Redesigning the Rising: Typographic commemorations of 1916

Ireland’s most influential twentieth-century typographer, Liam Miller of the Dolmen
Press, printed in pamphlet form three editions of the Easter Proclamation of the Republic, 1916 in 1960, 1975 and 1982. Looking at the distinct visual differences between the first and subsequent publications, and in particular at Miller’s typographic choices, allows an examination of the changing meaning of the 1916 Rising and of republicanism itself at a time when the Irish state was engaged in a project of wholesale modernisation. In order to investigate the typographical decisions made in the documents we need first to acknowledge that the shape that printed words take is not arbitrary; it depends on conscious design decisions and the circumstances of production. In everyday reading we look through – not at – letters. The typographic historian Beatrice Warde famously described the printed word as a ‘crystal goblet’ (Warde [1932] 1999) which simply presents, rather than interprets, written content. The transparency assumed for the visual form of printed letters is an example of what Roland Barthes ([1957] 1993) termed the ‘falsely obvious’: as such it provides the perfect conduit for mythological and ideological constructions.