Belgian Institute
of Graphic Design

‘So now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know. I was deceived to think I could not do this. I have the powers; I take them here. I have the right. I have the means. My words may be poor, but they will have to do.’¹
This is Ophelia’s opening line in Paul Griffiths’ short novel Let Me Tell You (2008). The novel is exclusively composed of the 483 words allotted to the main character in Hamlet. Literally ‘in her own words’, O (since she doesn’t utter her name in Hamlet either) tells the story of her childhood, her relationships with her brother, her father and absent mother, and her early friendship with Hamlet – leading up to the moment she must decide whether to be part of Hamlet’s story or leave Elsinore. Griffiths’ deliberate 483-word constraint gradually shifts his text from prose to dramatic dialogue, from poetry to song. Without getting annoying, the novel constantly confronts the reader with the limits and constructed nature of language. Ophelia is given enough words to express herself, yet also few enough to keep running into the unspeakable.
Words words words. Thomas Meinecke often points to Hélène Cixous’s idea of ‘écriture féminine’ as one of his main inspirations for the way he writes. While browsing for more information on Cixous, I came across a documentary with the appealing title Writing Not Yet Thought. I didn’t really get what Cixous was saying during the interview, but the atmosphere was captivating: because of her black cat who kept coming over to lie down on her desk and with whom she had these intriguing interactions, and because of her mother who was sleeping in the next room so that she was constantly aware of the surrounding noises. At a certain point, she said something that really spoke to me:‘We are many, we are a crew, when we write something.’². I assume she was referring to Mikhail Bakthin’s concept of ‘polyphony’.
I have about sixty handwritten A4 sheets in front of me, all addressed to you. In writing to you, I intended to generate the raw materials for Wouter to use in digitizing my handwriting. I had convinced myself that, in this way, I could embed an echo of you into the typeface we’re creating for Willem’s book design. It sounds completely absurd, I know. Griffiths’ way of ghosting Shakespeare is a lot more obvious. (Speaking of ghosting, I’ve just picked up Avery F. Gordon’s book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997). Have you heard of it? The synopsis made me think of you.) I had hoped that writing by hand would help me, that the words would come pouring out and my letters would start to write themselves, but the result is a bunch of embarrassing, diaristic material about smoking and grief. It’s a kind of writing that makes me wish I were the lowercase ‘e’ in Perec’s La Disparition (1969).
Even as a student, I was already drawn to Perec’s idea of ‘constrained writing’. I still clearly remember the euphoria I felt when I first read about OULIPO, in a text by Jan Baetens if I’m not mistaken. I was working on my thesis in the office of Matthieu’s art gallery – my boyfriend at the time, who had no trouble whatsoever creating things from nothing. In the background, Matthieu and his gallerist Jan Hoet Jr. were having a heated discussion. There had just been a preview of his exhibition and everyone wanted to buy the portrait he had painted of his sister’s baby (the first grandchild in a family of nine). Junior wanted Matthieu to paint more babies, but Matthieu was angry because he didn’t want to work ‘à la tête du client’. In the midst of all this commotion, I was having a kind of revelation as I read about this group of writers who resisted the idea that great stories simply sprout from the genius of the author’s mind. Instead, they proposed an entirely new view of creativity, one rooted in submitting themselves to a set of constraints. I think I felt so euphoric mostly because the possibility of writing myself no longer seemed out of reach. (And don’t get me wrong, I get why Matthieu didn’t want to make commissioned baby portraits. But I’ve always struggled with the way he could so effortlessly and shamelessly place himself at the centre of his work.)
