Révolution Typographique depuis Stéphane Mallarmé

The strange poem that appeared in May 1897 in London’s Cosmopolis magazine, Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance,” can be considered, historically, as the first cannonball that awakened the spirit of the modern book. The surprise of his contemporaries was matched only by their consternation, both of which were understandable. Mallarmé, in fact, had gone too far. Imagine ten magazine pages in which the words of the poem, instead of being neatly arranged line by line according to conventional formulas, were distributed seemingly at random across the pages, some of them occupying an entire page on their own. Others were surrounded by significant white space and printed in ten different typefaces, ranging from majestic capitals to flowing italics, by way of various Roman lowercase letters. Important words were revealed, underlined by the typography and overflowing with fleeting phrases running diagonally from top to bottom of the page. Moreover, the text, composed of one immense sentence devoid of all punctuation, was, at first glance, completely incomprehensible. This was stuff that we at Katherine Small Gallery don’t generally love, but, man, do we like to look at it. Packed with seventy years of letter-based lookers, this one is loaded with inspiration and motivation.