209

Figure 1

Marianna, Hey! Together

Figure 2

On the 9th of January 2008 the tag list on
www.MyFonts.com for the typeface Churchward
Marianna read: 3d, blimp, bulbous, cool,
decorative, funny, headline, heavy, informal,
newzealand, obese, outline, party, poster,
retro, round, sansserif, shadow, signage,
spunky [suggest].1, Fig. 1 A few weeks later,around the 14th of February, a new word
had been added to the list: biographical.Fig. 2
How did this word come to appear there?
What could its relation be to a typeface?
[. . .]

210		

Marianna, Hey! Together

211		

EssayMarianna,Your Dad was working all the time; like you
said (drawing out the ‘loved’) “He LOOOOVEDit!”. He designed this typeface in 1969, when
you were six, and he named it ‘Marianna’.

Looking back to 2005, in my very first interview
with Joseph that you conducted and transcribedfor me, he touched briefly on what influenced
the typeface Marianna.

It was through you that I managed to get incontact with Joseph in the first place, so finallymeeting you in Dublin last December felt likequite a significant moment.2 I was set tointerview you on a specific perspective of hispractice – connected to how we perceive andunderstand our parents’ JOBS as children.
But this was quickly replaced by a lengthy
exchange: stories about you growing up, aroundand eventually working at Churchward International Typefaces Limited, were interrupted by
the things I had discovered and made about
your Dad’s body of work over the past twoyears. Incidentally, the interview turned into
a conversation. It was quite soon after, maybe
even on the ride back to my accommodation
in town, that I began to reconsider a questionthat had been introduced to me in the preceding
months by a fellow designer.3 It was a questionthat had simultaneously annoyed and intrigued
me: ‘Can a typeface be biographical?’ I started
to think about it in relation to the typeface yourDad designed for you. Driving through a rainy,
dark Dublin night it suddenly occurred to me
that the first time we may have actually ‘met’
was by virtue of your typeface in 2005.	I called it Marianna because Marianna was fat in thosedays and it was a fat design . . . You were plumpy . . .
That’s why I called it Marianna, because it was plumpy. 4
I remember, quite vividly, reading this quote
for the first time. It made me laugh out loud. But
my laugh was coupled with that warm, pricklyscalp sensation you feel when embarrassed.
Being fresh to his work at the time – and it being
the closest I had yet come to his speaking voice,well, it just seemed too . . . unequivocal. Even
though it touched whole-heartedly on one of thewell-established methods of finding a name fora typeface,5 I didn’t really know that more could
be made of it. The ‘Marianna Quote’, along withsome other potentially cryptic answers to myinitial questions, was stored away in a folder
on my computer’s hard drive.
About a month after this interview I was given
an assignment to design a poster for our endof-year exhibition.6 Spurred on by a friend,
it seemed like a good opportunity to fish out
Joseph’s quote. The idea was similarly unequivocal: to try and keep the spirit of my initialinterpretation while setting the quote about

212		

Marianna, Hey! Together

213		

EssayOpposite: Figure 3

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0QFOJOH8FEOFTEBZBUXJUIQSFTFOUBUJPOCZQVCMJTIFS-BST.ÕMMFSGPMMPXFECZQBSUZXJUIESJOLTGSPNs&YIJCJUJPOPQFOUPQVCMJDPO'SJEBZGSPNs-PDBUJPO%F"UFMJFST 4UBEIPVEFSTLBEF /-"5 "NTUFSEBN
8FSLQMBBUT5ZQPHSBˣF    
85JTQBSUPG"SU&;JOTUJUVUFPGUIF"SUT/FX;FBMBOEUZQFEFTJHOFS+PTFQI$IVSDIXBSE GSPNJOUFSWJFXXJUI%BWJE#FOOFXJUI

Marianna in the eponymous font. At the time adigitised version of the typeface didn’t exist.7
I began the activity of cutting and pasting
the quote together, using a scan from an old
Churchward’s type catalogue. It felt like theclosest (digital) equivalent I might get thatwould hark back to the good-old-days ofcomposing headline lettering by hand, just likeyour Dad did (and you, too, some time after).
The process of constructing the quote – spacing
and composing the letters to make the design –unveiled a discovery that, in hindsight, could
be best described as serendipitous. Asidefrom the result being a bit humorous to readand look at, the form and content were now
mingling with one another. Marianna (the type)not only became more animated all of a sudden,
but hinted at something that went beyond thecorporeality of the quote. It had acquired anindependent, yet discrete personality that
seemed to populate the letterforms. An oral,
descriptive and formal conflation of Marianna
had resulted in a tangible response to my initialdisenchantment. I was surprised to notice that
it was the work that was speaking.Fig. 3This idea was made more apparent when, in a
telephone conversation with Joseph, the subjectof Robert Louis Stevenson came up. Joseph
said something that really struck me: “Perhaps214		Marianna, Hey! Together