I never expected my attempts at writing to take the form of letters – which is probably why writing feels so difficult. This rather loose and anecdotal format provides no constraints to hide behind. I’m calling it ‘hiding’, but I actually believe that constrained writing, and graphic design too, already reveals plenty about its maker. In an interview with Paul Griffiths, Scott Esposito asks him why he chose the method of constrained writing for his work. This was Griffiths’ response: ‘You invite an autobiographical answer, which I am happy to supply, in order to give credit where it is due. We have to go back to my second year in high school, 1959-60, when our English teacher was John A. Hall. One week, our assignment from him was to write a story in which six objects were to appear: a broken television tube, a bubble car (already there is a sense of the period), a green-eyed yellow idol, and I can’t remember what the other three were. I, at the age of 11 or 12, thought this was absurd and even demeaning – a totally arbitrary cramp on our imaginations and a joke he was playing on us. Just the same, I quite enjoyed writing my story, and arriving at the required objects either stealthily or with panache. The big surprise, however, came at the next lesson, when he invited several of us to read out our stories. They were all completely different. More than that, I could recognize, in the story one of my friends had come up with, how it spoke of him, of his personality.’³

Did I tell you that Willem and I went to see a graphologist? It’s hard to justify why I insisted on this encounter. Willem would not be pleased with a graphological reading of his essay. In his essay, he follows Roland Barthes’ lead, who firmly rejects the idea that handwriting is an authentic expression of who we are: ‘L’écriture, expression de la personnalité? Vraiment?’ ⁴ Barthes claims to have at least three types of handwriting that do not depend on his personality or state of mind, but rather on the kind of reader he’s addressing. Apparently, his handwriting changes depending on whether he’s writing letters, taking notes, or composing theoretical texts. As a graphic designer, I also believe that it’s best to tailor the formal dimension to the content. Although this reasoning is also practical in nature: to convince a client, it’s important to justify formal decisions, otherwise the conversation easily gets bogged down in disputes about what’s beautiful and what’s ugly.
For Willem, handwriting is the result of a most impersonal force, namely one’s physicality. Echoing Barthes, he writes: ‘What manifests itself in handwriting is never primarily an expression of an inner state, nor of our “personality” (graphology), nor of any thought seeking articulation. Before handwriting holds meaning, it is first and foremost “gesture”: a pure movement of the body, of the hand. And as such, this gesture is simply what it is; it does not refer to any external reality. It signifies nothing. Put differently: handwriting says nothing.’⁵
So, it was mostly the personal curiosity of the graphic designer that brought us to the Office for Graphological Studies of Marie-Thérèse Christians-Baetslé. Marie-Thérèse is a proud woman in her late seventies, with an office on the seventh floor of a fancy apartment building on Rue de la Vallée in Ixelles. (Coincidentally, Willem used to live on that very street.) The office overlooks the Jardin du Léopold II, a geometrically structured park designed by Victor Besmé. Within the park stands a statue of Leopold II. His gaze is turned toward the Ixelles Ponds as an implicit sign, subtly guiding visitors where to look or read. There are beautiful trees in the park, including a leather tree, Ptelea trifoliata.
Upon our arrival, Marie-Thérèse tells us that her private apartment is actually on the second floor, and she prefers the view there to the one from her seventh-floor office. It’s closer to street level, allowing her to observe the crowds more attentively. MT’s haircut is marvelous – a perfect ‘mise-en-plis’ that gives maximum volume to the little hair that remains in old age. A semi-permeable crown, one might say, if she were a tree. The perfect touch-up of the hairdo made me suspect she wasn’t exactly following social distancing rules. I only caught a glimpse of her face when she removed her mask to take a sip of water. I was struck by her distinct features.
Dutch isn’t her mother tongue, but she expresses herself effortlessly mixing in French and German words and proverbs – her husband was German. She does this with such ease that it feels as though she’s invented a language of her own. When I fantasize about the novel I’d like to make, I imagine a multilingual book. On our walk, you mentioned that you only manage to write when you write in English. Is that a constraint you’ve imposed on yourself? I hope you’ll write in English if you ever decide to answer my letters.
Once MT is settled in her chair, she tells us she had fun working on a graphological study for a change. She explains that in recent years, she’s mostly been consulted for her forensic expertise in document analysis, determining whether a will has been forged for instance, or identifying the author of an anonymous letter. Authorship verification, it seems, is in high demand. Every now and then, she still gets asked to do a small graphological job (parents wanting reassurance about their child’s choice of studies, couples hoping to validate their relationship before they get married, journalists preparing a cheesy piece on the signatures of Trump and Macron), but the peak demand of the Hudson years is long gone. For over a decade, she held a full-time job as a recruiter at the Ghent-based HR consultancy. Isn’t it crazy to choose an employee based on their handwriting?!
