Page 69 - Studio International - September 1968

3. Pisces described in an example of framed
writing from a tenth century manuscript

Framed writing 4. Easter Wings by George Herbert
Framed words are simple to write and set up and
have a longer history than shaped words. In ancient
Egyptian inscriptions the names of the revered dead
were enclosed in honourific cartouches which look
like coffins. Runic inscriptions were often written
inside outlines of serpents being slain by heroes
who were the subject of the inscription. Among the
Harlean manuscripts at The British Museum there
is one of the .Areteae in which constellations are
described within a frame which is a drawing. In
Gargantua & Pantagruel by Rabelais, the Oracle
of the Bottle is written inside a bottle-shaped frame.
Framed writing became fairly common on embossed
book-spine designs between the 1830s and the 1890s
and in advertising and the cheap press from the
1840s. Today framed writing is ubiquitous in
shop-signs and the black framed advertisement of
the last two years.

Shaped writing
There are three types of shaped writing: in the
first two the letterform is 'normal' but the edge
( `margin') is bent to make the shape, or the lines
of the text are so bent; in the third type of shaped
writing the letterforms themselves are distorted to
make the shape.

1. Filled forms where the edge of the text is the
shape exist in Hebrew calligraphy and are the most
common form of shaped writing in our cultural
area. Filled words are fairly simple to set by hand
in moveable type. The best known examples are3:
Simmias (300 Bc) Egg, and Wings of Love,
Dosiades (300 Bc) Altar, Besantinius (AD 100)
Altar, Porfyrius Optatianus (AD 325) Altar,
Piero Valeriano (1550) Egg, Puttenham (1558)
Lozenge and Triquets, Herbert (1663) Altar and
Easter Wings, Herrick (1647) The Cross; there are
many examples in the Baroque poetry of Germany;
Poe wrote a shaped version of The raven which is
among the unpublished papers of Charles Pierce;
Lewis Carroll wrote A long tale in the shape of a
tail; Morgenstern wrote Die Trichter in the shape
of a funnel; Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg and
Norman Mailer have written shaped poems.

5. Orion described in shaped writing