as you
as you phrases, ex Private Telegraphic Code for Landline Telegrams between points in the United States, Canada and Mexico / used by the United States Steel Corporation and its subsidiary companies (1911)
*
It was the typewriter that encouraged/enabled layout as a poetical device. It offered a precise grid for the deployment of monospaced letters and the words they formed, to be moved around on the page. Location suggested breaks of sense, pauses of different lengths, etc. But that grid has gone micro and invisible. Now feasible only by treating the text as a picture, moving large swathes of pixels around; too hard to do with css, Word,
or InDesign.
28 October 2011
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