The Compositor's Reversal

Known for his tales of mystery and horror, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a meticulous, self-conscious literary craftsman. He was also skilled in the methods of science, engineering, and typesetting. Poe's writing reflected on printed letters' aesthetic effects, their ability to direct and divert meaning, and their power to build and alter worlds. In the printer's office, a limited set of material elements was manipulated to assemble infinite combinations; lining up letters in the composing stick in reverse, compositors had to arrange and read type backwards. The mirrors, doubles, and "weird symmetry" that structure Poe's plots and his theory of the universe can be traced back to these central facts of nineteenth-century typography. In his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket-a broad canvas on which he worked out strategies later deployed in more concentrated works-typography was a crucial site for the conversions and exchanges between spirit and matter. Forging connections between the material and imaginative practice of "composition" and the cosmological uncertainties of the antebellum US, Poe's meditations on the transmutations effected by type linked literary invention, technical construction, and divine creation

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Physics · Power (physics) · Typography · Visual arts · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy