The design and social meaning of Australian type specimen books, 1880-1901

This thesis examines Australian type specimen books published between 1880 and 1901, analysing them as cultural artefacts that offer a rich and previously unexplored source of information on colonial typography. The books were designed to promote typography, showcasing the various letterforms and visual devices used by colonial printers, though we know very little of their compositional strategies, their mode of communication, or the curious and fragmented language through which they display typefaces. To explore these issues, I carry out a multimodal social semiotic analysis, which shows how their design and meaning is inseparable from their commercial and social contexts. The specimens' language is shown to reflect dominant discourses of institutional power, colonisation and industrialisation, and their mode of presentation depicts typography as one of the forces constructing the ideological and material foundations of the British Empire in late nineteenth-century Australia. Further exploring the specimen books' representation of cultural discourses, I employ practice-based research to construct a contemporary series of specimens. These designs provide a shadow history of the colonial life presented in the specimens, drawing out the relationships between the typographic trade and marginalised local cultures and politics. They suggest that the colonial typographers' work in promoting their trade obscured those facets of their practice that did not support an image of institutionalised power. This innovative combination of textual analysis and practice-based research highlights the covert and overt discourses in these texts, including the reciprocally constitutive relationship between typographic design and colonial expansionism.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• O'Neill, Jesse Garret

• Speciman books
• Australian
• 1880-1901
• Cultural artefacts
• Colonial typography
• Semiotic analysis
• Colonisation
• Industrialisation

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/16076

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/52547