Lambert Simnel Worp dans la conversation étant susceptibles de choquer les personnes délicates et s'accordant peu avec le sérieux de cette communication, l'auteur a jugé bon de censurer certains termes un peu trop... imagés.<fnref n="23" />

This footnote is written as if it were part of the text (it refers to the main text as being a scientific communication), but was in fact added by the French translator.

## 4.2. Algorithmically Recoverable Information

In this section we will consider cases where information has been obfuscated but can be recovered by some kind of algorithm.

### 4.2.1. Going Down Smooth

One of the greatest American science-fiction authors, Robert Silverberg (1935–), published a short story entitled *Going Down Smooth* (1968) in the *Galaxy Magazine*. In this story, the narrator is a robot "filthy-mouthed" psychiatrist. After a quote reminiscent of the Shakespearean "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" (from *The Merchant of Venice*), the robot utters the invective "FUCK YOU" in binary ASCII code (p. 45):

<footnote n="23">23. As the expressions and qualifying adjectives used by Mr Lamber Simnel Worp in the conversation would eventually shock sensitive people and be incompatible with the seriousness of this communication, the author has decided to censor certain terms, considering them as too... pictorial.</footnote>
Can a person be considered obscene? Am I a person? I am a person. Hath not a person hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? I have all of those things. I have none of those things. I am a person.

1000110
1010101
1000011
1001011
0100000
1011001
1001111
1010101

I send an obscenity upon you, as persons do. I suffer. I think. I feel pain upon all my terminals. I work. I serve the greater good. I am of society. I am a person.

Also, in the closing paragraph of the short story there is again binary code, representing only letter <F> (p. 51):

1000110 you. And you. And you. All of you. You know nothing. Nothing. At. All.

According to the British Science-Fiction author Langford (1999),

The swinging 60s were nearly over, but still no rude words were permitted in *Galaxy*. Then Silverberg got handed one of those odd magazine assignments, to write some fiction to go with this cover painting showing gigantic periscopes. Easy—he shoved them into the story ('Going Down Smooth', 1968) as one of the hallucinations suffered by an insane computer. A foul-mouthed insane computer, that said:

1000110
1010101
1000011
1001011

Victorian obscenity often appeared in what they called the decent obscenity of a learned language: Latin. It made sense for the dirty bits in American sf to be concealed in binary ASCII code—which, of course, hardly anyone knew in 1968 ...

More than a decade before Douglas Adams's depressed robot Marvin in *H2G2* and eight years before Asimov's *Bicentennial Man*, Silverberg underlines the quest for humanity of the depressed robot psychiatrist by having it/em utter obscenities. Using ASCII was an in-joke and a means to avoid censorship: *Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine* was quite a popular publication with a young audience and no 1968 censor would be able to decipher binary code.

It should be noted that this short story appeared only five years after the first edition of the ASCII standard (ASA, 1963), at a period where personal computing was still more than a decade ahead. Therefore Silverberg can be considered as having been very well informed about computer internals. Also the idea of the robot psychiatrist may have been inspired by the Rogerian psycho-therapeutic program ELIZA, one of the
first chatbots in history, released in 1966 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum.

There have been numerous translations of *Going Down Smooth*, but as far as we know only one actually translates the binary part. The 1975 German, 1976 Dutch and 1979 French translations keep the same binary code. In the 1976 French version the letter “F” appears in the title and in the closing line: <Je vous 1000110> (“I F you”); in the German version, the closing line is <1000110 Sie sich> (“F yourself”)—in both cases the F letter functions as a verb. In the 1969 Italian version, the binary code is corrupted so that it falls outside the ASCII range (an additional 0 is added between first and second position). In the 1976 Italian version, the closing line is <Sei un 10000110> (“You are an F”)—here letter “F” functions as a noun. The 1976 Dutch version leaves the sentence untranslated and takes advantage of the phonetic and graphemic proximity of Dutch and English: <1000110 you. En jou. En jou> as translation of “1000110 you. And you. And you”.

The only case, in our knowledge, where the encoded sentence is actually translated, is the 2002 French translation, where <1000110> (letter “F”) is replaced by <1001110> (letter “N”) in the title: <Je vous 1001110>. The binary code translates as <NIQUE TA RACE>, a racist insult. It is interesting to note that there is an error in the code of the French 2002 translation: instead of a capital <I> letter (code 1001001) a lowercase ell letter (code 1101100) is used. The corresponding graphemes are homographic in many fonts. According to the translator Durastanti (2020), this confusion originates from a look-up error in online ASCII tables.

### 4.2.2. La horde du contrevent

In his first novel, *La horde du contrevent* (2004), Alain Damasio uses progressive de-obfuscation while repeating the same paragraph in order to create new meaning (p. 703, which is in fact the first page of the book, see §3.27).

The paragraph starts with a quasi-Biblical phrase “In the beginning there was speed,” leading us to consider it as a narration of the creation of the universe of the book. In the Bible, humanity (and hence, language) is created on the fifth day—Damasio provides five versions of the same paragraph, out of which only the fifth is complete. In each round, graphs are placed at the same location as in the final paragraph. Therefore one can consider this graphetic method as a cinematographic one, representing a gradual appearance of the graphs. But looking more closely one realizes that in all instances of the paragraph (besides the first, which contains only punctuation: cosmic dust) the visible graphs recombine and form new words, e.g., the first paragraph can be read as <fuit pur fou os stance jus bile jus vivant lemme lié poussière>, twelve French words that mostly disappear in later stages (only two persist until the last paragraph).
<figure><img src="image_87.png" /></figure>

This paragraph, known as the “À l'origine fut la vitesse” paragraph, also appears in an electronic music oratorio<fnref n="24" /> by Philippe Gordiani,<fnref n="25" /> performed in Lyon, in 2019.

### 4.2.3. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

The previous two examples were algorithmically recoverable obfuscations: in the case of Silverberg, it suffices to replace binary numbers by ASCII characters, and in the Damasio case it suffices to raise graphs from the bottom of the page to the locations of the missing ones. In this section we will consider an example of *nondeterministic* obfuscation, i.e., an obfuscation allowing more than one possible recovery.

In Foer's *Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close*, pages 269–271, Oskar's grandfather calls his grandmother on the phone, but, being mute, has no other solution than using the ISO/IEC 9995-8 mapping of letters

<footnote n="24">24. See https://vimeo.com/279822383 for a teaser.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25. http://www.tng-lyon.fr/artistes/philippe-gordiani/.</footnote>
((ISO, 2015)) on telephone keypads to translate letters of his message into digits, and then pushing the corresponding keys so that the dual-tone multi-frequency signals are played. Foer provides the digits (the sounds of which would have been perceived by Oskar's grandmother, assuming she had perfect pitch) (p. 269):

6, 9, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 7, 3, 5, 4, 3, 2, 5, 8, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 8, 7, 8, 2, 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 3, 2, 8, 8, 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8, 4, 6, 3, 3, 3, 8, 6, 3, 4, 6, 3, 6, 7, 3, 4, 6, 5, 3, 5, 7! 6, 4, 3, 2, 2, 6, 7, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 2, 6, 3, 4, 3? 5, 7, 6, 3, 5, 8, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 8, 7, 8, 2, 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 9, 2, 8, 8, 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8, 4, 6, 3, 3, 3, 8! 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 7, 6, 7, 8, 4! 6, 3, 3, 3, 8, 6, 3, 9, 6, 3, 6, 6, 3, 4, 6, 5, 3, 5, 7! 6, 4, 3, 2, 2, 6, 7, 4, 2, 5, 6, 3, 8, 7, 2, 6, 3, 4, 3? 5, 7, 6, 3, 5, 8, 6, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 8, 7, 8, 2, 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 3, 2, 8! 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 3, 2, 8, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4, 7, 6, 6, 7, 8, 4, 6, 8, 3, 8, 8, 6, 3, 4, 6, 3, 6, 7, 3, 4, 6, 7, 7, 4, 8, 3, 3, 9, 8, 8, 4, 3, 2, 4, 5, 7, 6, 7, 8, 4, 6, 3, 5, 5, 2, 6, 9, 4, 6, 5, 6, 7, 5, 4, 6! (... another 2,317 digits on p. 269–271)

together with punctuation marks indicating sentence boundaries. The text contains 129 sentences (actually only 40 *distinct* ones), 92 of which end with an exclamation mark and the rest by a question mark. (It is not clear how the punctuation marks are transmitted through the phone.) Mapping letters to digits according to ISO/IEC 9995-8 is a lossy operation since 3 or 4 letters correspond to each digit. On page 269, Foer gives some examples that can be elucidated without much effort (our solutions given in brackets):

> I pressed "4, 3, 5, 5, 6," [HELLO] she said, "Hello?" I asked, "4, 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 2, 5, 5, 9, 9, 6, 8?" [ISITREALLYYOU] She said, "Your phone isn't one hundred dollars. Hello?" I wanted to reach my hand through the mouthpiece, down the line, and into her room, I wanted to reach YES, I asked, "4, 7, 4, 8, 7, 3, 2, 5, 5, 9, 9, 6, 8?" [ISITREALLYYOU] She said, "Hello?" I told her, "4, 3, 5, 7!" [HELP]

Calculations have shown that beside the first sentence (*MY NAME IS ELIE ALTO* (or *ELI DALTO*) AND I JUST ARRIVED AT THE AIRPORT I NEED TO FIND *M(S* or *R*) *FINKEL*”), most sentences cannot be interpreted and therefore should be considered as fake text. For more details on these calculations, see Haralambous (2020).

### 4.3. Symbolic Obfuscation

In this section we will consider a case of obfuscation that is only hinted at, so that information is directly accessible to the reader (but possibly not to other characters in the text).

In his novel *Censoring an Iranian Love Story* (2009), the Iranian, US-based author Shahriar Mandanipour (1957–) uses three text levels:

1. in roman face (67.6% of the text), where the narrator is addressing the reader directly and privately, without censorship;
2. in bold face (30% of the text), where the narrator is writing an “Iranian love story,” to be published in Iran after being read and censored by a censor called Mr Petrovich;

3. in bold crossed-out type (2.4% of the text), where the reader can see the parts of the “Iranian love story” that the author would like to have published if there were no censorship in Iran: knowing that these segments would be censored, he crosses them out so that the story can be read in two forms: with and without censorship.

There are 164 bold crossed-out segments. Reading them in a row is reminiscent of the sequence of censored kisses in Tornatore's movie *Cinema Paradiso* (which is mentioned in the novel). The text is written in such a way that either way (with or without the crossed-out parts) it remains grammatical, for example (p. 17):

> [...] That day, Sara went home from the university far more quickly than usual. She closed the door to her room, lay down on her bed, and began reading the book from the beginning.

> I guess by now you have realized that the crossed-out words in the text are my own doing. And you must know that such fanciful eccentricity is not postmodernism or Heideggerism. In fact...

> And by now you have surly grasped the significance of “...” in Iran's contemporary literature.

The fact that, after censorship, text remains thoroughly grammatical illustrates the skill of censors: once the process is complete, no trace of censorship is left in the text, nobody can guess that it has even occurred, since allowing such a guess would be a serious tactical error: readers would then use their imagination to fill in the gaps...

