Employing this new Manuscripts Folio Typeface by Stephen Farrell
to Demand an Accounting of the 8,000 or so People Killed in the Massacre
of Srebrenica.
Between Tuesday, July 11, and Friday, July 14, 1995, in a UN-designated
“safe area”, the Bosnian Serb military, led by General Ratko
Mladic, blew past a small contingent of doomed UN peacekeepers and swept
down on Srebrenica, a town of 40,000 people.
They separated the men from the women and children, an act that through
time has meant trouble. They hanged the men from trees and slit their
throats on the streets outside their homes. They raped the women and
children and kicked them out of town. They sent the remaining military-aged
men “to Bratunac, where Bosnian Serb officers said they would
be questioned for possible war crimes”, according to the New York
Times report.
This typeface is based on the 1601 handwriting of a clerk in Florence,
Italy. This clerk was performing a simple act that is one hallmark of
a civilized society: Every time someone died, they added the name of
that person, and the day that person died, and the neighborhood that
person lived in, to a list.
That list was kept in a central place, so that everyone could know what
happened to that person, and so that person’s son could now inherit
that person’s land, or that person’s spouse might think
about marrying someone else, or that person’s brother might come
and comfort the living.
Lists are big this way. They determine who gets paid on Friday, who
owes who how much money, who belongs in jail, who is qualified to do
taxes or perform brain surgery in your state, who gets their water from
what municipality, who can drive what kind of vehicle, and who can build
what where. Being on the right list at the right time makes all the
difference in the world.
Now these lists consist of language. Written language is made up of
words and characters and symbols. These are in turn made up lines and
curves and dots and ink and light. The type designer gives this stuff
form, taking bits and parts of expression and culture to make a new
way to write. The typographer necessarily reflects and alters the society
in which their work is created.
The stuff of this typeface in particular are 16 pages of the singular
scratches and penstrokes of one person who lived in Florence, Italy
in 1601. Stephen Farrell was not thinking of the 8,000 in Srebrenica
when he cobbled together these ™ and © and $.
But the choice of such a human material from so deep in the manger of
our civil laws and structure guarantees it would speak straight to us.
The making of list reeks of order, discipline, and succession. This
typeface was built the same way the International system of nation-states
was—- with the remnants of Europe’s political and social
institutions banged through the mouth of American English.
And the breakdown of decency in the middle of Europe is a direct threat
to that order. Anywhere that the International system of nation-states
is flouted by creeps; the whole system goes to pot.
The written document which now applies to Bosnia and Herzegovina is
the Dayton Peace Plan. It calls for the killers to be caught and tried
but no one wants to disturb the signators whose generals gave the orders
and soldiers did the killing.
I don’t know what typeface the Dayton Peace Plan is set in, but
whomever designed it must be very proud.
We now know that 8,000 men were killed in those few days in Srebrenica,
400 years and five hundred miles from the list of the dead in Florence.
But there is no list of the dead in Srebrenica, and a list of the missing
is not good enough.
It is fitting and right that someone would take this typeface and use
it to talk back at Europe with a reflective, terrified glance. For those
of us who write in English today, the craggy lips of the Romantic languages
look back at us each time we see our own words.
With this typeface and a computer anyone can compose a document in the
deliberate image of those who have gone before in dignified civility.
That is what I do now, in my hand, in this typeface—demand a list
of the dead from those who killed them.
© 2003 Daniel X. O'Neil
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