She tells us she recently finished an analysis that made her lose sleep for months. Someone had posted an anonymous letter at the police station, and she was tasked with tracing its author. She had asked the different suspects to copy the letter by hand, but that didn’t provide the evidence she needed. In the end, she drafted a new letter using the same words of the original and asked the suspects to transcribe it using their left hand. This exercise in constrained writing eventually provided the decisive evidence.
I asked her why she still did this kind of work if it caused her sleepless nights, but from her response, I could tell that rest isn’t part of her vocabulary. Marie-Thérèse will keep going until she drops. Work, work, work is her creed. Accordingly, she began our analysis claiming that our handwriting revealed we were both very, very, very hard workers. Neither of us objected, but I’m sure Willem was thinking of all the naps he takes throughout the day. And I was thinking about how I’ve been trying to stick to a nine-to-five routine ever since a difficult period two years ago, barely working on weekends, so I can enjoy time with Robin who’s growing up so fast. I realize how many of the titles on my bookshelf suggest quite the opposite kind of interest (if that says anything about my personality at all): The Right to Be Lazy (Paul Lafargue), Slowness (Milan Kundera), Essays in Idleness (Kenkō), Kairos (Joke Hermsen), Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer) … I’m also reminded of artworks that often cross my mind: The Stand by Steve Paxton, the dérive of the Situationists, Guy Rombouts wetting a paving stone with a small Chinese brush, Francis Alÿs moving a mountain, Marina Abramović’s slow writing performances. Only to be hit by guilt a moment later, because I haven’t posted anything on Instagram in over a year. What kind of designer am I?
MT juggled many different adjectives in her diagnosis, but insecurity wasn’t one of them. ‘One can never quite get a grip on you to identify any insecurity. Rationality always prevails, you don’t show your emotions.’ I’ll spare you the other revelations from our nearly four-hour interview. I had hoped we’d gain more insight into the graphological method, but whenever we asked how she had identified a particular trait, her answers remained cryptic: ‘It’s not that simple. My analysis is based on 366 formal features and their interactions.’ I had hoped Willem would confront her with some of the ideas from his essay, like Barthes’s different kinds of handwriting, but it never came up.
We said goodbye and promised to send her a copy of our book once it was finished. She asked me to let her know when the line above my name had disappeared from my signature: ‘The time will come when you no longer need that protection. When you’ll be able to breathe more deeply.’ I left feeling a bit disillusioned, as if I’d just stepped out of an astrology session. I was pleased that she had referred to me as non-authoritarian, but also slightly disappointed that she hadn’t detected any creativity in my handwriting. I took comfort in the thought that creativity can be defined in many different ways.

MT claims she never reads what the writing actually says. She insists she only examines the text’s formal surface, making clear that she is not influenced by its content.
What fascinates me about the text you gave me, ‘How to “Read” Images with Text: The Graphic Novel Case’ (2011) by Jan Baetens and Steven Surdiacourt, is how it disrupts the conventional opposition between image and text, between seeing and reading: words can be approached not only as text but also as images; conversely, images can be seen but also be read. Reading graphic novels is a ‘multilayered operation’⁶ that requires a different attitude from the reader than, say, reading a classic novel: ‘It can prove extremely helpful to import a certain number of concepts – such as, for example, grammatextuality, diagrammaticity, or voice – that have been defined primarily in verbal contexts. If images are intermedial objects, their theory should also be open to crossovers.’⁷
Like MT, I find it intriguing to sometimes deal with the textual image exclusively. Many designers create books without much concern for the level of content, but excluding this dimension completely doesn’t interest me. Whenever I imagine the novel I would like to make, I envision a blend of text for the sake of signification, text for the sake of image, and all the subtle gradations in between.