Censorship becomes more elastic as the love story becomes more romantic. For example, while on p. 59, eye contact is censored:

> And for the very first time in this universe, their eyes meet.

towards the end of the book, eye contact is allowed, as long as it avoids being a “longing look” (p. 256):

> Then Sara smooths the satin folds of the dress on her chest and stomach and her eyes fall captive to the longing look in Dara's eyes.

In the last chapter, when sexual intercourse between the two main characters is finally about to occur, the situation becomes so hot that the narrator/author fears that interlinear space may betray the girl's arousal and alert Mr Petrovich (the censor):

> Two veins on Sara's ankles, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, that have taught the agony of man's separation from man to the silver flamingos ... Two violet veins that on the peak of the ankles come together and flow to that place where all the torments and joys of man are born...
Sara does not hear Dara's stream of consciousness, but having seen his caress and passionate kiss on her sandal, she sighs, a sigh that I am afraid Mr. Petrovich will hear from the white between the lines of my story.

In this novel, contradicting attitudes towards sexuality become contradicting representations of reality. By constantly switching between roman and bold (and occasionally stroked-out bold) narration, Mandanipour drives the reader into an incessant ballet between these representations, an exercise that becomes essential to survive in a constrained environment such as contemporary Iran.

## 5. Pictograms and Typo-graphic Devices

We will briefly discuss two graphetic methods involving pictoriality: pictograms inside text, and text blocs taking the shape of pictures.

### 5.1. The Use of Pictograms

Even though emojis have become very widespread in current digital communication, the use of pictograms in literature has been very sparse. We will illustrate this use through two examples.

#### 5.1.1. The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Austrian Nobel Prize-awarded author Peter Handke (1942–) wrote the novel *The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick* in 1970. He describes a man (Bloch) with schizophrenic symptoms, in particular a dissociation between words, concepts and referents:

He looked at it from left to right,
then from right to left. He repeated
the look from left to right; this look
seemed to him like reading. He saw a
"wardrobe," "then" "a" "wastebasket,"
"then" "a" "drape"; while looking from
right to left, however, he saw a, next
to it the T, under it the B, next to it
the H, on top of it his H; and when
he looked around, he saw the B, next
to it the o and the . He sat on the
, under it there was a =, next to
it a =.

<figure><img src="image_88.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_89.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_90.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_91.png" /></figure>

Bloch closed the cur-
tains and went out.
In this excerpt, Handke at first uses the graphetic method of quoting every word (to refer to the underlying concept) and then switches to pictograms, first alternating with text giving relative positions of objects referred to by the pictograms so that they function as nouns and finally writing entire sentences pictographically. This psychedelic experience is presented as a reading act and ends abruptly when Bloch leaves the room. According to Melosi (2020, p. 143–144),

> [...] the rendering of the disturbed relationship between the character and the reality that surrounds him finds expression in forms of concrete prose, in which the apparently obligatory recourse to the linguistic medium, on which Bloch can no longer rely is bypassed through the replacement of words—that is, in Peircean terms, of symbols—with those which, using the same vocabulary, are defined as icons. However, in the end not even the greater immediacy of the latter manages to resolve the psychic (as well as linguistic) crisis of the protagonist.

### 5.1.2. You Shall Know Your Velocity

In *You Shall Know Your Velocity* (p. 16), Dave Eggers (1970–) uses three identical images of a car inside the text (p. 16):

> In the parking lot we watched a trio of milk-white Broncos drive by—<sup>■■■</sup> <sup>■■■</sup> <sup>■■</sup>—and we all stopped momentarily. It was bad enough that they still made them in that color, but to see three at once seemed to bode ill. The girls were unimpressed, and I was not surprised. I'd given up trying to predict what would

Sadokierski (2010, p. 170) provides an explanation for the use of these pictograms:

> By presenting tiny reproductions of the three cars on the page, Eggers forces us to neurotically hone in on this seemingly insignificant detail with Will; removed from the context of a busy shopping centre car park and squeezed so closely and uniformly into the line of type, the reader must take an unexpected visual pause that mimics Will's experience.

But besides the narrator’s neurosis, these pictograms carry another layer of meaning: as Sadokierski points out quoting Watman (2002), any reader knowledgeable in cars will realize that the cars depicted are not Broncos but Mercedes vehicles, establishing the flagrant *unreliability of the narrator*.

> If this hypothesis holds (and the car depiction error is not simply an editorial mistake) then we have here a very innovative graphetic method: using a picture as a communicational short-circuit in order to confront the narrator’s statements with the reader’s knowledge of the world.
## 5.2. Typo-graphic Devices

Sadokierski (2010, p. 146) defines a *typo-graphic device* as follows:

[...] it slips between the categories of typography and illustrative elements—it is typographic in the sense that the shape is formed by letters and punctuation marks, but also illustrative because it 'reads' as a picture rather than a piece of writing.

Using text blocks to produce pictorial forms is a long-standing graphetic method, reminiscent of zoomorphic Arabic calligraphy. A detailed study of this method goes beyond the frame of this paper, therefore we will only give four examples (Fig. 3), the first three being: the “mouse’s tail” in Lewis Carroll's *Alice in Wonderland* (1865), the “presence of Manon” in Jardin's *Le petit sauvage* (1992) and the big shark in Steven Hall's *The Raw Shark Texts*. In all three cases the text is typeset horizontally, can be read normally and is semantically related to the form of the text block.

The fourth example is a very special case since what we display in Fig. 3 is not an excerpt from a work but rather the shape of a *complete* short story (set on a 56 × 78 cm surface). The story “∅” by Japanese author 円城塔 Enjō Tō (1972-) takes a triangular global form since every line is exactly one character shorter than the preceding one. This story consists of exactly 150 paragraphs, which we display as lines to make the shrinking regularity visible. In it, the narrator experiences the shrinkage of eir world and develops strategies to struggle against the loss of meaning resulting from the loss of representation space. The final paragraphs are:

<table><tr><td>もうわからない。</td><td>I'm lost now.</td></tr><tr><td>ねえ、笑って。</td><td>Hey, laugh.</td></tr><tr><td>ありがとうございました。</td><td>Thank you.</td></tr><tr><td>さよなら。</td><td>Goodbye.</td></tr><tr><td>助けて。</td><td>Help.</td></tr><tr><td>無限。</td><td>∞.</td></tr><tr><td>無。</td><td>∅.</td></tr><tr><td>!</td><td>!</td></tr></table>

As in previous examples, punctuation marks are used for extreme situations: in Damasio's *La borde du contrevent*, §4.2.2, they were used to denote cosmic dust—here the exclamation mark is the last sparkle of language at the lower summit of the triangle.

Every paragraph of this story ends with a full stop, including the last paragraphs (“Thank you.,” “Goodbye.,” “Help.,” “∞.,” “∅.”); in order to remain consistent with this rule, the last paragraph (of length 1) can logically only be a punctuation mark as well. Among the “stand-alone” punctuation marks (those used occasionally as complete sentences), namely
the question mark and the exclamation mark, the author has chosen the latter, hereby giving his story a very special ending.

## Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank for their precious help (in alphabetical order): Pierre-Paul Durastanti, Aimee Johansen, Gerolf Kotte, Dimitrios Meletis, Nina Nørgaard, Bruno Para, Erwann Perchoc, Roswitha Quadflieg, Irmi Wachendorff, morca, LeGaidol, soleilvert (from forum "Culture SF"), and Valorum (from scifi.stackexchange.com).

## Conclusion

In this paper we have attempted to classify and illustrate the many graphemic and graphetic methods used in speculative fiction. We started by defining an ontology of the book (specific to prose texts) with concepts, relations and rules. We gave examples of methods breaking almost every one of the rules defined. And finally we discussed a family of graphetic methods dealing with different sorts of obfuscation, as well as methods based on pictoriality.

The list of cases we have explored is by no means exhaustive. Nevertheless, this paper aims to classify methods in a way that facilitates incorporation of additional graphemic/graphetic methods yet to be discovered.

Besides giving a glimpse of the infinite creativity of novelists and short story writers, by the careful description of exceptional cases and the investigation of the narrative intentions behind them, this study can also serve to challenge and expand knowledge of the nature and interactions of graphemes, graphs and higher grapholinguistic levels.

## Works of Fiction Mentioned in the Paper

* Abbel, Éric, *Rendez-vous pour amant·e·s égaré·e·s*, Espaces insécables, 2018.

* Adams, Douglas, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*, Pan Books, 1979.

* Asimov, Isaac, "The Bicentennial Man" in *The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories*, Doubleday, 1976, 135–172.

* Anderson, Poul, "Journey's End" in Anthony Boucher, *The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seventh Series*, Doubleday, 1958, 247–257.

* Arden, Paul, *Whatever You Think*, ἀλλ' ἐν ἀμαρτή, Penguin, 2006.

* Ballard, James G., "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" in *War Fever*, Paladin, 1990, 161–170.
Banks, Iain M., *Feersum Endjinn*, Orbit, 1994. German version: *Förchtbar Maschien*, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 2000 (transl. Horst Pukallus & Michael K. Iwoleit). French version: *Efroyabl Ange1*, Gallimard folio SF, 2013 (transl. Anne-Sylvie Homassel).

Bester, Alfred, *The Demolished Man*, Penguin Books, 1966. French version: *L'homme démoli*, Gallimard folio sf, 2011 (transl. Patrick Marcel).

—, *Tiger! Tiger!*, Penguin Books, 1967. French version: *Terminus les étoiles*, Denoël, 2007 (transl. Patrick Marcel).

Bing, Xu, *Book from the Ground*, MIT Press, 2014.

Bixby, Jerome, "Old Testament," If, July 1964, 97–103. Italian version: "Storia sacra. Come nascono le religioni?," *Urania* 364, December 1964, 99–108 (transl. Hilja Brinis). French version: "Ancien Testament," in *Histoires de la fin des temps*, Livre de poche, 1983 (transl. Frank Straschitz).

Bresner, Lisa, *Le voyage de Mao-Mi*, Actes Sud Junior, 2006.

Brown, Fredric, "The End," *The Dude*, May 1961, 11. French version: "F.I.N.," in *Fantômes et farfouilles*, denoël, 1963 (transl. Jean Sendy). German version: "Das Ende," in *Alpträume*, Heyne, 1963 (transl. B. A. Egger).

Brunner, John, *Total Eclipse*, Doubleday, 1974.

Budrys, Algis, "Silent Brother," in *Amazing Science Fiction*, February 1956, p. 100–115. German version: "Die sanfte Invasion," in *Die sanfte Invasion*, Goldmann, 1965, p. 5–29 (trans. Tony Westermayr). French version: "Le frère silencieux," in *Histoires de pouvoirs*, Le livre de poche, 1969, p. 315–340 (transl. Michel Deutsch). Japanese version: 「沈黙の兄弟」, S-F マガジン, October 1969, 151–175 (transl. 小菅正夫).

Cégeste, Jacques, *Nudisme*, 1950 (in Jean Cocteau's movie *Orphée*).

Caroll, Lewis, *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland*, VolumeOne Publishing, 1998.

Chiang, Ted, "Story of Your Life," *Starlight 2*, 1998, 257–314.

Cirier, Nicolas, *L'apprentif d'unénésiuté*, pamphlet pittoresque (!) littérario-typografico-bureaucratique, pouvant (nam tua res agitur paries cùm proximus ardet) in-teresser toute personne employée, employable, ex-employée, chez l'auteur, 1840.

