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Arden Stern
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Design Issues (2020) 36 (4): 92–94.
Published: 01 September 2020
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Design Issues (2016) 32 (4): 76–90.
Published: 01 October 2016
Abstract
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This article offers a historical analysis of 21 st -century American engagements with 19 th -century ornamented typography, demonstrating how this form of historicist practice constructs purposeful continuities between past and present by aligning 19 th - and 21 st -century modes of production. These alignments, balanced on fraught cultural divisions between handmade/machine-made and authentic/artificial, are resolutely ahistorical yet speak volumes about the dynamics of information capitalism, deindustrialization, and recession in recent US history. The analysis focuses upon two genres of neo-19 th -century typographic revivals: heritage letterpress fetishism, which invokes an imagined return to authentic handcraft, and revivalist authentications of digital design practice, in which designers use the old to confer legitimacy upon the new.