Letters
I went to to what was probably an interesting lecture last night. Some chap, a typographer, had become fascinated with inscriptions on Welsh stones dating to about 400AD. So he’d wandered around Wales taking ‘squeezes’ (a sort of advanced form of rubbing) from these various stones.
I tried not to fall asleep. The long words, bad acoustics, wine and an early start all conspired to inflict me with horrible spasms of drowsiness; one second I was alert and attentive, the next I felt as though I’d woken up just in time to save myself from falling out of bed and whacking my head on the radiator.
The subject was interesting though. How had letterforms evolved between Greek inscriptions and the early manuscripts? There seemed to be a gap in the taught knowledge of typographers.
And time is limited to learn from these stones as they are eroding at an alarming rate, with no official system of preservation to save them (and indeed why should there be?).
His technique for taking the ‘squeezes’—a process of pushing some stuff into the inscriptions to capture their shape—used blotting paper and toilet paper. Apperently other stuff damages the stone.
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