designing a typeface is like writing a book.” 8
It became clear that by using the common
definition of ‘biography’ as a catalyst, while
also considering this particular insight into
your Dad’s designing process, I could make aconnection to your typeface. What I mean, isthat through Joseph’s process of designing,a narrative was occurring that would result ina biographical disposition being instilled in
the Marianna alphabet.
Something else as well. During our conversationin December you reminisced about theoccasions when you would sit in your Dad’s
studio, swinging your legs on the office chair.
Not really talking much and trying to be on
your best behaviour because your Dad wasconcentrating on his designs. I like to imagine
that Joseph was designing Marianna during
these moments, writing as he was designing.
This time he happened to be busy writing aboutyou. Each character – glyph, letter, digit, mark –has something about you programmed into it.
Like the time you broke your leg. For the firstfew days you needed help from your family tostand up and get around and your Dad saw theopportunity to design the ligatures.9, Fig. 4
Of course – as is generally the case with
typefaces – this type of information is often
divorced from its expected function. But it

215		

Essay

could be argued that influences live in a kindof palpable creation system that exists in thecircumstances of its genus. This is a place whereRoland Barthes’ ‘natural state of the letter’ 10
might be compared with the natural innocenceof the child. This idea is perpetuated in the essay‘The Storyteller’ by the philosopher, Walter
Benjamin, where an equal relationship between
the storyteller and the craftsman is elucidated.11
For your Dad, a typeface is complete when thebalance of the letters are found, then – without
much pause for reflection – the next one isdiligently begun.12 Even though it is your Dad’swish that the alphabets are used, this is not theprimary reason he obsessively designs them.
Instead, he describes it as an ‘inquisitive urge’ 13or (more tellingly) as ‘Chinese ghosts’ “[Whichpush him to] do the bloody work!” 14 Perhaps itis in this hypothetical space that the alphabet
could also develop a hidden personality. A
latent spirit that was planted in the crafting
grows and remains embedded as a cipher orcode. Maybe these are things are conveyed intransmission. ‘Invisible’ traces to which a viewer
might be sensitive; traces that are apprehended
for later reference. More often than not, this is
how we come to understand, or react to, a style.
We receive a signal before we start reading.15
On the other hand – as your Dad quite clearlyreflects – ‘It’s there, you just have to find it’. 16

216		

Marianna, Hey! Together

217		

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7 [a+b]

œ

flfi
æ

Essay

Hey!
Looking further, I discovered that these kindsof transmissions are not uncommon in various
historical manifestations of communicative
writing. For example, in Oriental calligraphy,
or ideographic writing cultures in general, thepractitioner’s hand infers an important layer ofmeaning and narrative. In the early Irish written
tradition from the time of the Book of Kells,
complex scripted letterforms were ‘inhabited’
with stories, symbols and figures. These figures
were apprehended by the speaker and thereceiver, the literate and illiterate, as muchby the eye as by the ear.17 Fig. 5 More recently,
these visual transmissions seem to prevail inthe coded backgrounds of uncontained lettersthat are found in multitudes of graffiti pieces.
Similarly, a more specific example is seen in
12-year-old Kate McCann’s entry for the 2008
‘Doodle for Google’ competition. Miss McCann’s
work is entitled ‘Up My Street’. The small ‘g’ of
Google is a school; the ‘e’ is a fully fledged train
station.Fig.    6 It seems the activity of inhabiting
letters with ulterior meanings is still prevalent.
In the more black and white world of typefaces
you might have to look a bit further to readthese transmissions. There are other ‘daughter’
typefaces around, such as Eric Gill’s ‘Joanna’.
Gill’s emphatic insistence that letters were‘things, not pictures of things’ 18 alreadypresupposes an inextricable link between218		Marianna, Hey! Together

both Joanna’s letter and her anatomicalrenderings. Fig. 7 Recently, on receipt of the typespecimen for Typotheque’s latest typeface, I
encountered the eponymous Greta, adjacentto her alphabet, staring out at me from thecover. Fig.  8 Again, Barthes is a good reference
point about how, when regarding reading andform, these manifestations of transmission
work. For example, when describing Erté’sillustrated alphabet in ‘Erté or À la Lettre’, Fig.   9Barthes suggests a relationship between thehuman and the letter via the motif of silhouette:	The silhouette, if only by its etymology,
is a strange object, at once anatomic andsemantic: it is the body which has explicitly
become a drawing.
He concludes,	The silhouette is an essential graphic
product: it makes the human body into
a potential letter, it asks to be read. 19
When considering Marianna’s opticalprovocations, and because it is evident that
typefaces and humans share some common
physical characteristics, I wondered if (inperson) you might share ‘common terms’ with awritten description of the typeface Marianna.
Also, I was curious about how this description

219		

Essay

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11 [a+b]220		

Marianna, Hey! Together

might reflect back on you? 20, Fig.10 To test thisout in a kind of controlled situation I consulted
a curious feature of the MyFonts website. It
is possible to search for a particular style oftypeface by adjectives or keywords. A compilation of these related words (tags) is listed forevery font in the MyFonts system. By revisiting
this list (see the beginning of this essay) Fig. 1– and since meeting you – I could quite easily
relate these words to your character: 3d, cool,decorative, funny, informal, newzealand, party
and spunky. Used in this way, the adjectives
create a set of idioms that relate to both thetypeface and the subject. Consequently they
touch on some kind of language that designers
generally use to describe events or choices intheir work – however much they’re intended
or innocuous.*
Inevitably, this led towards a curiosity about
how these ideas might be transmitted in
more tangible ways: through reproduction.
(Designers, in general, are quite pre-occupiedby reproduction.) When considering themany ways and means by which Marianna has
been applied, printed and disseminated over
the years, I wondered if this matter might
contribute to a burgeoning biographical myth?
During the course of its 39-year-long existence,
Marianna has been rendered for use by thevarious available technologies of the day.

221		

Essay

From its more humble beginning as handlettered forms, to mechanical production as
photo-lettering, Dia-type, Computa-type andLetraset, Marianna has recently been ‘bornagain’ as a fully-fledged Opentype version.
It is within these systems of production andreproduction that a biographical message
might be conveyed. If Marianna has been
designed as writing, which is very much about
you, each rendering also conceivably carries
an adumbrated – albeit arrangeable – accountof your story. Maybe this begins to up-size
the original question from ‘Can a typeface
be biographical?’ to ‘Can a typeface be abiography?’ That is, where the typeface is akind of gestalt that captures the characterof a person.
[. . .]* To present a small digression: wheneverI look at a typeface I feel I am being
confronted with a surface paradox. It issomething that meaning can be projected
onto (whether designing or reading) andsomething that also has an intrinsic meaning,a meaning that stares straight back at you.
I think this paradox is personified quite wellby the teenage characters in recent Gus vanSant films. In Elephant and Paranoid Park,for example, the teenagers ultimately seemto be the proverbial ‘blank slate’. They arecharacters that you can feel familiar withand can easily project your own thoughts
onto. But as much as you can inhabit them,or read them, there are things intrinsic totheir characters that you might never see –or be allowed to see. That is, unless you dare
to go further. The action in these two films isa kind of testament to this (some characters
are also quite dangerous). Fig. 11

222		

Marianna, Hey! Together

223		

Essay

Together
When taking these different prospects into
consideration, two possible readings ofMarianna in relation to the term ‘biographical’
seem to eventuate. First, there is the optical
recognition of the alphabet – the messages sent
via its morphology. Second, is a more latentmessage that exists in its crafting, or creation.
Both readings seem capable enough of holding
an account of both person and personality – andthere exists the possibility that these accounts
oscillate in this ‘inhabited alphabet’.
Since its creation, Marianna has been publisheda few times over by a handful of different
publishers. ‘She’ has been purchased, swapped
and used by many people in different places.21Now that it is fully digitised it takes up just
120kb of hard disk space on a computer, so –if you have it – Marianna is always attendant.
Whenever I make use of Marianna I am consciousof also sending something about you out into
the world. Something akin to digital pollen,transmitted by wires, disks, signals, film, ink
and paper that takes hold over screens, objects
and printed matter.
David Bennewith, 2008.

Endnotes
1. MyFonts.com, http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/blhd/churchward-marianna/.
2. 1.12.2007.
3. Interview with Will Holder, Maastricht,
5.2007.
4. Joseph Churchward, unpublishedinterview with David Bennewith,
20.10.2005. Conducted and transcribedby Marianna Churchward.
5. Emily King. ‘Thirty-six point Gorilla’, firstpublished in Eye, No. 23, Winter 1996. Text
can be sourced online from Typotheque.com,
www.typotheque.com/articles/thirty-six_point_gorilla.
6. Year 7 students of the Werkplaats
Typografie Masters programme, Arnhem,
Netherlands, 2006-7.
7. Since 2007 a digitised version ofMarianna has been available for purchasefrom MyFonts.com. Digitisation by BluHead
Studios of Norwood, MA, USA.
8. Telephone conversation with Joseph
Churchward. David Bennewith. 21.11.2007.
9. Sebastian White. Instabilities inwriting and standing, ‘Memory Character,
Resurrection Character’, workshop,
Royal College of Art, 26.02.2008, DavidBennewith. ‘In writing and medical tools
a ligature occurs either when two or moreletterforms are joined as a single glyph ora patient’s leg or legs are injured and areunable to support body weight. Ligatures
usually replace consecutive characterssharing common components, or legs.’
10. ‘Such is the alphabet’s power: torediscover a kind of natural state ofthe letter. For the letter, if it is alone,
is innocence: the Fall begins when wealign letters to make words’ in Roland
Barthes. 1991. ‘Erté, or Á la lettre’, ‘M’,
The Responsibility of Forms. Translated
by Richard Howard, The University ofCalifornia Press. p. 127.
11. ‘An orientation towards practicalinterests is characteristic of many bornstorytellers . . . It contains, openly, orcovertly, something useful’. See Walterbenjamin. The Storyteller. Reflections on theWorks of Nikolai Leskov. www.slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1331-Benjamin.
pdf, p. 2.

