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The first page looks normal enough until we stop to take note of the repeated phrases in this ‘from A to A’ text. Thus the first two pages Through Light and the Alphabet look like this: (Figures 1 and 2) The main such device, one Drucker discusses vis-à-vis Modernist experimental typography in The Visible Word, is paragonnage– ‘the incorporation of several different typefaces and/or sizes within a single line or word’ (VW 96). The differences in typographic scale allow these to be read at different rates but prohibit their ever being read all at once. Once a typographic theme is introduced, it is sustained, so that by the time the book is finished, there is a complex multilinear text on the page. disintegrates linear reading by the addition of a new typographic element on each successive opening. I was intent on using contrasts in scale as a way of introducing hierarches of meaning and forms of movement into the printed text. In her recent Century of Artist’s Books, she recalls: In 1986, the year she received her PhD in Visual Studies from Berkeley, Johanna Drucker produced a letterpress book, in an edition of fifty copies, called Through Light and the Alphabet. Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff Textual Practice, Volume 11, Issue 1 Spring 1997, pages 133 – 142.

Available through Granary Books, New York. (CAB) Johanna Drucker, ThroughLight and the Alphabet. (AL) Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artist’s Books. (VW) Johanna Drucker, The Alphabet Labyrinth. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Druckwerks Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art.