1996: Poem for the Volgare Typeface

VOLGARE PROCLAMATION

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.