Interview, 2024
RW I wanted to ask you about the two pieces you’ve written that deal with the history of typography and its connection to structures and conditions of labor. Can you share an overview of what these texts are about for those who haven’t had the chance to read them yet?
JDB “American Graphic Design in the 1990s: Deindustrialization and the Death of the Author” was my first peer-reviewed essay, and the first published bit of my dissertation. It was part of a special issue of Post 45, edited by Annie McClanahan, on the cultural aspects of deindustrialization and post-Fordism. Post 45 is mostly a literary journal, so this was an opportunity for me to talk about the way that literary theory collided with new working conditions in 1990s graphic design. I’m actually working on a short book right now that will expand on that piece.
Around the same time, my friend Jack Fisher approached me about publishing something in Counter Signals, the journal he publishes with Alan Smart. It took a while to write, and by the time I was done they’d decided to put it out as a standalone pamphlet. “Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor: A Brief History” was published right before the pandemic. It was a tiny run so it sold out fairly quickly, but it ended up getting emailed around. Between 2020 and 2021, it seemed like everyone was starting reading and discussion groups. Designers, particularly younger ones, started asking structural questions. It wasn’t just about Covid, but about the absence of a functioning health system in the US; not just racist individual police, but the institutions of criminal justice as a whole. So this essay about design, labor, and capitalism found a place in that conversation.
RW Yeah, I was in one of those reading groups for a while. It was great. Anyway, so you wrote these two pieces, and one is suddenly circulating more than expected. Can you share more about what these essays are about? What is it about this typographic history that you find so interesting, and why do you think people suddenly started caring about it?
JDB I’ll try to outline a brief history. Western typography comes out of the Gutenberg era in the mid-15th century. Over the next few centuries, the labor and technology don’t change all that much. With the rise of capitalism, work tends to become more fragmented and specialized. So typesetting emerges as a distinct job. Then, in the industrial period, a few different things happen: on one hand, there is increased literacy and increased demand for printed matter; on the other, print technology starts to shift.
Gutenberg’s press, which was a hand-operated, wooden machine, evolved into a gigantic iron contraption with cylindrical printing plates, which could spin out copies all day under steam power. But the manual labor of typesetting had barely changed. This meant that printing businesses relied on large groups of typesetters who composed everything one letter at a time. So there were various efforts at mechanizing the process. The invention that wins out is the Linotype, which was developed with R&D funds from the biggest newspaper companies in New York. The Linotype process made printing much more efficient; at the same time, it threatened to undermine the union activity that had always been very strong in the printing trades.
Incidentally, this is all happening right around the time that the halftone process for image reproduction is being developed. So right at the cusp of the 20th century, anyone working with mass-produced images and texts is weathering these huge technical transformations.
The ITU, the union that I have been studying, was able to absorb the shock of this transition, even though a lot of people were “disrupted” out of jobs they’d been doing for decades. For most of the next century, the dynamic would be the same: new technologies promised to lighten the workload of typesetters, but in practice they just facilitated layoffs and speed-ups. The union empowered typesetters to contest the direction that these technologies were allowed to take. They could even be a kind of brake on “innovation.”
So as I was working through this, I gradually realized that modern typography’s roots are intertwined with this intense labor history. It isn’t just a story of increasingly rational, efficient machinery, but one of protracted conflicts over machinery. The technology was shaped in part by worker resistance — codified in union contracts and enforced through strikes.
One example that comes to mind is “teletypesetting” technology, which allowed Linotypes to be driven by encoded tape rather than a human operator. ITU members understood that code had the potential to completely transform — and maybe even abolish — their trade, so they kept the threat at bay for about thirty years. Then in the mid-sixties, the New York local negotiated a contract that allowed this tech into printing plants for the first time. The condition was that the employer had to pay 100% of the profits resulting from the new machines into the union’s “automation fund.”
RW It sounds like the unionized workers were basically taxing their bosses for replacing their jobs with new machinery.
JDB Exactly. The union could control the adoption of certain technologies in the places where they were the strongest, like large printing plants in industrial cities. But of course the new inventions kept coming, and they made the most headway in areas where the union was weakest. Photo-based and code-based typesetting technologies had to work around the unionized parts of the industry, so they developed in directions that were totally foreign to the traditions of print. They start to crop up in office machines in the late 1940s, which were operated by a low-wage — and increasingly feminized — workforce of clerical workers.
Because the ITU had a predominately white, male membership, and many of the operators of the new machines were women and people of color, this history becomes a collision of class, gender, race, and technology by the late 1960s. Some of the more militant members of the ITU tried to organize in these new sectors, but the union leadership shut this effort down. It’s hard to imagine how different the processes of design and production might look today if they had been successful.
Partly because of its reluctance to organize the phototypesetters, the ITU steadily dwindled during the 1970s, and the last locals were dissolved into other unions in 1986. Of course, this was concurrent with our “digital revolution”: the first Macintosh was released in 1984, Postscript in 1985, Illustrator and Photoshop in 1987 and ‘88. In other words, at least in the US, organized labor’s role in typographical history suddenly halts in the mid-eighties. Graphic designers (aided by computers) take over the detail work of typesetting.
The design discourse in the nineties is remembered for these big debates: not just about form but about technology, authority, and the desire for meaningful work. I think there was an opening to talk about what was happening to all of these print workers; anyone in the profession at that time would have worked closely with these people. But there is a near-total silence on the subject.
RW My understanding here is that as soon as it becomes easy for anyone to set type, designers stop focusing on technical typography in the traditional sense, and instead try to assert a more authorial or perhaps even artistic role. It’s interesting to think of labor influencing visual culture like that.
JDB Yes! That connection between labor and visual culture is what I finally realized this was about. I’m trying to argue that all of this labor history should be included in design history. But — and this is the harder part — what if we also approached design history from the perspective of labor? I think it’s possible to re-read the nineties as a moment in which designers were trying to make sense of sudden shifts in their working conditions. There are strong parallels to the technical transformations that happened a century earlier.
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