‘All that gliistrs’: What Mistakes Can Do
One of the many printing projects recently completed at Thin Ice Press is a book entitled Anteverbs. The point of the book is to splice together proverbs into funny or thought-provoking new ones: ‘a friend in a need is a dangerous thing’, or ‘a stitch in time wins the race’.
A page from Anteverbs
I’m a postdoctoral research associate at Thin Ice Press; trained to read and think about Renaissance literature but very much an amateur when it comes to letterpress. But I’m here to learn, and so, as part of my contribution to Anteverbs I attempt to print the colophon. The colophon is the bit that tells you about the printing of the book: it’s a place for accurate information not creative whimsy. This is what happened for my first attempt.
My first attempt at a colophon
The second line is supposed to say ‘Set in Van Dijk’ printed on Colorplan Natural 135gsm’ which is a reference to the typeface and the paper. Here I’ve ended up instead with some slightly bizarre gobbledigook, caused by picking up wrong letters out of the case as I went and mentally mixing up Colorplan (the paper) with colophon (what I was doing). The first line will look both more jarring and more familiar to you. You might know the phrase ‘all that glisters is not gold’, which is written on the piece of paper found by the Prince of Morocco who wrongly chooses the gold casket in his pursuit of Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. You might also know the phrase ‘all good things must come to an end’, which may have its origins in a line from Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde. The narrator tells us resignedly at the end of a particularly fun feast that ‘every thynge hath ende’ (3.615). So here, we’ve got a moment where these two canonical authors – Shakespeare and Chaucer – have been fused together to create a funny but somehow still meaningful proverb that was never written by either of them. Splicing them together undermines the authority of these writers, making phrases that we might take for granted strange and unfamiliar.
In my own printing of them things have gone even further astray. ‘All that glisters’ has become a still legible but wildly error-ridden collision of vowels, so that we can just about make out the phrase we’re expecting only by ignoring what’s actually in front of us. The unfamiliar word ‘glisters’, which is soften misquoted as ‘glitters’, comes out as the even more bizarre ‘gliistrs’. If one of the effects of proverbs is to cement phrases so smoothly into our psyche that we glide over them indifferently, then one of the intentions is of Anteverbs is to draw attention to the wrinkles and bumps that join together its pages of mismatched halves. My erroneous printing makes those proverbs even more unexpected, strange, and peculiar. Drawing attention to the process during which I selected each piece of type and accidentally went for the wrong one, my mistakes end up perpetuating the intent behind Anteverbs, which is to make us think twice about the kinds of stock phrases we might barely even notice.
