Letters for the Millennium - Why We Cut Letters in Stone

Emma Lloyd-Jones and Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley

ISBN 10: 1874426112 / ISBN 13: 9781874426110

Published by Cardozo Kindersley, 1999

About this Item

There is something magnificently stubborn about the act of cutting letters into stone. Entire civilisations have collapsed, empires have burned, governments have risen and fallen in clouds of paperwork and committee reports, yet somewhere a Roman inscription still sits perfectly legible after two thousand years, calmly ignoring the internet. Letters for the Millennium - Why We Cut Letters in Stone is a deeply thoughtful and unexpectedly moving meditation on this peculiar human urge to make words physically permanent, preferably with hammers. Emma Lloyd-Jones and Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley explore the ancient craft of letter carving with the kind of reverence normally reserved for cathedral architecture, violin making or people who still sharpen pencils using knives. This is a book about typography, certainly, but also patience, permanence and the quiet arrogance of civilisation itself. To carve a sentence into stone is to make a remarkable declaration: namely that these particular words are important enough to outlive everyone currently involved. The irony, naturally, is delicious. This book emerged right on the edge of the millennium, at precisely the moment humanity began abandoning permanence in favour of passwords, temporary files and social media posts written while waiting for kettles to boil. While the world rushed toward digital ephemera, here were the Kindersleys calmly explaining why chiselling beautifully proportioned serif letters into granite might still matter. In retrospect they may have had a point. The average Roman gravestone has survived more reliably than several modern hard drives and approximately all Geocities websites. The photographs and examples throughout are quietly mesmerising. Letters cease to become mere symbols and instead appear as physical objects with weight, shadow and dignity. One suddenly notices how badly modern life treats typography. We live surrounded by fonts screaming from takeaway menus and estate-agent boards, while this book gently reminds us that there was once an era when someone spent three days considering the curve of a single capital R. There is also something wonderfully British about the entire enterprise. The determination to preserve craftsmanship, proportion and beauty through painstaking manual labour feels gloriously out of step with the modern world. These are people who look at a stone surface and think not ?load-bearing capacity? but ?perhaps Trajan capitals in a balanced classical spacing arrangement? It is hard not to admire such dedication, even if one suspects the average modern reader spends more time selecting emojis than contemplating inscriptional harmony. As sold by Crappy Old Books, this copy is in Good condition, meaning it has endured the passing decades rather better than most millennium predictions. The pages remain perfectly suitable for anyone wishing to contemplate the durability of stone-carved language while holding a mass-produced paperback that itself has improbably survived twenty-six years of shelves, boxes and domestic reorganisations. Which, in its own modest way, is also a small victory over time.

Seller Inventory # 6496

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Letters for the Millennium - Why We Cut Letters in Stone
• Publisher: Cardozo Kindersley
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1874426112
• ISBN 13: 9781874426110
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

Letters for the Millennium: Why We Cut Letters in Stone