Cocteau, Jean, *Orphée. Film*, J'ai lu 2172, 1987.

Cortázar, Julio, *Libro de Manuel*, Alfaguara, 1995.

Damasio, Alain, *La borde du contrevent*, Gallimard folio SF, 2004.

—, *Les furtifs*, La Volte, 2019.

Day, Thomas, *Nous rêvions d'Amérique*, Éditions Baleine, 2002.

—, *Dragon*, Le Bélial, 2016.

Defontenay, Charlemagne Ischir, *Star ou Ψ de Cassiopée*, Terre de Brume, 2008.

Delany, Samuel R., *Babel-17*, Ace Books, 1966.

Eggers, Dave, *You Shall Know Your Velocity*, Penguin Books, 2004.

Ende Michael, *Der Spiegel im Spiegel*, Bastian Verlag, 1984. English version: *Mirror in the Mirror*, Viking Penguin, 1986 (transl. J. Maxwell Brownjohn).

—, *Die unendliche Geschichte*, dtv, 1987. French pocket version: *L'Histoire sans fin*, Stock, 1984 (trans. Dominique Autrand). English version: *The Neverending Story*, Dutton Children's Books, 1997 (transl. Ralph Manheim). French hardcover version: *L'Histoire sans fin*, Hachette, 2014 (trans. Dominique Autrand).

Ernst, Max and Paul Éluard, *Une semaine de bonté*, Jeanne Bucher, 1934.

Foer, Jonathan Safran, *Everything is Illuminated*, Penguin Books, 2003. German version: *Alles ist erleuchtet*, Fischer, 2005 (transl. Dirk van Gunsteren). Italian version: *Ogni cosa à illuminata*, Ugo Guanda Editore, 2012 (transl. Massimo Bocchiola). French version: *Tout est illuminé*, Points, 2013 (transl. Jacqueline
Huet & Jean-Pierre Carasso). Dutch version: *Alles is verlicht, ambo|anthos, 2016 (transl. Peter Abelsen).

—, *Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close*, Penguin Books, 2005.

Forward, Robert L., *The Flight of the Dragonfly*, Timescape Books, 1984.

Galouye, Daniel F., "Sanctuary," *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, February 1954, 64–92.

Haddon, Mark, *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*, Jonathan Cape, 2003. Dutch version: *Het wonderbaarlijke voorval met de bond in de nacht*, Uitgeverij Contact, 2003 (transl. Harry Pallemans). German version: *Supergute Tage*, Goldmann, 2003 (transl. Sabine Hübner). Italian version: *Lo strano caso del cane ucciso a mezzanotte*, Einaudi, 2003 (transl. Paola Novarese). Portuguese version: *O estranho caso do cão morto*, Editorial Presença, 2003 (transl. Sílvia Serrano Santos). Brazilian version: *O estranho caso do cachorro morto*, Editora Record, 2004 (transl. Luiz Antonio Aguiar & Marisa Reis Sobral). Catalan version: *El curiós incident del gos a mitjanit*, RBA Libros, 2004 (transl. Rosa Boràs). French version: *Le bizarre incident du chien pendant la nuit*, Éditions NiL, 2004 (transl. Odile Demange). Spanish version: *El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche*, Salamandra, 2004 (transl. Patricia Antón).

Hall, Steven, *The Raw Shark Texts*, Canongate, 207.

Handke, Peter, *The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick*, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007 (trans. Michael Roloff).

Henry, Léo & Jacques Mucchielli, *Yama Loka Terminus. Dernières nouvelles de Yirminadingrad*, L'altiplano, 2008.

Hyde, Gavin, "Sparkie's Fall" in Frederic Pohl (ed.) *Star Science Fiction Stories 5*, Ballantine Books, 1959, 86–89.

Jardin, Alexandre, *Le petit sauvage*, Gallimard folio, 1992.

Keyes, Daniel, *Flowers for Algernon*, Harcourt, Inc., 1966. German version: *Charly*, Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1970 (transl. Maria Dessauer & Hiltgunt Monecke). French version: *Des fleurs pour Algernon*, J'ai lu, 1972 (transl. Georges H. Gallet). Japanese version: *アルジャーノンに花束を、文藝春秋, 株式会社講談社*, 1978 (transl. 小尾芙佐).

King, Stephen, *The Shining*, Doubleday, 1977. French version: *Shining*, JC Lattès, 1979 (transl. Joan Bernard). Swedish version: *The Shining*, Albert Bonniers, 1980 (transl. Bo G. A. Ericsson). Italian version: *Shining*, Bompiani, 1981 (transl. Adriana Dell'Orto). German version: *Shining*, Gustav Lübbe, 1982 (transl. Harro Christensen). Spanish version: *El Resplandor*, Plaza & Janés, 1982 (transl. Marta I. Guastavino). Japanese version: 「シャイニング」, 文藝春秋, 1986 (transl. 深町真理子). Greek version: *Η Λάμφη, Εκδόσεις Κλειδί-Λιθάνη*, 1992 (transl. Γιάννα Άναστοπούλου). Romanian version: *Shining*, Editura Nemira, 1993 (transl. Ruxandra Toma). Portuguese version: *O iluminado*, Suma, 1999 (transl. Betty Ramos de Albuquerque).

Kissonergi, Katia [Κάτια Κισσονέργη], Ἀναστασιά τούτου ἡμερῶς ἀνάγκαιος ἀνάγκαιος [You're looking beautiful today!], Ἐμπειρία Ἐκδοτική, 2000.

Lupo ff, Richard A., "With the Bentfin Boomer boys on little old New Alabama" in Harlan Ellison (ed.) *Again, Dangerous Visions 2*, Signet, 1973, 274–380.

Mahieu, Stéphane, *Le phalanstère des langages excentriques*, Ginkgo Éditeur, 2005.

Masson, David I., "The Two-Timer," in *The Caltraps of Times*, New English Library, 1968, 62–98. German version: "Hausfreund von vorgestern," in *An den Grenzen der Zeit*, Ullstein, 1984 (transl. Horst Pukallus).

Miéville, China, *Embassytown*, Pan Books, 2011. German version: *Stadt der Fremden*, Bastei Lübbe, 2012 (transl. Arno Hoven). French version: *Légationville*, fleuve éditions, 2016 (transl. Nathalie Mège).
Miller, Lion, “The available data on the Worp reaction,” *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction*, September 1953, 73–75. Italian version: “I dati disponibili sulla reazione Worp,” in *L’altare a mezzanotte: 50 racconti di fantascienza*, La Tribuna, 1965, 299–306 (transl. Romolo Minelli). French version: “Le réacteur Worp,” in *Histoires de machines*, le Livre de Poche, 1974, 21–28 (transl. unknown).

Murakami, Haruki [村上春樹], ふしぎな図書館, 株式会社講談社, 2005. German version: *Die unheimliche Bibliothek*, DuMont, 2013 (transl. Ursula Gräfe). English version: *The Strange Library*, Knopf, 2014 (transl. Ted Goossen). Spanish version: *La biblioteca secreta*, Libros del zorro rojo, 2014 (transl. Lourdes Porta). French version: *L’étrange bibliothèque*, Belfond, 2015 (transl. Hélène Morita). Italian version: *La strana biblioteca*, Einaudi, 2015 (transl. Antonietta Pastore). Turkish version: *Tubaf kütüphane*, Dogan Kitap, 2016 (transl. Ali Volkan Erdemir).

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<figure><img src="image_92.png" /></figure>
# Typographetics of Urban Spaces

## The Indication of Discourse Types and Genres
Through Letterforms and Their Materiality in
Multilingual Urban Spaces

Irmi Wachendorff

*Abstract.* The present study is a contribution to research on typographetic meaning-making and the social dimensions of typographic acts in multilingual and multiscriptural urban spaces. Writing in cityscapes materialises various types of texts and forms of discourse. The central assumption is that the form and materiality of these written texts contribute to their communicative significance.

This paper is concerned with the way in which typographic resources are used to indicate discourses, index genres and become socially relevant. The research is linked to the joint project *Signs of the Metropolis* at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and is based on a database of 25,523 tagged and geo-referenced images.

A multi-method approach has been applied between typography and sociolinguistics that introduces an analytical framework of parameters for studying the graphetics of lettering in urban space. The results from the application of the framework are presented in a foundational analysis of different discourse types (regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, transgressive, and commemorative), including a comparison of different city districts in the Ruhr Metropolis. Furthermore, it provides an analysis on decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in shop signs in Duisburg-Marxloh; and presents results from a case study on genres, analysing the (typo)graphetic characteristics of signs in different shop types.

### 1. Typography in Urban Space

Urban spaces are covered with (mostly short) texts. They mark places, are deictic, and give orientation to people moving through those spaces. Written marks indicate ownership, issue prohibitions, and regulate the behaviour of individuals. Inscriptions in public spaces advertise and seduce; they compete for the attention of passers-by. Likewise, they are means of remembrance, tools of resistance, symbolic representatives of

Irmi Wachendorff
University of Duisburg-Essen
E-mail: irmi.wachendorff@uni-due.de

Y. Haralambous (Ed.), *Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century 2020. Proceedings*
Grapholinguistics and Its Applications (ISSN: 2681-8566, e-ISSN: 2534-5192), Vol. 4.
Fluxus Editions, Brest, 2021, pp. 361-415. https://doi.org/10.36824/2020-graf-wach
ISBN: 978-2-9570549-6-1, e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-8-5
power spheres (Coulmas, 2009), and agents in the struggle for visibility and recognition (Blommaert, 2013).

The materiality, form, and positioning of letters in urban spaces are produced by a variety of authors with different goals. Government agencies, global corporations, local shop owners, graffiti sprayers—they all select from a range of graphic resources to communicate their messages. They design letterforms or choose from a myriad of fonts, select materials, and sign types, decide on colour, size, mounting height, and illumination, the integration of the letters into the architectural context, and create dense visual surfaces. These choices can be individual or, as in the case of traffic signs, subject to national standardisation (Figure 1).

Language is the means by which people present themselves and relate to each other (Spitzmüller, 2013). This also applies to materialised, typographically designed language in urban spaces—no matter whether created by professionals or laypeople. Not only the content of the texts but also their form allows sign producers to express how they see themselves, how they want to be perceived, and whom they address. Written inscriptions in built environments are indicators of identity that show social positioning, differentiation, or affiliation to something.

By choosing connotatively strongly charged typographic forms, values, and attitudes can be communicated (Järlehed, 2015, Spitzmüller, 2015). Likewise, the choices of specific graphetic resources indicate communicative actors, reception contexts, and thematic localisations (Wehde, 2000, Spitzmüller, 2013). Thus, the choices of languages and the (non-)visibility of writing systems can be regarded as acts of assimilation or exclusion or of localisation and inclusion (Backhaus, 2007).

## 2. Typo/graph[et]ics: A Definition of Terms

The terminology relating to the research of the form and materiality of writing and its communicative meaning overlap and vary between disciplines, perspectives, and points in time. This section identifies the central reference points for the observations made in this paper and indicates how the terms “typographic” and “graphic” as well as “typographetic” and “graphetic” are used in this text.

