Q&A with Eric Hurtgen
It turns out he’d been toying with old typefaces anyway, so I soon got a text out of the blue with a screenshot of a handsome and eccentric a and his explanation: “i hand drew a lowercase ‘a’ from the original poor richard’s cover. The original is a real gem—look at it some time—the a is all kinds of original. So anyway, I designed a custom ‘a’ that took the spirit of that one but updated it for my own peace of mind.” Later, he tweaked it a bit, adding, “Also after i answered your questions, i immediately thought through what i had been talking about and i realized that i wanted the ‘a’ to be much closer to Caslon's original.”
The last time we saw each other was well over a year ago at a small restaurant in Prospect Heights, so I thought I’d impose on him further for a little Q&A about his thinking around the mark, as well as his design practice in general. We emailed back and forth, and then edited it down for clarity and length:
Ben Tapeworm: You hinted at it when you texted me that you were “thinking of doing some research on that era of iconography,” but I'm curious to what degree you were already kicking around ideas of 18th-/19th-century typefaces and printing presses and almanac(k)s before you decided to make something for the newsletter. And, if you had been thinking about it for a while, what aspects interested you.
Eric Hurtgen: I'm a designer, so it's a fairly banal truth that most of us are into rare and unique typography. When I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, my dad was getting his undergrad degree in English while my mom worked as a nurse and I often had to go to class with him. As a result, one of my first graphic memories is the seal of the University of Louisville. Later I remember seeing an old seal of Louisville done in a similar style on a mug in a stoneware shop and that felt like some sort of providence. I fell in love pretty quickly with the quirky old style type that ringed both of them. Years later, I found out they were both designed by the Austrian-born typographer and artist Victor Hammer, who fled Nazi occupation during WWII and late in life found his way to Lexington, Kentucky, where he was the artist-in-residence at Transylvania University from 1948 to 1953. I think it might have been during that time that he finalized his best known type design, American Uncial, which he used on both Louisville seals. From there, I got really interested in the history of type design in the United States—a very chaotic and uneven practice. So, yeah, by the time I started reading your newsletter, I was already thinking of type and printing from that era of almanac(k)s and was interested in making something contemporary from the forms.
BT: I'm curious about that a from Poor Richard’s Almanack. You called it “a real gem” and “all kinds of original.” It totally is, and I'm interested in why you think that is. Working in documentary, I watch a lot of archival video and have always found something captivating about the texture or artifactual nature of archival, even if its content is sort of odd or irrelevant or unknowable.
EH: Very early on, before Ben Franklin published either Poor Richard’s or the Pennsylvania Gazette, he made a pilgrimage to London and worked as a typesetter at St. Bart’s, where he learned a better form of printing than he would have had he stayed in the colonies. One of the main practitioners of English type at the time was William Caslon, a contemporary of Franklin, who started out his career as an engraver. Prior to Caslon, there really weren’t English typemakers, or at least not good ones. Like a lot of other English typesetters of the time, he found his inspiration in the old Dutch type of a generation earlier—ignoring the European innovations that were more delicate and stylized. So Caslon was making his own copy of a copy, in a way—of the Dutch who were reaching for a classical ideal. So already the cutting edge of English type was archaic. But what Caslon did in his copy of a copy is, I think, what happens often in these situations—it becomes the artist's own in a way the first copy never could be. Soon after Caslon cut his first typefaces, Franklin had them shipped to the colonies and began using them on his printing press. Back to the little a: the cut of this early Caslon has the wonderful eccentricities that would be smoothed out in later versions, and the a really is lovely. It's so out of fashion of the European style of the time, with its asymmetrical counter, the short bowl, and the funkiness of the slight ball terminal. And then, of course, the fact that what we see is the result of the ink from the type—an imperfect representation of the original cut that was made an ocean away.
BT: Do you find that you stumble upon things you like, such as that funky a? Or do you find that your approach starts more broadly or conceptually and that you go looking from there?
EH: Well, I'm a native Kentuckian and, as such, I was born a contrarian, like so many other Kentuckians before me. I find myself attracted to eccentricities—to forms and formats that maybe aren’t as immediately beloved. And I find that I often have a meandering design and art practice—it starts one place and ends up in a completely different space. It’s rarely conceptually straightforward and when it is, I usually don't love the outcomes as much. I like when I surprise myself; I enjoy the unexpected or the mistake. I often think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”: “All things counter, original, spare, strange,” or Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: “Honor thy error as hidden intention.”
BT: I feel like graphic design has entered more conversations I've had with friends recently, but in a vague way, and often in a somewhat negative light—I wonder if that's partly because of the proliferation of activist-ish infographics on social media, the (often related) graphics of “woke” corporatism, or just the sort of deadening ubiquity of the Red Antler look, at least in a place like New York. What are your thoughts on that?
EH: Well, I think even graphic design being discussed in a negative light is better than it not being discussed at all. Design has become in some ways a strange lingua franca of the vast and expanding world of interface that we live in and among now. Even when we're not “inside the app,” the ubiquity of design throughout our lives, especially in certain urban and suburban spaces, is fairly complete. So discussion of it, rather than unconscious acceptance, is a positive movement. It’s hard to know where things go from here but I do think that the graphics of “woke” corporatism are with us for the foreseeable future. Every group of people, in order to cohere, has to find the water level of what is acceptable and what is not, and, in the US, the role of upholding agreed-upon values has fallen to commercial entities. Which isn't to say that activists, artists, politicians, and religious professionals don't play a role in this tug-of-war—they clearly do. But by and large the way it works itself out is up to the corporations. If Walmart decides during the Covid pandemic that shoppers have to wear masks in order to enter their establishment, that really will do more to shape actual human activity nationwide than any mask mandates. Now, I'm clearly not saying this is the best situation, but that's where we find ourselves right now. How it evolves going forward will be a complex interpersonal matter of shifting personal, geographical, national, and a-geographical realities. That said, there are almost always positive movements going on underneath the surfaces and on the edges, even where you least expect them. For example, when I look across the horizon to the world of art and I see wonderful shows like Working Together, which was recently featured at the Whitney but was organized by the Virginia Museum of Modern Art—movements like that seem really heartening.
BT: You have an ongoing “impossible geometry” series on Instagram, often just captioned with a month and year. Can you tell me more about the that? I am particularly drawn to your impossible cylinders—those feels very Hurtgenesque(!) to me.
EH: Ah, well, thank you. It's funny—I'm currently in a long process of untangling my own sense of purpose inside the practice of making personal work. If you'd asked me this question, say, four or five years ago, I think I would have had a much more succinct answer, but now I'm not as sure of my aims as I was then. And I think maybe that's been kind of the point behind the impossible geometries series. I'm a parent now and I have two daughters and it's very important for me to make sure my work sustains a life that sustains them. It's a really beautiful situation I find myself in but it also complicates my relationship to work, both commercial and personal. They bend back on themselves, in a way. I find myself trying to thread needles that aren't easily threaded. And then the national situation—as any very, very casual observer can see—has been harrowing. So in a way, this work has been oddly descriptive of where I've found myself for the last little bit. That said, I just got my vaccination last week and, for the first time in a while, I'm really hopeful about what comes next. So it may be time to sort out that series of work and just kind of put it to bed, so to speak, and move on to something else.
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ben tapeworm