A special edition of a zine published by Black Scat Books and edited by the Norman Conquest is bound to raise some eyebrows (and lower them, too).
I consider myself a polygyphist: a person who is fluent in graphic linguistics. Typoglyphics is the language of phonetic and hieroglyphic (among other glyphic) forms. As Norman Conquest (aka Derek Pell, aka Doktor Bey) points out in the recent number of his niche zine TYPO, there is so much joy to be found in dead languages, the least of which is: The reader cannot find the typos. Since my living prose is riven with typos (prior to editing), I am anxious to become expert in what Conquest calls determinative hieroglyphics.
This “Typoglyphics” article in TYPO: An International Journal of Prototypes (No. 5) is a clever means to pull significance out of two seemingly disparate themes—letters/words and meaning, versus the infallibility of mythic goddesses. Conquest enjoys mixing and matching intellectually stimulating historic material with contemporary concerns. “Typo,” which in most of our half-used-brains suggests a mistake, is in Conquest’s editorial vocabulary an umbrella for the combination of variegated types of information. The themes of the essays he chooses to publish, as suggested by the recognizable and not-so-known names on the cover, indicate that the eclecticism herein is not as far afield of our fixations on typographic mystery as one might think.
