Marina Garone Gravier, "Semiótica y tipografía. Edición y diseño en lenguas indígenas"
Mexican art historian, designer, and typographer Marina Garone Gravier studies how printers in colonial Mexico from 1530 through 1810 adopted the Latin alphabet to represent indigenous languages in printed text. During the course of typesetting and printing, they encountered numerous problems with the notation and arrangement of text. In order to overcome these difficulties, printers came up with several strategies to invent, reutilize, and reconstruct typographic symbols to expand the scope of linguistic representation of indigenous languages with the Latin alphabet. In order to analyze the visual codification of colonial books in indigenous languages, Garone Gravier focuses on the composition of words at the level of individual letters and proposes a classification system for the different solutions printers found to confront typographical obstacles in representing indigenous languages using the Latin alphabet. Garone Gravier ultimately argues that making sense of the composition of typeset letters used by colonial printers to construct written representations of indigenous languages is of critical importance to understanding the broader role of textual production during the early colonial period. Yet all too often, the graphic value of the text on the visual plane is overshadowed by the broader literary and historic value of the textual content. In other words, studies of form and composition of text have been overshadowed by the considerations of the content of the text itself and its broader literary and historical merits. Garone Gravier’s work serves as an intervention, placing textual form at the center of book historical analysis.
This work helps us view the book form as a visual plane for mapping and encoding language at the level of individual typographic symbols. The transformation and adaptation of the Latin alphabet to represent indigenous languages further reinforces the importance of semiotics and typography in book historical research. Form and content are equally significant and must be treated as such within the field of book history.