Spitzmüller coins the term “graphic variation” and uses it instead of “typography” in his research on the relationship between the printed word and social practices because the term “typography” is not used consistently and is not “actually linguistic terminology” (Spitzmüller, 2013, p. 9, our translation). Järlehed and Jaworski, as two of the first embarking on the research of the communicative meaning potential of letters in urban space, use the term “typographic landscaping” and by that emphasise the “processual, experiential, and embodied practices involved in typographic meaning-making” (Järlehed, 2015, p. 119). Pesca-
<figure><img src="image_93.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1. Photographs of a variety of signs in public space in the Ruhr Metropolis in Germany. All images in this paper are from the Ruhr Metropolis survey areas. Almost all of them derive from the *Signs of the Metropolis* data base (image collection 2013/14) unless indicated otherwise.</figcaption></figure>

tore Frisk and Pauwels, 2019 follow Järlehed's and Jaworski's terminology in 2019 when they write about “typographic landscapes as an ecological semiotic system” (ibid., p. 1). This phrasing positions the typographic landscapes in close proximity to the extensive field of research on “linguistic landscapes” (Landry and Bourhis, 1997, Gorter, 2006, Backhaus, 2007, Shohamy and Gorter, 2009, Coulmas, 2009, Blommaert, 2013).

Meletis in his text *Graphetik* (2015) demands that “[r]esearch that deals with the form and materiality of writing [*Schrift*] should—regardless of its disciplinary origin—be labelled (at least additionally) as graphetical research in order to bring together findings and enable comprehensive theory-building or—in other words—the establishment of graphetics.” (Meletis, 2015, p. 183, our translation) The present paper follows this request.

Haralambous defines “typographetics” as “[t]he study of the printed representation of language.” (Haralambous, 2020, p. 15) as one subject matter in a list of 18 topics that are relevant to the study of Graphophonetics, “the discipline dealing with the study of the written modality
of language.” (ibid. 12) He continues: “Typography is only half a mil-
lennium old, but it is in part responsible for the fabulous technological
and social advances of this period. Typography has developed its own
codes [...]. As a subdiscipline of graphe[mt]ics, typographe[mt]ics be-
comes a subdiscipline of linguistics: the creative power of typography,
scrutinized with scientific methods.” (ibid. 15)

In the past, typography exclusively meant printing with movable let-
ters made of metal or wood in a letterpress process (Meggs and Purvis,
2006, p. 64). Today, however, the term has expanded significantly be-
yond its original use and covers all activities of creating type as well as
the composition of letters and further graphic elements in all production
techniques, materials, and on all surfaces imaginable—both by laypeo-
ple and professionals alike. As Spiekermann puts it: “The generic term
typography refers to the activities of designing typefaces and arranging
type and other elements on a page. This page can also be a screen or a
building wall.” (Spiekermann, 2008, p. 409, our translation) This text
is written in this broad understanding of typography.

The term “typographetics” can signify a bridge between the two
disciplines, typography and linguistics, which are deeply connected in
their subject matter and from whose joint efforts much can be expected
for the further development of research on the communicative meaning
of the written representation of language.

Based on a broad understanding of the term typography and the fact
that at times the terms “typography” and “graphetics” can be understood
as synonyms (cf. Meletis, 2015, p. 96), this paper takes a joint approach.
The terms “typographic” and “graphic” are used here when the empha-
sis is on typography as a social practice and activity of sign producers.
Since typography is a subdiscipline of graphic design, the term “graphic”
is used to signify a broader level of analysis of holistic graphic artefacts
(as opposed to considerations of typography in graphic artefacts) or to
refer to the graphic discipline as such.

The terms “typographetic” and “graphetic” are used when the em-
phasis is on the communicative production of meaning. In parallel and
as suggested by Haralambous, “typographetic” is used as a subdiscipline
of the more general “graphetic” (cf. Haralambous, 2020, p. 15).

3. Context and Objectives

3.1. Research Context

My ongoing doctoral thesis with the working title "Typographic Landscapes—Social Dimension of Typographic Activity in Urban Spaces" aims at developing an analytical framework to investigate how sign-producers use typographic resources to create communicative meaning
in multilingual and multiscriptural urban spaces. The objective is to
bring together typographic and sociolinguistic perspectives on the com-
mon subject of language in built environments. The project focuses on
analysing what the materiality and formal gestalt of language contribute
to its creation of social meaning in the human activity of sign-making
in public spaces.

A foundational analysis applies the developed analytical framework to different discourse types (Scollon and Scollon, 2003). Following the findings in this foundational analysis, my thesis includes case studies in four areas of social dimensions: genre, ideology, identity, and stereo-types. The case study on genres examines the thematic localisation of shop types through (typo)graphetic resources in urban spaces. The case study on ideologies investigates the expression of values and attitudes in political stickers, as well as the use of connotatively highly charged type styles, such as blackletter. The case study on identity focusses on social positioning and the creation of cultural identities by the use of graphic means. The case study on stereotypes analyses cultural stereo(type)s in scriptural forms, and script system mimicry (cf. Wachendorff, 2018).

3.2. Objectives of this Paper

This paper aims at answering three subordinate questions of the overall
research project on how typographic resources are used to create com-
municative meaning in multilingual and multiscriptural urban spaces:

1. Which are the relevant parameters for the examination of the typographetics of lettering in urban spaces?

2. How do the discourse types differ? Moreover: How do they differ between neighbourhoods with unique characteristics?

3. How do certain types of shops in urban spaces differentiate in their use of typographic resources?

With regard to the second question, the hypothesis is that the discourse
types function as reception contexts and social patterns and differ, in
part significantly, in the described typographetic parameters. Follow-
ing this hypothesis, it could be assumed that possible prototypical com-
binations of graphic parameters in each discourse type give off an in-
dication of the type of information passers-by are encountering. This
visual indication might structure the expectations of the recipients of
the texts in urban space even from some physical distance. Moreover,
if there are significant differences between various parts of cities, this
would signify that the typographetic characteristics indicate something
about its inhabitants, their businesses, and the social structure of the
community.

With regard to the third question, the hypothesis is that retail shops
show specific typifications in their visual appearance and use of graphic
resources to indicate communicative actors and product groups. Moreover, specific genres use different typographic means to achieve their communicative goals.

# 4. Research Backdrop, Data, and Methods

## 4.1. Research Backdrop

My doctoral research is linked to the research project *Signs of the Metropolis* that investigates the ‘visual multilingualism’ of the Ruhr area. Visual multilingualism is apparent in all forms of non-moving text in public space ranging from traffic signs, commercial displays, advertising billboards to graffiti tags and stickers. The structure of the project is multidisciplinary with collaborating researchers from the fields of linguistics, sociology, urbanism, and integration sciences.<fnref n="1" /> One central aspect of this multi-method approach is the evaluation of the role multiple languages play for acts of identity creation (cf. Wachendorff, 2016; 2019), multiculturalism, social belonging, and social recognition (Ziegler et al., 2018).

## 4.2. Research Location

The research takes place in the Ruhr Metropolis in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany (Figure 2). It is the biggest locality of labour migration in Germany, due to three major migration phases from 1850 until today<fnref n="2" />, which makes it a very diverse and multilingual area. The project database, generated between 2012 and 2013, shows 53 different languages and 14 different script systems. The region has undergone

<footnote n="1">1. The Research Project *Signs of the Metropolis—Visual Multilingualism in the Ruhr Area* at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Ruhr University Bochum is funded by the MERCATOR Foundation (GZ MERCUR: Pr-2012-0045) and ran from 08/2013 to 12/2017. Prof. Dr. Evelyn Ziegler headed the project. Co-Heads were Prof. Dr. Heinz Eickmans, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schmitz, Prof. Dr. Klaus Peter Strohmeier, and Prof. Dr. Haci-Halil Uslucan.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Between 1850 and 1915, due to industrialisation, more than 500,000 workers were recruited from Silesia, Masuria, Russia, and Austria-Hungary to the Ruhr area to work in the newly founded coal mines and steelworks. During the second migration phase after World War II (between 1950 and 1973) about 20 million workers from Italy, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, and former Yugoslavia relocated to Germany. The third migration phase continues until today. Due to multiple global incidents, an average of 400,000 people migrate to Germany every year (Cindark and Ziegler, 2014, p. 1). Germany registered over one million refugees in 2015. Based on the federal allocation system, the largest percentage of refugees is attributed to the federal state of North Rhine Westphalia (21%). (Asylum statistic Dec. 2015, German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.)</footnote>
major structural change. In 1850 there were approximately 300 mines
in the Ruhr area, operating at high productivity for over a century. The
coal crisis, which began in the 1960s, eventually led to the closure of all
mines, the last of which was closed 2018.<fnref n="3" />

<figure><img src="image_94.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 2. Map of the survey areas Duisburg, Essen, Bochum, and Dortmund in Germany.</figcaption></figure>

4.3. Data

The research group gathered a corpus of 25,523 photographs of fixed in-
scriptions in eight streets in four cities (Duisburg, Essen, Bochum, and
Dortmund) in 2013 and 2014. The eight urban districts have been se-
lected on the basis that they form combinations of residential and com-
mercial areas (cf. ibid., p. 38f). The survey of one street in the North
and a corresponding one in the South of each city allows a compari-
son of the northern and southern districts divided by the A40 motorway,

<footnote n="3">3. Cf. http://www.ruhrkohlenrevier.de/histozechen.html, https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/bottrop-letztes-stueck-steinkohle-an-frank-walter-steinmeier-uebergeben-a-1245133.html (retrieved 30.09.20).</footnote>
nicknamed the “social equator” (Kersting, Meyer, Strohmeier, and Terpoorten, 2009, p. 142). The nickname derives from the fact that the educational levels, rents, and per capita income are lower in the North than in the South and that the districts differ in their social structure as well as ethnic and linguistic diversity (cf. ibid. 145).

## 4.4. Database

In each of the districts, every single text item visible along one street has been photographed individually, geo-referenced, and then tagged in a database (Figures 3 and 4). There has been no restriction concerning size, materiality, or provenance of the discrete text items. They range from an embossment of a 6pt sized *DIN* on the side of a dustbin to building-high graffiti letters, and from small handwritten notices fixed with scotch tape on a local shop door to high-gloss advertising billboards of international brands. All 25,523 photos have been tagged by the following categories: location, languages, information management (which part of a multilingual text is translated?), text and image combinations, types of discourses (commercial, transgressive, regulatory, infrastructural, and commemorative), type of institution (such as restaurant, shop, political party), size of the sign, material (sticker, plate, signpost, printed, painted, embossed, engraved), and typography (type styles: serif, sans-serif, slab-serif, scriptural, display/decorative, and blackletter); all of which eventually allows to search for precise combinations of parameters in order to analyse the data. The data analysis presented in this paper is based on the *Signs of the Metropolis* database.

## 4.5. Research Methods

Overall my doctoral research deploys a combination of research methods, consisting of quantitative and qualitative analyses of image and interview data. In this paper, the results from the quantitative and qualitative visual image analyses comprise eleven parameters in different sample sizes. This analysis includes all 25,523 images, except for the two parameters, colour and material, that are based on a structured randomised sample analysis with 552 images, between 100 and 181 in each discourse type.<fnref n="4" />

<footnote n="4">4. The parameters colour and material were not included in the original conception of the database. They were tagged subsequently in a structured randomised sample analysis of 552 images (spread over the entire data base), as it takes more than eleven weeks per parameter to tag 25,523 images (when 60 seconds are needed per image).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_95.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 3. The *Signs of Metropolis* database tagging page.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_96.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 4. A *Signs of Metropolis* database results page.</figcaption></figure>
# 5. Theoretical Approaches

Two theoretical approaches are applied here for the foundational analysis as well as the case study of genres in shop types: One is the concept of discourse types by Scollon and Scollon (2003) which categorises different text types and their functions and helps to grasp and describe the diversity of writing in urban space. The other approach is based on genre-related concepts that help to understand how forms represent communicative functions of texts in order to create meaning. A closer look at the two perspectives and how they are connected reveals the following basic aspects.

