The Triangle Cancellations of Ireland (original) (raw)
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Neighbours on Paper: A Contribution to the History of Multiscript Printing in Colonial Cyprus
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In Cyprus the introduction of printing coincided with the beginning of the British occupation. Thereafter, all printed documents had to address a multilingual audience as English, Greek, and Ottoman Turkish were in use. This article focuses on a distinctive characteristic of the local printing history namely the practice of multiscript printing and the visual appearance of multilingual documents that addressed a linguistically multifarious society. For comparative reasons two different kinds of documents are examined: multilingual administrative documents and advertisements. The analysis of the documents provides insights into the practice of multiscript printing, i.e. the technical resources (printing methods and available types), the skills of printers, and the typographic conventions applied on multilingual documents. In conjunction with archival evidence these documents become mirrors of political convictions, social norms, and commercial transactions that linked a peripheral printing trade with the European centres.
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The objective of this article is to discuss the lettering styles that can be found in signs around Dublin, and which are used to convey some kind of Irishness and tradition. The first section discusses the story of insular scripts that flourished in medieval Ireland, being the Book of Kells their most conspicuous representative. After that, the rise of Gaelic typefaces is examined and, finally, examples are used to show the multiplicity of lettering styles in Dublin which are based on insular scripts. It is demonstrated that such letters often fail in their intention to display tradition and nationalism.
The Design of the Spanish Postage Stamp under Franco, 1936-1975. The National Iconographic Scheme.
Postage stamps are used mainly to certify that a postage fee has been paid, but they have less obvious uses. Postage stamps are used by governments to send out ideological messages to its citizens and to those of others countries. The receptions of those messages will depend not only on the intentions of the state that releases them, but also on other factors directly involved with the receptor. Those factors would range from literacy to income. Postage stamps issued by any state reflect the way its government wants it to look like in the eyes of its own people and to those of foreign countries. A state chooses very carefully what to show and what to hide in its postage stamps depending of the results it wants to achieve. The messages conveyed on postage stamps are the result of the combination of text, numbers and images. To combine text and image in different ways may result in a wide range of meanings. Those meanings could depend on the functions that the text used will acquire once combined with an image. (“Anchorage” and “Relay” functions defined by Roland Barthes.) Also, the images used to convey the messages sent out by stamps are obtained quite often from other artistic disciplines. Some of the iconographic images used on stamps, despite of being antique, could adapt –on stamps- its connotations and contents to the needs of the moment thanks to what Aby Warburg described as “energetic inversion”. For Franco’s regime, postage stamps were a symbol of sovereignty, carriers of historical and spiritual values because they were an expression of autonomous national entity. Franco’s regime through its “National Iconographic Scheme” (5th of July of 1944) tried to shape the image of Spain that was shown on postage stamps. This scheme established a series of preferences about what should and what should not be shown on stamps and how it should be shown.