typohypergraphicobject is a teachable agenda for conscious graphic design.
A message from the last laughingthrush; a hallucinatory history of typography and the last empty page; a “facile leftist conspiracy” which self-respecting business-as-usual designers should certainly not read; a boyhood memoir consumed by graphic design’s sumptuous, foil-blocked, ultra-carcinogenic aesthetic allure; an essay about the utility of waste; and an afterword on the matter of this book’s near-futures.
Written, edited, designed, and published by James Langdon.
Contributions from
Brad Haylock
Bryony Quinn
Caleb Klaces and Daisy Hildyard
Gilbert Again with Michael Fowler
Karl Nawrot
Sam Rolfes
Susanne Kriemann
The cover shows one of the book’s protagonists, the Banasura Chilappan, whose declining population is currently estimated to be as low as 530, endemic to southwest India. This number determines the edition size. Book: bird. Art by Sam Rolfes. The cover is overprinted onto sheets from a bootleg English translation of Der Wert Eines Vogel (what a bird is worth) by Frederic Vester.
typohypergraphicobject is approximately 32×24cm, 52 pages, printed and overprinted in multiple offset and silkscreen inks on make-ready sheets and leftovers from four other books.
Produced with the technical co-operation of die Keure, Bruges; Spreedruck, Berlin; DZA, Altenburg; Kajsa Ståhl, London; OK-RM, London; and Stina Gromark, Stinsensqueeze, Paris.
Alongside the
typohypergraphicobject comes
a new, 20-page, offset-printed, bootleg English translation of German ecologist Frederic Vester’s ‘window-picture book’ What a Bird is Worth (1983). Vester presents an overtly financialised analysis of the value of a single bluethroat, from the material elements of its body to its role in supporting numerous ecosystems and human habitats. The book’s surprising calculations show how a single living thing — deeply interdependent with its environment — has a value that even crass, economical thinking can capture. The bootleg, translated by Johanna Schaefer is carefully reproduced from scans of an original copy and printed by Spreedruck in Berlin. Its format includes 59 die-cut apertures.