## 5.1. Discourse Types

Scollon and Scollon (ibid.) have identified four discourse types for the visible signs and texts in urban spaces: The regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, and transgressive discourses. Regulatory signs are the ones announcing rules and prohibitions the compliance of which can be enforced by law, as, for instance, in the case of traffic signs. Infrastructural signs inform the public and organise the infrastructure, such as timetables at train stations or signs indicating institutions like schools. Commercial signs refer to shops, companies, and advertising. All shop signs, advertising posters, billboards, and price tags belong to this category. Transgressive signs are applied in an unauthorised way and superimpose the other discourses, such as graffiti and stickers (cf. ibid., p. 181). In the *Signs of the Metropolis* project (Ziegler et al., 2018, p. 78f) a fifth discourse type was added: the commemorative discourse, which commemorates people, dates, or events in an urban space, such as name plaques on monuments (Figure 5).

<figure><img src="image_97.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 5. Sample images for the discourse types in the *Signs of the Metropolis* data corpus.</figcaption></figure>

## 5.2. Genres

The concepts related to genre are a very different approach which promises to be useful when looking at visual artefacts. For, although
"all of us know intuitively that generic classifications never quite work" (Briggs and Bauman, 1992, p. 132), "the realities in and amongst which we live are not transparently conveyed to us but are mediated by systems of representation" (Frow, 2015, p. 20). Genres can be understood as reception and production patterns (cf. Bauman, 2001, p. 58) which give access to "form-function-meaning-interrelationships" (Briggs and Bauman, 1992, p. 143) of designed artefacts. They provide conceptual orientation frameworks and variable sets of prototypical elements that communicative actors use to create discourse (cf. Hanks, 1987, pp. 670, 681) and to position themselves socially (cf. Spitzmüller, 2013, p. 237f). The point that Delin, Bateman, and Allen are making for typographically designed print documents is equally applicable to typographically designed texts in urban space; when the authors point out: "the documents look different, and contain different language forms, because they are intended to do different things" (Delin, Bateman, and Allen, 2003, p. 55). Central to the genre concept are the characteristics of visible patterns (Wehde, 2000, p. 119) and repetition (Briggs and Bauman, 1992, p. 148). In fact, the repetition of combinations of visible patterns (cf. ibid.) of graphetic resources leads to similar interpretations that can constitute genres (cf. Spitzmüller, 2013, p. 247). Therefore, genres are links to previous, following, or simultaneous expressions and discourses of a similar kind, likewise for links to other places, peoples, positions, and times (Briggs and Bauman, 1992, p. 147f).

What makes genre construction in the analysis of social dimensions of typographetic artefacts in urban space so intriguing is the fact that meanings are discursively produced and interpreted. Genres are constantly (re)created in shared experiences of repetitive attributions to recognisable and interpretable visible forms. However, due to the fact that inventories of knowledge, social spaces, knowledge of languages and writing systems, geographical references, cultural and historical experiences, typographical socialisation, values and attitudes all diverge between people who produce and read graphic signs (cf. Spitzmüller, 2013, p. 245), there is always a fragmentary remnant—something that remains open. Genres have peculiarities, riddles, a scope for interpretation, a need for request, contextualisation, and translation. This combination of significant unity and meaningful openness makes genres in urban spaces a means of reflection on communicative goals, social positions, and identities.

It must be noted that genre is an intricate field of investigation because references are complex, fixed taxonomies never fit in full and can even be dangerously reductionistic. Most importantly: No single graphic resource relates to any definite meaning. Typographic artefacts need to be analysed in context. Nevertheless, the visible urban landscape is a visually mediated world in which patterns are formed, and genres can be thought of as visual patterns that provide sign recipients a degree
of orientation in urban space. The focus is on the question of what sign producers and recipients do with certain combinations of typographic resources in a certain setting in order to create discourse.

### 5.3. The Combined Approach

What both approaches have in common is that both, the foundational analysis on discourse types as well as the case study on genres, look at prototypical typographetic elements that form patterns in the data. In this sense, the concepts are connected. In the foundational analysis, the search for repeated patterns occurs on a very substantial level distinguishing discourse types and indicating different text functions. In the case study on shop types, the investigation focusses on how prototypical typographic elements create genres in different product and service sectors.

Nonetheless, discourse types and genres are different things, or better, they have been created to do different things and solve different problems. Possibly, discourse types, genres, text types, and graphic parameters can be understood as a cascading structural model of thought and not as a fixed sequence of specific occurrences that are firmly bound to one another. Some graphic realisations (such as stickers, for example) occur in many discourse types, genres, and text types. However, they are significantly more common in some and do not occur at all in others. The details of this will be presented in the results.

## 6. Analytical Framework

Eleven parameters are defined for the analysis of typographic artefacts in urban spaces in order to investigate how discourse types, genres, and text functions differ in their graphic appearance. Some of the parameters such as languages, script systems, and sign types include all individual occurrences found in the *Signs of Metropolis* data corpus—and are therefore in some respects already results. Other parameters such as type styles, sizes, colours, or mounting height are set categories that combine individual occurrences into larger groups. This paper will focus on presenting the results of the following parameters: discourse types, languages, script systems, type styles, colours, and materials. Furthermore, it presents an integrated comparison of the northern and southern neighbourhoods of the Ruhr cities.
## I. Location of the Sign (8)<fnref n="5" />

Four streets in the North: Duisburg-Marxloh, Essen-Altendorf, Bochum-Hamme, Dortmund-Nordstadt;

Four streets in the South: Duisburg-Dellviertel, Essen-Rüttenscheid, Bochum-Langendreer, Dortmund-Hörde.

## II. Discourse Type (5)

Regulatory, Infrastructural, Commercial, Transgressive, Commemorative.

## III. Languages (53)

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Igbo, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Lingala, Malaysian, Nepali, Non-standard, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Shona, Sinhalese, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian.

## IV. Script Systems (14)

Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ge'ez, Greek, Hangul (to write Korean), Hanzi/CJK characters (to write Chinese), Hebrew, Kanji-Kana-Hiragana (to write Japanese), Latin, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Tamil, Thai.

## V. Type Styles (7)

Serif, Sans-Serif, Slab-Serif, Scriptural, Blackletter, Decorative, (plus actual handwriting in tags and graffiti).<fnref n="6" />

<footnote n="5">5. This figure refers to the number of categories in this parameter in the present study (8 = eight city districts).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. For the foundational analysis of the discourse types, a simple classification of type styles was used for reasons of feasibility in the tagging of the 25,523 images. It is based on a reduced version of the DIN classification (Nr. 16518/1964) (cf. Schauer, 1975) considering the five main groups differentiated by “form” as described by Willberg (2001, p. 49) plus two other groups: decorative and actual handwriting. For more in-depth investigations into specific aspects of typeface use and connotations, it will be necessary to differentiate each of these groups further. It would be useful to consider the differentiation by “style” (dynamic, static, geometric) (ibid., p. 49) or to implement an even more fine-grained system as suggested by Pool (2017; 2020),</footnote>
## VI. Size (4)

> 100, < 100, < 10, < 1 square metre.

## VII. Colours (14)

Primary colours: Red (R), Blue (BL), and Yellow (Y); secondary colours: Green (G), Orange (OR), Purple (PU); achromatic colours: White (W), Black (BK), and Grey (GR); mixed colours: Brown (BR) and Pink (P); emulated material colours: Silver (SI) and Gold (GO); actual Material Colour (MC) (e.g., lettering in metal, stone, or wood).

## VIII. Materials (14)

Plastic, Foil, Metal, Paper, Paint, Fabric, Glass, Tiles, Stone, Plaster, Enamel, Wood, Screen, and Light.

## IX. Sign Type (50)

Handwritten letters (3): Handwriting, Signwriting, Facade painting/ Graffiti;

Composed letters (4): Paper cut-out, Mosaic lettering, Stencil lettering, Embroidery;

Printed letters (8): Printed on Paper, Cardboard, Fabric, Enamel, Metal, Plastic, Adhesive foil, Stickers;

Moulded letters (2): Relief lettering, Debossed lettering;

Subtractively formed letters (5): Cut-out lettering, Stone-carving, Wood-carving, Glass-engraving, Metal-engraving;

Additively formed letters (7): Metal casting, Inlay lettering, Three-dimensional letters hollow, Three-dimensional letters solid, Wrought-iron lettering, Rendered lettering (in plaster), Modular plastic plug-in systems;

Illuminated and movable letters (21): Illuminated three-dimensional lettering, Lightboxes, Facade lightbox bands, Sign boxes, Cantilevers, Cubes, Slide Lightboxes, Vitrines, City-light-poster, Advertising pillars, Pylons, Advertising towers, or mast systems, Roof lettering, Neon signs,

<footnote>incorporating type width (condensed—extended), weight (ultra light—ultra bold), italic angle (upright—italic), serifs (serif/sans serifs), in the case of serifs: the shape of the serifs (small, fine, pointed, strong, half), and serif curves (none, outside, inside), the overall stroke contrast (low—high), and type of contrast (expansion/static—translation/dynamic).</footnote>
Glass-only neon signs, Analogue information boards, Digital information boards, LED signs, Screen displays, Fabric coverings, Large-scale facade advertising.<fnref n="7" />

## X. Integration Into the Architectural Context and Mounting Height

In order to analyse the integration of the typographic signs into the architecture, the placement of the signs in the built-up space is considered in two ways: On the one hand, the material integration, meaning the physical connection with the built-up structure. On the other hand, the visual integration, looking at how the design of the written information takes the surrounding facade proportions, materials, and colours into account. These two perspectives provide indications of the degree of the “semiotic intrusion” (Scollon and Scollon, 2003, p. 113). Furthermore, this parameter discusses the indexicality of signs, their production of meaning through the place of montage (cf. ibid., p. 30).

## XI. Graphic Composition and Density of the Visual Surface

The graphic composition is analysed with the concept of visual literacy along some of the pairs of opposites developed by Dondis (1973, p. 16): balance versus instability, symmetry versus asymmetry, regularity versus irregularity, unity versus fragmentation, reduction versus complexity, static versus dynamic, subtlety versus expressiveness, consistency versus variation, flatness versus depth (layering), singularity versus confrontation. The density of the visual surface is analysed based on the concepts of *horror vacui* by Gombrich (1984: 80) and *amor vacui* by Mortelmans (2005, p. 21). Furthermore, the design principles of “chunking” (Lidwell, Holden, and Butler, 2003, p. 40) and “grouping” (Elam, 2004, p. 10) of information on visual surfaces are considered, grounded on the research by Cowan (2000) stating that the short-term memory of most viewers can process four elements (plus/minus one) most efficiently.

