In the summer of 2022, as Guest Curator at the Centre for Renaissance & Reformation Studies, I curated a small physical exhibition of handpress-printed books, Typographia, exploring six distinctive glyphs found on the early modern page.
I also began a digital version of Typographia, coding it on Twine, an open-source platform for interactive, non-linear games. The first part, on the history & deployments of the asterisk, recently went live. It starts like this:
Working on Twine is fun & arduous. I approach it as an experiment in digital typesetting and learn everything I could from my handpress forbears about typeface & page design. In my note on the project I put it like this:
An exhibition is a story, or a suite of stories. Some can be told in a straight line. Others are more shrub than tree – more rhizome than taproot – and ask to discover their own shapes. I’ve created Typographia on Twine, an open-source platform for creating non-linear narrative games, in that exploratory spirit. I haven’t seen Twine used for an exhibition before. This is a trial run, as the first pages printed in Europe also were.
I make the same point differently in the colophon:
Still to come, lever of the pilcrow ¶ , sprawl of the fleuron ❦ .
The Art of Compost 