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Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation. Edited by Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 198 pp. $34.95. ISBN 1-55849-288-7.
In "Reading the Invisible," their introduction to Illuminating Letters: Typography and Literary Interpretation, editors Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton compare the visual, printed presentation of a text to the staging of a play. "The words may be Hamlet's," they tell us, "but the uniquely inflected body and voice are Branaugh's or Olivier's. The body and voice make a difference. Type and typography make a difference" (6). Thus, the essays collected in this interesting volume dispute the notion that typography, the visual arrangement of texts, is an invisible pane through which we see the meaning of a particular piece of writing. Instead, the essays herein argue that the typographic elements of a text are not transparent; they not only help to determine how a text is read and...