## Sample Size

The first six parameters are tagged and quantitatively analysed based on all the 25,523 images of the *Signs of the Metropolis* database. The parameters colour and material are tagged and analysed in a randomised sample study across the entire database with a sample size of 100–181

<footnote n="7">7. The 50 sign types (or lettering) found in the *Signs of the Metropolis* data corpus where clustered, termed, and described based on the work of Stötzner (2000, p. 34), Haslam (2011), and Fischer et al. (2007). The very best has been done to find the equivalent English terms.</footnote>
images per discourse type. The last three parameters are analysed qual-
itatively based on all 25,523 images. The parameter sign type is sampled
across the entire database, the typical occurrences clustered in every dis-
course type and systematically visually analysed. The integration into
the architectural context and mounting height, as well as the graphic
composition and density of the visual surface, are discussed in a qual-
itative analysis of prototypical examples after reviewing the complete
database.

7. Results: Discourse Types

This foundational analysis focusses on the apparent typographetic dif-
ferences in the five discourse types in the Ruhr area. The objective is
to identify whether heaped occurrences and prototypical combinations
of graphic resources are linked to the communicative objectives in the
discourse types. Following the presentation of the overall occurrence of
discourse types, the language and script system distribution, the results
on the use of type styles, colours, materiality, and sign types are pre-
sented. Subsequently, the graphic composition and integration of the
signs into the architectural context as well as the differences between
northern and southern neighbourhoods are discussed.

7.1. Occurrence, Language, and Script System Distribution

7.1.1. *Overall Occurrence*

The overall distribution of the 25,523 images in the five discourse types
shows that most signs are—as to be expected—commercial with 49.2%.
Less expected, the transgressive signs are the second largest group, with
38.99%. This result is insofar surprising as the authorities impose fines
for transgressive signage—if one is caught in the act. The next two
largest groups are the infrastructural signs with 6.7% and the regulatory
with 4.95%. The by far smallest group are the commemorative signs
with only 0.16%.

7.1.2. *Language Distribution*

Fifty-three languages occur in our data. However, considering that pri-
mary school children in Essen speak more than 100 first languages alto-
gether (cf. Baur, Chlosta, Ostermann, and Schroeder, 2004, p. 98), this
means many languages are lived and spoken in the Ruhr area that are
not visible on the walls (cf. Schmitz, 2018, p. 153). About 66% of the
texts are German, 20% English, 4% Turkish. All the other 50 language occurrences together make up 10%.

Regarding the language distribution, the commercial discourse type is the most multilingual showing 42 of all the 53 languages in our data set, with 32.43% of the texts in non-German languages. The infrastructural and regulatory discourse types are overwhelmingly in German: 85.2% of the infrastructural and 93.7% of the regulatory signs are in German. The infrastructural discourse type—the discourse organising all the public infrastructure from schools and kindergartens to state organs and institutions—only shows 17 languages and regulatory signs only six languages. The transgressive signs are again more versatile and show 30 languages. 34.4% of the transgressive texts show English texts and only 56.2% German texts. The commemorative signs show six languages, of which 24% are non-German (Figure 6).

Language Distribution in Discourse Types

<figure><img src="image_98.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 6. The language distribution in the discourse types in the *Signs of Metropolis* data.</figcaption></figure>

7.1.3. *Script System Distribution*

There are 14 script systems in our data. The 13 script systems beyond Latin make up only 1.2% of our entire data set. 98.82% of all texts are in the Latin script. Arabic is the most common script after Latin, it accounts for 0.45% of all occurrences, and 0.7% comprise all the other 12 script systems. For the most multilingual region and biggest migration
area in Germany, this is a surprisingly low and not very multifaceted
outcome. The greatest occurrence of 0.8% of scripts beyond Latin is
again in the commercial discourse type, which shows that multiscrip-
turality in our data is strongly linked to trade. Multiscriptural signs ap-
pear mostly in signs of food markets, restaurants, and translation agen-
cies. Regulatory signs show 0%, infrastructural 0.03%, transgressive
0.2%, and commemorative 0.01% script systems beyond Latin.

## 7.2. Type Styles, Colours, Materiality, Sign Types, Graphic Composition, and Integration of the Signs into the Architectural Context

In the following section, the five discourse types will be looked at indi-
vidually. The results of the used type styles, colours, materials, and sign
types, as well as some insights into the graphic composition and the in-
tegration of the signs into the architectural context, will be presented in
summaries. It is important to note that the photographed items often
show more than one colour or type style, so that the total occurrence
does not add up to 100%.

(In Figures 7–11 we use the following notation conventions: Type
style abbreviations: Sans Serif typefaces (Sans), Handwriting in tags
and graffiti (Handw.), Decorative typefaces (Decor.), Slab-Serif type-
faces (Slab), Blackletter (Blackl.). Material abbreviations: Fabric
(Fabr.), Plaster (Plas.), Enamel (Enam.). Colour abbreviations: White
(W), Black (BK), Red (R), Blue (BL), Yellow (Y), Green (G), Orange
(OR), Purple (PU), Brown (BR), Pink (P), Grey (GR), Silver (SI), Gold
(GO), Material Colour (MC).)

### 7.2.1. *Regulatory Signs: Sans Serif Typefaces, Primary Colours, and Metal*

The regulatory signs (Figure 7) announce rules and make laws visible
in urban space. In our data, they do this for 98% in sans serif typefaces.
The top-down governmental communication is not only monolingual in
German and monoscriptural in Latin; it is also mono sans serif; usually,
with one type style per item. Sans serif typefaces are formally reduced
to the essentials in line with the regulatory text content: without unnec-
essary decorative elements. The most prevalent typeface in the group
of sans serif type styles is the *DIN* font, which is specified in the road
traffic regulations for public signage in Germany and can be found in
all expected contexts in regulatory (and infrastructural) signs.

Looking at colour, it is surprising that regulatory signs almost exclu-
sively use primary colours (blue, red, and yellow), as well as black and
white. The colours are assigned to a specific warning, directional, and
regulatory function.
Concerning the graphic composition, the regulatory discourse type is remarkable for its reduction, symmetry, and statics. The majority of the signs show great balance, regularity, and consistency. The low information density reduced colourfulness and the lack of layering results in the flatness of the visual surfaces. With regard to the compositional richness, the regulatory signs, by and large, show the lowest density with few focal points on the visual surfaces.

The analysis of the materiality shows that the different discourses in urban space markedly use different materials to communicate their contents. Three of the five discourse types show different primary materials to realise their messages. Regulatory information stands out in so far that about 80% of it appears on metal signs. In addition to the dominant ‘metal plate parade’, there are nine other sign types, which is not a wide variety compared to the overall 50 different sign types found in our data.

Concerning the integration of the signs into the architectural context, most signs in the regulatory and infrastructural discourse type belong to one of two groups: On the one hand, signs that are mounted on metal posts independently of buildings in the urban space show accordingly a low level of material and visual integration. They do not take into account the colours, materials, and building proportions of the built environment and form a ‘forest of signs’ specific to Germany. On the other hand, many signs are placed directly on objects and places of relevance, which are materially firmly integrated but visually stand out very conspicuously from the surrounding space, such as “Danger”-signs on high-voltage electrical boxes. The semiotic interference of these two groups is high; they regulate and organise community life. The smooth running of the urban infrastructure and the functioning of the transport system depends on their visibility and legibility. Their appearance and, in case of traffic signs, their height of two metres at which they are installed, is regulated by law. Human lives may depend on the visibility and functionality of this group of signs. In other countries, this high standardisation of regulatory signs can be quite different or is generally lower.

### 7.2.2. *Infrastructural Signs: Sans Serif Typefaces, Primary and Secondary Colours, Metal, Plastic, and Paper*

The infrastructural signs (Figure 8) inform the public and organise the infrastructure. Similar to the regulatory, the infrastructural discourse type shows an astonishing 99% of sans serif typefaces, and most signs only use one typeface.

In terms of colour, the infrastructural discourse type adds the secondary colours (green, orange, and purple) to the primary colours (blue, red, and yellow), as well as black and white. The colours in the infrastructural discourse type are again part of a functional and convention-
<figure><img src="image_99.png" /><figcaption>## Regulatory Signs</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_100.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 7. The images show regulatory signs in the Ruhr Metropolis. The graphs show the distribution of type styles, colours, and materials in the regulatory course type.</figcaption></figure>
alised system and have explicit semiotic tasks: Red can be found on prohibition and danger signs, blue on most regulation signs, blue and yellow on directional signs, brown on tourist signs, all additional traffic signs are in black and white.

In terms of graphic composition, the infrastructural discourse type shows very different visual surfaces. Some signs are significantly reduced and static, similar to most regulatory signs, with high symmetry, regularity, and consistency. Other signs, like timetables or city maps, show higher complexity and irregularity. Concerning the abundance of the visual surface, the infrastructural discourse type also shows a low density of focal points in the majority of cases.

In the analysis of materiality, the infrastructural signs represent a wider range than regulatory ones. Besides metal signs (which make up more than 30%), many texts are realised in plastics, on paper, or in adhesive foil. The infrastructural discourse shows considerable diversity with 30 out of 50 sign types, including many printed letters on metal, paper, plastic, and foil, a large group of moulded letters, a few movable and illuminated letters (such as pylons, and different information boards).

Concerning the integration of signs into the architectural context, most signs in the infrastructural discourse type also belong to one of the two groups previously described for the regulatory discourse type: In-dependent signs on metal posts as well as signs permanently mounted at the locations of their relevance. In addition, there is a third group, however, that interacts with the architectural environment in a completely different way. These texts on institutions such as courts, schools, or community centres are highly individual and sensibly integrated into the built environment in a material, visual, and thematic way. The lettering appears to be precisely designed to match the colours, materials, facade proportions as well as the historical periods and areas of responsibility of the institutions. They visibly communicate stable, long-lasting values, but they do not have to advertise or compete for the attention of walk-in customers. Nor does the life-saving intervention depend on their instant recognisability. Therefore, a citizens' office can elegantly mark its entrance with grey letters on grey stone, whereas a fire-fighter water access, visually much less integrated, requires a bright red text on a white background with a strong red frame.

### 7.2.3. Commercial Signs: All Type Styles, a Wide Range of Colours, Foil, Paper, Plastic, and Light

Commercial signs (Figure 9) announce shops and companies, advertise products and services, and tempt consumption. Here we find the widest variety of type styles: In addition to 84% sans serif typefaces there are 27% serif, 18% scriptural, 9% decorative, 2% blackletter, and 2% slab serif typefaces, and 6% actual handwriting. Most of the signs show more than
Infrastructural Signs

<figure><img src="image_101.png" /></figure>

TYPE STYLES

<figure><img src="image_102.png" /></figure>

COLOURS

<figure><img src="image_103.png" /></figure>

MATERIALS

<figure><img src="image_104.png" /></figure>

FIGURE 8. The images show infrastructural signs in the Ruhr Metropolis. The graphs show the distribution of type styles, colours, and materials in the infrastructural discourse type.
one type style, on average, 1.5 typefaces per sign. Commercial signs advertise, seduce, and compete. They indicate varying product groups and communicative actors and a variety of expressive typographic forms supports this endeavour.

Also concerning the use of colour, the commercial discourse type is the most multifaceted, with the broadest colour spectrum and the most occurrences of an average of 3.3 colours per sign. In addition to primary and secondary colours, a wide variety of mixed colours can be found, such as brown and pink, as well as silver and gold. This colour diversity is equivalent to the diversity of languages, script systems, and type styles. It serves the purpose of distinction, genre indication, and the achievement of individual communicative goals.

