Typo Bilder Buch (English translation: Typo Picture Book) is an artists’ book by Romani Hänni created on pages made of paper towels and consisting of mainly pictographic symbols reoccurring throughout the entire book. 

A collection of symbolsare iterated on the right as you open the book; there are two that appear like a person running, a few that look like dogs, one that looks like a robot, and one that even sort of looks like a brontosaurus. These symbols appear in elsewhere in the text, in addition to other similarly geometric symbols, some of which have external meaning such as the equal sign, the greater than sign, and the infinity sign that have meaning in the world of mathematics. There are pages in which symbols appear entirely on their own on a particular page, and there are other symbols that cohabit a page with letters and numbers--which, to be fair, are symbols in their own nature, either to represent phonetic information or numerical information. There are even a collection of symbols, including parentheses, triangles, periods, and rectangles that are positioned in a way to resemble three nude women.

This entire book exists as a symbolic meditation on the nature of images and how we perceive them. In the statement accompanying the book, Appearance and Riately, Hänni states that as humans, we struggle with the collective reading of images and signs and symbols. In these symbols, we look for symmetry, and often a human face to sympathize and connect with, one like our own. He also believes that, in a way, images can lie to us, saying that (in Jessica Schmid’s translated English) “images are frequently staged in order to look beautiful”. In this way, in particular, it is difficult to know when we can trust visual symbols and images, something that a lot of people would believe is universal. Especially in the today’s media, every image has a purpose, and yes, it may be to lie, due to the fact that programs like Photoshop have the ability to distort images to make them look real. Hänni makes the interesting point that we’re only served the images that we’re supposed to see, and those images are handpicked by those who control our world and attempt to control our perception of the world and the events that occur within it. In this way, the use of symbols can almost be dangerous, especially if they are false. If universal language through symbolic typography is possible, and if a symbol or an image is falsely doctored and every person interprets it the same way, then the whole world is successfully deceived.