Work in progress: Reviving a 17th century Garalde. This is the italic “m”.

THE MECHANICS OF MEANING

On the significance of coincidence

It’s quite profound the way coincidence attaches importance to objects and ideas that it associates with one another. Here is an example which happened to me.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Charles Dickens, 1837. Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965.

When I was thirteen I won an academic award at school, and, following protocol, went to the designated book store and chose a work of literature, which was subsequently presented on prize-giving day with a personalized certificate pasted inside and school crest stamped on the cover. I selected Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, and it was all very posh and proper, with gold foil on smooth, matte, off-white cover stock channelling the cachet of vellum.

Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter, Thames & Hudson, 1969.

A few years later, age seventeen, I won the art prize. This time I chose Dada by Hans Richter. On prize-giving day I went up on stage in turn, to receive my award from the Head Master, in front of the whole school, hundreds of boys, dozens of masters, and was horrified to see that the beautiful art on the cover had been desecrated by the school crest—but quickly realized that it was really rather appropriate for a book subtitled “Art and Anti-Art.” Delicious irony, the soul of coincidence!

That experience and the cherished artefact form a deep semantic agency in my mind, engaging present-day events like Banksy’s self-shredding Love is in the Bin and splashing old master paintings as political protest. The intensely personal and iconic manifestation of irony which I encountered has given the work of Hans Arp (whose art appeared on the Dada cover) a special significance. At least, this thought occurred recently as I worked on cleaning up and stylizing the ratty auto-traced scans of some old letterpress typography, which is the basis of a new typeface I’m making, and noticed that the curved shapes I was drawing had a distinctly Arpish feel. Sympathetic magic, fifty-six years on from The Coincidence at Prize-Giving. ●