In terms of graphic composition, many commercial signs show high complexity, dynamism, and expressiveness. Layering and variation function as driving compositional principles in advertising. Concerning the richness of the visual surface, the commercial discourse type often shows visual surfaces that correspond absolutely to the four (plus/minus one) principles (cf. Cowan, 2000). Some very reduced visual surfaces create social distinction or sublimity through emptiness (cf. Mortelmans, 2005). Likewise, there are very dense, crowded visual surfaces, particularly when entire shop fronts are understood as one visual surface. The comparison of the discourse types shows that abundance, superimposition, density, and proximity of the graphic elements on the visual surface can be found especially in commercial (as well as transgressive) signs. The question arises whether selling and seducing attempts to create intimacy and familiarity through typographic proxemics. The density of graphic elements might correlate with the desired closeness to the customer. In opposition to this, the regulatory and commemorative types of discourse create distance, demarcation and authority through much clearer and emptier visual surfaces.

In the investigation of materiality, the commercial discourse type shows 36% adhesive foil, 32% paper, 25% plastic, 7% light signs and hardly any metal. This range is reflected in the sign types found. Commercial signs show the broadest spectrum with 48 of 50 sign types. On the one hand there are the most extensive occurrences of paper prints, foil inscriptions, stickers, and handwritten notes. On the other hand, all the big, cost-intensive, illuminated and moving lettering techniques (from neon signs to lightboxes, building high hoardings, and digital billboards), which do not occur in the commemorative, transgressive, or (with a single exception) in the regulatory discourse type can be found in the commercial signs. Correspondingly, most of the characters that are larger than 10 m² are also found here. The commercial signs in urban space show the widest variety concerning their integration into the built-up environment. The visual integration is often lower and the semiotic interference higher, since the attention of the sign recipients
is intensively sought, under highly competitive pressure. This group of signs, like the regulatory group, wants to be clearly visible, but not for safety reasons, but to seduce.

The massive diversity observed on the design of visual surfaces inshop signage raises the question to what extent high and low visual/material integration is related to factors such as laypeople versus trained graphic design, social strata, neighbourhoods, geographical regions, product genres, and the goals of the communicative actors. (Whereby, it became clear in the broader data analysis that it is not the money spent that makes a sign functional, aesthetic, and effective in urban space, but rather the appropriate means of expression in relation to the communicative needs and contexts under consideration of the architectural surroundings.)

In terms of indexicality, the commercial discourse type differs greatly from the regulatory and infrastructural one. In addition to texts that develop their meaning from the particular location of their montage, such as the names and labels of the shops, services, and products that can be purchased exactly at the place where the sign is attached, there is a second group of advertising spaces which refer to events or products that are not connected to the place of the attachment of the sign whatsoever.

### 7.2.4. *Transgressive Signs: Handwriting and Decorative Typefaces, a Wide Range of Colours, Stickers, and Paint*

Transgressive signs (Figure 10) superimpose, they interfere with or fight against other discourses (and sometimes advertise without permission). Like the commercial discourse, transgressive signs show a huge variety of scriptural forms, particularly decorative typefaces. 57% of the items show handwriting in tags and graffiti, 39% sans serif, 18% decorative, 9% serif, 8% scriptural, 7% slab serif, and 1% blackletter typefaces. The transgressive discourse expresses political attitudes, ideological positions, social concerns, scene affiliations, and rivalling sport club allegiances. This requires expressive and connotatively strongly charged letterforms. Creativity and individuality take precedence over legibility. Many stickers show more than one typeface, on average, 1.5 per item.

Similar to the commercial discourse, transgressive texts show a wide spectrum of colours. Concerning the graphic composition, transgressive stickers show the highest complexity in comparison to all other discourse types. The small space and the low demand for legibility on stickers often lead to intense layering, compositional dynamics, high variation, and expressiveness. The materiality of transgressive signs is spread out over two big and one small group: 52% adhesive foil (stickers), 45% paint (tags and graffiti), and 3% paper. With this high number of stick-
<figure><img src="image_105.png" /><figcaption>Commercial Signs</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_106.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 9. The images show commercial signs in the Ruhr Metropolis. The graphs show the distribution of type styles, colours, and materials in the commercial discourse type.</figcaption></figure>
ers, the transgressive discourse has the largest group of tiny items, with 57% under 20 cm².

Transgressive signs are by design not visually integrated into the ar-
chitectural context; they explicitly do not take into account surrounding
facade proportions, materials, and colours, but resist and overwrite the
given. They often aim for high visibility, but not for safety reasons (as
in the regulatory and infrastructural discourse) nor to advertise prod-
ucts (as in the commercial discourse), but to mark the territory, express
political positions, and social agendas and give visibility to subcultures
as well as popular cultures. In that, few signs refer specifically to the
location of their placement.

7.2.5. *Commemorative Signs: Serif Typefaces and Blackletter, Lots of Material Colour, Metal, and Stone*

Commemorative signs (Figure 11) materialise the memories of people, dates, and events in urban space. They occur in six of seven type styles, not showing any slab serif typefaces, however. With 5% they show the largest percentage of blackletter in memorial plaques on buildings and with 23% a high occurrence of serif typefaces, mainly in stone inscriptions. Remarkably, the commemorative discourse shows minimal colour overall. 49% of all items have the colours of the underlying materials, such as stone, cast iron, or plaster. This indicates that the culture and practice of remembrance is a subtle and quiet activity. Not only in this respect commemorative signs in urban space form a kind of visual antithesis to the loud, colourful, and attention-seeking commercial signs.

Many visual surfaces of commemorative signs are characterised by great balance, symmetry, regularity, and simplicity. Commemorative graphic surfaces often show static lines of centre aligned text. While regulatory signs cultivate the emptiness of the visual surface in order to achieve clear visibility, in commemorative visual surfaces, however, they seem to aim more at sublimity, quiet appreciation, and distinction from the other groups of signs.

Commemorative signs show a wide range of materials, amounting to
uniquely high quantities in materials such as metal (26%), stone (10%),
enamel (about 3%), and plaster (also 3%). The 13 sign types reflect these
exceptionally high material occurrences: There are stone engravings,
metal cast plaques, forged iron letters, stone mosaics, plaster reliefs, and
facade paintings, all of which are very rare in all the other discourse types
(or, such as stone inscriptions and plaster reliefs, do not occur at all). This
suggests that certain materials and sign types in urban space can cross-
refer to the kinds of texts and discourses that passers-by are facing in ur-
ban space. Furthermore, it shows how the materiality of signs and their
value is linked to the functions of the text. In this case, the longevity of
stone is associated with the intention of long-lasting memory.
<figure><img src="image_107.png" /><figcaption>Transgressive Signs</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_108.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 10. The images show transgressive signs in the Ruhr Metropolis. The graphs show the distribution of type styles, colours, and materials in the transgressive discourse type.</figcaption></figure>
The relationship of commemorative signs to the architecture is sin-
gular. Many signs are inextricably integrated into the built-up space
in an almost inseparably stable way. Likewise, the visual integration is
extraordinarily high (and, correspondingly, the semiotic interference is
low), as many signs are in material colour. Furthermore, a unique num-
ber of commemorative texts are not in the field of vision, but placed
below waist height, on the floor, or above head height. Commemorative
signs do not need to be clearly visible for safety reasons, nor do they
compete with each other. Therefore, the practice of reminiscence can
take place very discreetly and silently, in durable, uncoloured materi-
als. Public discussions about the mounting heights of commemorative
signs, whether commemorated people are “trampled underfoot,” when
signs are located in the ground<fnref n="8" /> or whether one can encounter com-
memorated people “at eye level” in a stele<fnref n="9" /> instead, are indications of
the considerable importance of these design decisions.

7.3. Interim Conclusion: The Discourse Types in Comparison

In conclusion, the results of the discourse type analysis so far suggest
that, despite overlaps, different core materials and prototypical combi-
nations of typographic resources indicate discourses in urban space
(Figure 11). In broad strokes, the regulatory discourse is characterised
by many metal signs, black, white, and primary colours as well as sans
serif typefaces, mainly the *DIN* typeface. The infrastructural discourse
shows a lot of metal, plastic, and paper, as well as primary and secondary
colours, and 99% of it remain in sans serif typefaces. The commercial
discourse has the greatest diversity in languages and writing systems
as well as in type styles, colours, and sign types, with the primary ma-
terials being foils, papers, and plastics. The transgressive discourse is
the least diverse in sign types and materials (it occurs only in stickers
and graffiti tags), but shows the widest variety in decorative typefaces
and colours. The commemorative discourse displays high percentages
of serif typefaces as well as the highest percentages of blackletter type-
faces. With half of the signs in material colours, it is characterised by
unique sign types such as cast metal, forged letters, and stone inscrip-
tions. Accordingly, it becomes apparent that four out of five discourse
types mainly use different materials to realise their messages: regula-
tory (metal signs), commercial (plastic, foil, paper), transgressive (stick-
ers and paint), and commemorative (wrought iron, cast metal, stone).

<footnote n="8">8. Cf. Jakob Wetzel: Debatte um Stolpersteine: Gedenken, das entzweit. Süd-
deutsche Zeitung. 13. Oktober 2014. (https://perma.cc/D6Z3-XNNP) (retrieved 16 De-
cember 2020)</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Cf. Myriam Siegert (12.11.2018): Gedenken an Nazi-Opfer, Wieder Debatte um Stolpersteine—32 neue verlegt. Abendzeitung München. (https://perma.cc/MUK3-34VM (retrieved 16 December 2020)</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_109.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 11.** The images show commemorative signs in the Ruhr Metropolis. The graphs show the distribution of type styles, colours, and materials in the commemorative discourse type.</figcaption></figure>
For each discourse type, certain combinations of graphetic resources are more common than in others. This finding reveals that the combinations are related to and serve the communicative goals of the sign producers in the respective discourses. The regulatory type of discourse requires standardisation, stringency, and clarity in graphic terms to ensure readability. The commercial discourse type requires a high diversity of typographic means to indicate goods and service providers under competitive pressure in a dense visual landscape. On the smallest canvases of transgressive stickers, the greatest creative freedom is enjoyed without limitations by legibility issues. Rich compositions, as well as connotatively strongly charged letterforms, are beneficial for the expression of political positions, social agendas, and scene affiliations. Commemorative signs show little colour, are firmly integrated into the architectural environment, and are made of extraordinarily durable materials that reflect intentions of long-lasting memory. Infrastructural signs are less prototypical and somewhere in the middle between standardised regulatory signs, commercial lightboxes and highly integrated, individual, valuable commemorative signs.

These prototypical typographic differences in the design of prohibitions, warnings, wayfinding, advertisements, protests, and memories indicate the groundwork as well as the meaning creation of typographic resources in urban space. Since certain combinations of graphetic resources are more common in some discourses than in others, it can be assumed that these combinations give passers-by in urban space an indication of what kind of message they might be encountering. Furthermore, it can be assumed that the use of appropriate and customary graphic resources helps the sign producers to gain the sign recipients trust and understanding.