Willem’s essay, with its focus on the materiality of language, strongly encourages bringing the design to the forefront. I still fully support the decision to use digitized handwriting for the book design. This choice is intended to make it immediately clear that the book aims to distance itself from traditional facsimile editions. Using digitized handwriting seeks to counterbalance the romantic and nostalgic associations that an original manuscript might evoke. I hope my design will demonstrate to the reader that the opposition between digital and analog is not as binary as Willem’s essay sometimes suggests.
In an effort to avoid graphological or biographical interpretations, it seemed like a good idea to introduce some polyphony and not digitize the author’s handwriting. So when Willem explicitly asked me to turn his essay into an ‘œuvre à quatre mains’, digitizing my own handwriting felt like the obvious next step. At times, the essay’s subject aligns so closely with my own interests (some parts even made me wish I had written them myself) that I felt the need to appropriate the material quite literally. Besides, I also think my handwriting just looks better and is more legible than his – although those aren’t exactly decisive arguments when it comes to the text’s content.
However, now that I’m meeting every two weeks with Wouter van Nes (a former student whom I asked to digitize my handwriting through the Grafische Cel alumni program) and my colleague Frederik Berlaen (a type designer) to mull over my handwriting, I’ve been experiencing quite a few moments of insecurity. I’m not only foregrounding the book design, I’m also foregrounding myself. Sure, I know Wouter is happy to take on this assignment, but I can’t help feeling that I’m taking a somewhat authoritarian stance: asking a former student to digitize my handwriting?!
Wouldn’t it have been wiser to cut production costs in half by using an existing typeface? There are plenty of good digitized handwriting examples out there: Duos or Liza by Underware, for instance, or the Belgian typographer Fernand Baudin’s handwriting, digitized by Caroline Sunier and Charles Mazé, or Roger Excoffon’s Mistral font.
In an article on Mistral in Eye Magazine, Matt soar writes: ‘Excoffon reported that his aim had been to achieve “a handwriting of the man of the twentieth century … a modern handwriting perfectly free, uncodified, and spirited.” After studying hundreds of writing samples and autographs and consulting graphologists, Excoffon ended up using his own handwriting as the basis for the typeface.’⁸ ‘Reproduire l’écriture de l’homme moderne du XXe.⁹ ‘Recréer le symbole graphique de l’homme présent.’¹⁰
A great man with great ambitions… I’m not interested in supporting exaggerated claims about this handwriting or involving great men in the process. I simply wanted to expand ‘the crew’, as Cixous called it, and make room for collaboration with Wouter.

‘Design is problem solving’ is a widely used definition of design. But I have always found that definition too distant and too rational. I like to take detours, and I enjoy slowing down the production process. In the case of Willem’s book, I’m even creating a problem: all this tampering with the narrative perspective, even though no reader will ever realize that this is my handwriting and not the author’s. For that you’d have to rely on language again. And on the meaning of words. I wish I could come up with a formal solution without having to explain myself in an afterword, or add something on the cover like ‘written by Willem, traced by Dear Reader,’. Or something along those lines.
Jan Baetens writes in his text that by blurring the boundaries between image and text, it becomes possible to approach the narrative voice visually. So that, alongside the verbal narrator, the visual narrator also gains importance. Some time ago, a question occurred to me that I find thought-provoking, though I’m not sure whether it makes any sense: ‘Can a typeface be an unreliable narrator?’ Does using my handwriting for Willem’s essay amount to a kind of unreliability? Perhaps it’s because I don’t like to think in instrumental terms like ‘problem solving’ that I find myself adopting narrative concepts. It feels somewhat risky to venture into territory I know so little about. And an essay is perhaps hard to compare to a graphic novel. Maybe I should see myself more as a visual ghostwriter. Marie-Thérèse would probably just call me a forger. I’m not quite sure what to make of my question, but I just wanted to share it with you.
Dear A, is the proposal you made me a long time ago to collaborate under a pseudonym still valid? There’s this idea I’ve been toying with , but I can’t quite put it into words yet. My mind feels too tired, I desperately need a vacation. But you can expect another letter this summer.

Love,
Eva

Credits
Type design: Dear Reader, and Wouter van Nes, with a helping hand from Dries Wiewauters and Frederik Berlaen
Translation: Arne Vanraes