12. David Bennewith, Joseph Churchward
and Warren Olds. 1.2007. ‘Churchward
Video Notes A-J’. National Grid #3, p. 54.
13. Joseph Churchward, unpublishedinterview with David Bennewith,
20.10.2005. Conducted and transcribedby Marianna Churchward.
14. ‘Churchward Video Notes A-J’. Op cit.
p. 57.
15. Edward Wright. ‘Conversation,
Handwriting and the Poster’. EdwardWright. readings, writings. Department ofTypography and Graphic Communication.
University of Reading, United Kingdom, p.  39.
16. ‘Churchward Video Notes A-J’. Op cit. p. 58.
17. ‘To the early Irish, Latin was ‘primarilya written or ‘visible’ language . . . [apprehended] as much (if not more) by the eye, as
by the ear.’ [. . .] In the Book of Kells (lateeighth or early ninth century) occurs thefamous CHI-RO (folio 29), an elaborate motif
in which the letter [a sort of ‘P’] encrypts
a human form.’ Jed Rasula and Steve
McCaffery, 2001. Imagining Language,
An Anthology. MIT Press. p. 380.
18. Eric Gill, ‘Autobiography’ in Fiona
MacCarthy, 1989. Eric Gill. A Lovers Questfor Art and God. E.P. Dutton, New York.
p. 144.
19. ‘Erté, or Á la lettre’, The Responsibilityof Forms. Op cit. p. 107 [‘The Silhouette’];p. 113 [‘The Letter’] (Author’s emphasis).
20. See ‘And Joseph Churchward’,Paul Elliman, p. 241.
21. You proudly told me that Marianna is
one of your Dad’s best-selling typefaces.
Conversation with Marianna Churchward,Dublin, 1.12.2007.

Figures
1. MyFonts description as at 9.1.2008.
2. New keyword ‘biographical’ added as
at 14.2.2008.
3. Werkplaats Typografie Graduation Show
‘Marianna’, David Bennewith, poster/invite,
700 x 500 mm, black and white, 2006.
4. Ligatures of Churchward Marianna,
Joseph Churchward, 1969. BluHeadstudios, 2007.

224

Marianna, Hey! Together.

5. CHI-RO. Folio 29, Book of Kells, image
sourced at http://www.wsp.krakow.pl/whk/konkurs/szkola.html
6. Up my Street, 2008 by Kate McCann.
Age: 12, Howard of Effingham School,UK. http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/
doodle4google/vote.html#
7. [a] Joanna, Eric Gill. pencil and crayonon paper, 260.35 x 349.25 mm, c. 1920.
[b] Joanna, Eric Gill. 1927.
8. Greta, Typotheque specemin no. 4, PeterBilak & Nicola Djurek, Typotheque VOF 2007
9. Erté Alphabet, http://www.erte.com/alpha.html
10. MyFonts, 2008.
11. [a] Elephant, Gus van Sant, 2003.
Still, http://farm2.static.flickr.
com/1259/761078952_e84d7f8c1a.jpg[b] Paranoid Park, Gus van Sant, 2007,
Still, http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v651/verbal_ jr/movies/Paranoid%20Park/
ParanoidPark.jpg

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery. 2001.
Imagining Language, An Anthology.
MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18186-X
Department of Typography and Graphic
Communication. 2007. Edward Wright.
readings, writings. University of Reading,United Kingdom. ISBN 0-7049-1322-4.
Walter Benjamin. The Storyteller. Reflections
on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. www.
slought.org/files/downloads/events/
SF_1331-Benjamin.pdf
Roland Barthes. The Responsibility ofForms. Translated by Richard Howard,
The University of California Press.
ISBN 978-0-520-07238-1.
Robin Kinross. Fellow Readers. noteson multiplied language Hyphen Press,London, 1994. ISBN 0-907259-07-3.

UFOUBCL