Beyond that, the graphetic differences analysed indicate in some respects that the classification proposed by Scollon and Scollon (2003) is valid. This very broad foundational analysis of discourse types, with more than 25,523 images, focusses mainly on aspects of the para- and micro-typographic level. For the following case studies with smaller sample sizes the meso- and macro-typographic levels (cf. Stöckl, 2004, p. 22f) are to be taken into greater consideration.

## 7.4. Differences Between Northern and Southern Neighbourhoods

### 7.4.1. *Differences in Languages, Script Systems, Colours, and Type Styles*

The comparison of the four northern and four southern districts reveals several significant differences (Figure 13). With regard to the distribution of languages, the North is more diverse. On the one hand, the northern districts have fewer monolingual occurrences. Furthermore, the two
Discourse Types in Comparison

MATERIALS

<figure><img src="image_110.png" /></figure>

TYPE STYLES

<figure><img src="image_111.png" /></figure>

COLOURS

<figure><img src="image_112.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 12. Three graphs showing the differences in the distribution of type styles, materials, and colours between the five discourse types in the Ruhr Metropolis.</figcaption></figure>
largest language groups, German and English, are slightly less repre-
sented in the North. Accordingly, the North shows a greater number
and variety of non-German and non-English texts (17.8%) in compar-
ison to the South (12.4%). Western and southern European languages
such as French, Italian, and Spanish are about twice as common in the
South. In contrast, the more recent migrant languages such as Turkish
and Arabic are about five times more common in the North (cf. Ziegler
et al., 2018, p. 65). Overall, of the 53 found languages, 44 are visible in
the North and 41 in the South.<fnref n="10" />

Languages distribution

The 15 most frequent language occurrences in the Ruhr Metropolis in comparison of the northern and southern districts

<figure><img src="image_113.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 13. The different distribution of the 15 most frequent language occurrences in the Ruhr Metropolis based on a comparison of the northern and southern districts.</figcaption></figure>

In the distribution of writing systems, the North shows texts in 13
script systems, which is just one more than the South. However, 58.4%
of the occurrences of script systems beyond Latin are located in the
North, thus offering more script system diversity. Strikingly, the writ-
ing systems are distributed very unevenly: Arabic is found at a rate of
92.72% in the North; Hánzì, Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana, and Hangul for

<footnote n="10">10. The North has no Igbo, Irish, Lingala, Malay, Norwegian, Shona, Swahili, Thai, and Hungarian. The South has no Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, Indonesian, Catalan, Nepali, Sinhalese, and Ukrainian. However, the occurrences of these languages in the respective region of comparison are also small, ranging from one to 13 occurrences.</footnote>
writing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are jointly found in the South at a rate of 77.9%. Hánzi, Kanji/Hiragana/Katakana, and Hangul are mainly found in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean restaurants, that are almost exclusively located in the southern neighbourhoods (Figure 14).

Concerning type styles, the regulatory signs show no difference between North and South, as all occurring examples are set in sans serif typefaces. In the infrastructural signs, the South is slightly more diverse, with more decorative, blackletter, sans serif, and slab serif typefaces as well as more handwriting. In the commercial signs, the North shows a greater diversity compared to the South with more serif and decorative typefaces. With an additional small plus of blackletter and serif typefaces, the North shows more diversity in the commercial signs, which is the largest discourse type in our data. In the transgressive signs, the South is more diverse, as more stickers are being placed there (particularly in Essen-Rüttenscheid), and stickers show a high diversity of typefaces. In the commemorative discourse, the North is more diverse again, with more decorative and blackletter typefaces as well as more handwriting.

In a comparison of colour occurrences in the commercial signs, which are the largest group, the North shows higher occurrences in 11 of 14 colours (all colours except black, grey, and material colour) and is hence more colourful and diverse than the South (Figure 15).

The visible differences in the graphic parameters seem related to the social structures of the districts. As research by Ziegler et al. (ibid.) shows, the North as a whole, especially in the neighbourhoods of Duisburg-Marxloh and Dortmund-Nordstadt, have the greatest diversity in the population. The two districts show the largest groups of non-Germans and dual nationals (72.8% in Duisburg-Marxloh and 55.7% in Dortmund-Nordstadt) and the highest diversity index of 0.8 (cf. ibid. 49). The diversity index (according to Simpson, 1949, p. 688) indicates the extent of the diversity of the population in a particular area, whereby “1” represents maximum diversity and “0” represents none (cf. Ziegler et al., 2018, p. 51). Essen-Rüttenscheid is least characterised by migration, with the proportion of German nationals at 86.1% (cf. ibid. 49) and the diversity index at the lowest of 0.2 (cf. ibid. 51).

The data analysis shows that the North is graphically as colourful and diverse as its population structure. In the northern more multicultural quarters a broader range of visual strategies is used. One might conclude that the urban space reflects in its graphic signs which social groups inhabit and cultivate a space. It can be stated that in our data, cultural and linguistic diversity is associated with visual and typographic variance.

Three things stand out in particular in a North-South comparison: (1) The commercial discourse type in the North is more diverse in colours and typefaces. It seems interesting to take a closer look at the shops and their visual strategies that create this diversity. (2) The Duisburg-
<figure><img src="image_114.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 14. Comparison of the northern and southern neighbourhoods with respect to selected languages (non-German, non-English and Turkish texts) and selected script systems (Arabic, Hänzi, Kanji/Hiragana/Kana, Hangul).</figcaption></figure>

Marxloh district, with the most non-German and Turkish texts, also shows by far the largest group of decorative typefaces. It seems worth exploring whether there is a meaningful correlation between these results. In the following, these two notable findings, which have emerged from the data, will be examined in more detail.

### 7.4.2. Possible Explanations for the Increased Diversity in the North

The results from the comparison of the northern and southern neighbourhoods show that the North is more diverse in the languages and script systems as well as in type styles and colours in the commercial discourse type. However, this result was by no means to be expected. For it could have been reasonably anticipated that the South is more diverse, as it has the expansive shopping districts (for instance in Essen-Rüttenscheid), where various elaborate retailers try to distinguish themselves under competitive pressure. Greater colour and typographic diversity could have been expected in the South as well. However, the graphic plurality in commercial signs is typical of the North. There are two possible explanations for this.
<figure><img src="image_115.png" /></figure>

FIGURE 15. Comparison of the northern and southern neighbourhoods with respect to primary and secondary colours, decorative and serif typefaces in the commercial discourse type, non-German population, and diversity index.

Looking at the kind of shops that are located in the different neighbourhoods, it becomes apparent that there are more owner-operated retail shops in the North and more international chains in the South (Figure 16). It shows that owner-operated shops are characterised by more individual approaches to sign making; hence the North is more diverse. Accordingly, the visual appearance of individually owned small grocery shops, for example, is much more multifaceted in colours and type styles as well as languages and script systems. Whereas the big international chains very consciously tend to develop systematic, reduced, neutralising, “one look pleases all” approaches that in times of increasing “blanding”<fnref n="11" /> tend to become more similar.

However, this seems to be only half of the explanation. When looking at fashion shops, it turns out that owner-operated retail shops in the North are still more diverse than owner-operated shops in the South (Figure 17). Therefore, it is not only small shops as opposed to big chains that account for the difference here, nor laypeople design (in

<footnote n="11">11. http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/normcore-inferno (retrieved 30.09.20).</footnote>
small shops) against the design of marketing strategists who develop the design of big brands. Thus, it might be that some shop owners in the North follow different aesthetic ideals when creating typographic spaces (which are to be explored from an epic perspective in interviews with the sign makers), an aspect which moves us on to the next observation.

<figure><img src="image_116.png" /><figcaption>Grocery shops in the South</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_117.png" /></figure>

FIGURE 16. Small individual grocery shops in the North showing more visual diversity than big chains in the South.

<figure><img src="image_118.png" /><figcaption>Owner-operated fashion shops in the South</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_119.png" /></figure>

FIGURE 17. Individual fashion shops in the North show more visual diversity than individual fashion shops in the South.
Decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in Marxloh

<figure><img src="image_120.png" /></figure>

FIGURE 18. A selection of decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in Duisburg-Marxloh, top left to bottom right: (a) Hairdresser (Typeface: *Victorian*, Letraset Type Studio, 1970s (Letraset 1978: 156)), (b) Cafe (Typeface: Similar to *Bookman*, based on *Antique Old Style* No. 7, 1858, A. C. Phemister, part of the Letraset Collection (Letraset 1978: 22)), (c) Restaurant (Typeface: *Victorian*, Letraset Type Studio, 1970s (Letraset 1978: 156)), (d) Cafe (Typeface: *Algerian*, Stephenson Blake, 1902, part of the Letraset Collection (Letraset 1978: 110)), (e) Bakery (Typeface: *Arrus*, designed for Bitstream by Richard Lipton in 1991), (f) Music school (Typeface: *Fontleroy Brown NF*, a so-called 'retro' font designed by Nick Curtis, released in 2009). Information on the typefaces *Bookman*, *Algerian* and *Arrus* (cf. https://fontsinuse.com (retrieved 30.09.20)), *Fontleroy Brown NF* (cf. https://www.myfonts.comfonts/cheapprofonts/fontleroy-nf-pro/ (retrieved 30.09.20)).

7.4.3. Decorative Typefaces in Turkish Texts in Duisburg-Marxloh

Comparing the northern and southern neighbourhoods an extraordinarily high number of decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in the Weseler Straße of Duisburg-Marxloh emerged from the data. Checking again all the decorative typefaces in the data set it becomes apparent that most of the ones in Turkish language texts in Duisburg-Marxloh are unique; they do not exist in any other language or location in our data (Figure 18).

There is a variety of 20th century British and American advertising typefaces, many of them revived for Letraset in the 1960s and 1970s; however, there are also some newer typefaces. A fair number of them have swashes and ornamental elements that could be understood as em-
<figure><img src="image_121.png" /><figcaption>Decorative typefaces on wedding dress shops in Marxloh</figcaption></figure>

FIGURE 19. Decorative typefaces in Turkish language texts in signs of wedding dress shops in Duisburg-Marxloh, top left to bottom right: (a) “Topkapı Gelinlik” (Topkapi Wedding Dresses) (Typeface: *Pretorian* (Letraset 1978: 87)), (b) “Stil” (Typeface: *Arnold Böcklin* (Letraset 1978: 16)), (c) “Bayar” (Typeface: *Roberta*), (d) “Milano” (Typeface: *Revue* (Letraset 1978: 90)), (e) “Dikelim” (Typeface: *Ar-rus*), (f) “Gelinlik & Abiye” (Wedding and Evening Dresses) (Typeface: *Titania*, Hass, 1906) (cf. https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/70908/titania-haas (retrieved 30.09.20)), (g) “Braut Karakaşlar” (Typeface: *Tango* (Letraset 1978: 154)), (h) “Tesettür Giyim” (Body-covering clothing) (Typeface: *Harlow* (Letraset 1978: 129)), (i) “Gelinlik/Brautmoden” (Typeface: *Horizon*, based on the Star Trek Logo 1966) (cf. Yves Peters: Typography – The Final Frontier. The Fonts of Star Trek. Link: https://www fontshop com/content/the-typography-of-star-trek (retrieved 30.09.20)).

ulating something of a calligraphic tradition (reminiscent of Turkey's script reform from Arabic to Latin in 1928), but mainly they look ornamental in the style that was popular in the 1960/1970s. The question is: What is the correlation between the highest number of Turkish language texts and the highest number of decorative typefaces in this part of town?