The First: Ahn Sangsoo

I was a literature student. One day, while doing homework, I noticed that a passage I had copied from a book into a word processor and printed looked distinctly different from the original page. The typeface and size seemed the same, but for some reason the book looked much more convincing. It was strange. Then I learned that making letters, sentences, and texts look convincing was called “typography,” and that someone who did this was a “typographer.” Typography appealed to me because it handled letters on a different level from the literature I had studied. Having grown accustomed to the artistic pretensions of my school, I also found it unusual that typography seemed closer to a practical skill with a clear purpose. I thought it would be useful to learn. Above all, the six Korean syllables of “typography” sounded rather elegant for no particular reason.

I no longer remember what I searched for. What I do remember is that, among countless results, his name appeared most often. I trusted Google far more unquestioningly then than I do now, so this meant he was one of Korea’s leading typographers. I emailed him out of the blue to ask for book recommendations. About three minutes later, I received a reply. His email had periods where spaces should have been. Assuming his keyboard’s space bar was broken, I exchanged emails with him for about forty minutes. Only much later did I learn that he used periods instead of spaces. When I asked why, he said there was no particular reason. From then on, however, the periods between words made me read his writing carefully.

The book he recommended was the Korean edition of Emil Ruder’s Typographie. The sentences of this Swiss typographer and graphic designer, who had died more than thirty years earlier, translated by my teacher, had to be read and pondered repeatedly before I could grasp them. The black-and-white illustrations, which simply looked wonderful, seemed somehow secretive despite their purpose. In fact, the type was too small and the book too large to read comfortably. But none of that mattered to a fledgling just beginning to feel his way into typography. The less I could find my bearings in the book, the more I vaguely felt he had handed down a secret scripture to me. It was March 2007, exactly ten years ago, a couple of months before I entered military service.

As it turned out, typography was already present in literature. Although the extent and methods differed, concrete poetry, Oulipo, and the Nouveau Roman were the results of writers being as conscious of form—in other words, typography—as of content, or even more so. In “Silencio,” written, or laid out, by Eugen Gomringer, typography itself became a work that revealed silence. In Georges Perec’s La Disparition and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, it intruded into or seeped through the forms making up the work. Even without digging up a nearly forgotten past or works notable for their form, typography was something writers, especially poets, had to consider as they wrote. The same sentence conveyed subtly different things depending on where it broke into a new line or stanza, where a period or comma appeared, or how often a particular word or phrase was repeated.

After entering military service, I had neither occasion nor means to contact him. But the book he had recommended stayed at my desk and proved useful for reports to superiors and banners for events large and small. All I did was make important parts larger or colored and the rest smaller or uncolored, but that was enough in the military.

About two years later, I met him for the first time at a letterpress workshop for Hongik University’s graduate school. It was his answer to the email I had sent as a kind of report on my discharge. His email still had periods where spaces should have been. Boarding the number 2200 bus to Paju at Hapjeong Station, I had no idea I would take that bus every morning for the next five years or so. It began to rain outside the window. He was tall and wore a red cap. When I greeted him awkwardly with wet hair, he raised a long arm and pointed to my seat. What stayed with me from the three-day workshop was less the setting of a few business cards I would never show anyone and a few poems than the rain that fell throughout, and above all the Kuretake brush pen and small “daily collection notebook” tucked into his shirt pocket.

Afterward, I worked in his office for half a year. What I saw most often was him taking a brush pen and notebook from his shirt pocket, blotched here and there with ink, before doing anything. He did the same when meeting someone. He wrote things down. He wrote down what he had done and what he had to do, then which of those things mattered and which did not. He wrote phrases for posters and postcards he would make someday. He wrote down people’s names and email addresses, and the names of bakeries. When his brush pen ran out of ink, he used a pencil; when his notebook ran out of blank pages, he pulled out a tissue and wrote on it. He also revised. He revised after writing and while writing. He stored filled notebooks in layers on the shelves in his office, retrieving them whenever needed. Typography came later. His tools have since become more varied and convenient—Facebook, Evernote, FoxPro—but everything he did seemed to begin with writing things down. That is why, to this day, he remains to me “a person who writes things down,” more than a typographer or graphic designer. If I learned anything about typography from him, it was not which typeface to use at what size and line spacing, but the importance of content and the attitude with which one creates it. In that sense, I would like to use this opportunity to add a sentence to the end of the first email I sent him: “But there was someone in that room.”

Looking back, perhaps I met him because of Google. However trivial, something done for the first time is worth remembering because it is a first. Yet everything differs at least a little from what came before, so everything is always a first, and nothing is unworthy of remembrance. That is why I have written, as I please, about a few of the many firsts I have shared with him, from learning how to put a letter properly into an envelope to helping prepare a new school and teaching there. This is a first.