Publishers as Authors

Though foundational to copyright law, authors are not its only proprietary beneficiaries. Publishers, too, are recognised as holding ownership rights in books. In the United Kingdom, section 1(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (‘CDPA 1988’) defines copyright as a ‘property right’Footnote ¹ that subsists not only in ‘original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works’Footnote ² but also in ‘the typographical arrangement of published editions’.Footnote ³ Under section 8(1) of the same Act, a ‘published edition’ means that of ‘the whole or any part of one or more literary, dramatic, or musical works’, though the House of Lords has clarified that the published edition of a newspaper referred to the publication as whole rather than to any of its constitutive articles.Footnote ⁴ This category of copyright is primarily intended to protect the publisher’s interests rather than the contributing authors’. Yet, the Act also defines the publisher as the ‘author’ of the typographical arrangement of any published edition, ‘the person who creates it’,Footnote ⁵ as if copyright in published editions were grounded in authorship as the fundamental basis on which the law proceeds.

Compared with copyright in the literary work, copyright in typographical arrangement is of fairly recent origin, first recognised only in the Copyright Act 1956.Footnote ⁶ As noted in some legal authorities, typographical copyright (also known as ‘published edition copyright’) arose partly in response to contemporaneous technological developments, particularly improvements in optical lithography that eased the reproduction of printed editions.Footnote ⁷ In the 1952 Report of the Copyright Committee, it is recorded that the Publishers Association had proposed the inclusion of copyright in typographical arrangement in the Copyright Act 1956 so as to prevent any ‘unscrupulous competitor’Footnote ⁸ from reproducing the printed edition of any literary or musical work ‘by photolithography or similar means’.Footnote ⁹ Having made the production of reprints faster and cheaper than traditional typesetting, photographic technology was exploited to reap the benefits of the publisher’s investments in the original edition. Photolithography was referenced in section 15(3) of the Copyright Act 1956, which defined the infringing act of the publisher’s copyright as ‘the making, by any photographic or similar process, of a reproduction of the typographical arrangement of the edition’.Footnote ¹⁰ Though the Publishers Association had pushed for a fifty-year term of protection, the Copyright Committee decided that a twenty-five-year term, which corresponded to that of copyright in gramophone records, films and photographs, would be sufficient.Footnote ¹¹ The perspective on publishers as authors of typographical work anticipated the present approach adopted in the CDPA 1988. Under the English copyright system of today, the publisher is recognised to be an author inasmuch as it is to this individual that the creation of the typography is attributed. The existence of such a causal relationship between author and work is the factual basis on which a property right in typographical arrangement is granted to the publisher.

The co-subsistence of literary and typographical copyright in any printed publication under this expanded rubric of authorship was discussed in Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc.Footnote ¹² Tasked to clarify the boundaries of typographical copyright, the House of Lords addressed two main issues: the first being whether a ‘published edition’ referred to the individual articles of a newspaper or to the newspaper as whole; and the second, whether there was any substantial reproduction of the pertinent typographical arrangement that amounted to copyright infringement. In what follows, I review Lord Hoffmann’s response to both questions so as to generate a working understanding of copyright’s treatment of the literary artefact and its material form.Footnote ¹³ Doing so paves the way for this chapter’s analysis of how the materialities of Breitkopf Frakur, the typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set, disclose the limits of the law’s account of literature as objects of intellectual property.

In Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd v Marks & Spencer Plc, the relevant genre of publication was that of newspapers, particularly national and regional newspapers.Footnote ¹⁴ As Lord Hoffmann noted, each newspaper was understood as comprised of multiple objects in which different categories of copyright could subsist at the same time.Footnote ¹⁵ The individual articles were ‘literary works’ that, if ‘original’, were protected under section 1(1)(a) of the CDPA 1988. The same section provides for the protection of original ‘artistic works’, which would have covered any original drawings and photographs in the newspaper. Regarding the dispute at hand, however, the pertinent aspect of the newspaper was its typographical layout, the protection of which was prescribed under section 1(1)(c) of the same Act. Typographical copyright in newspapers had been assigned by their publishers to the plaintiff-appellant, a company that dealt with copyright licensing on their behalf. The plaintiff-appellant had issued a licence to a press cutting agency for the copying of portions of those newspapers, the latter service of which had been contractually obtained by defendant-respondent. However, the defendant-respondent had made further copies of those cuttings and distributed them to its employees without any license to do so. The plaintiff-appellants claimed that copyright in the typographical arrangement of the newspapers, specifically the typographical arrangement of each individual article, had been infringed. The first issue was whether the notion of ‘published edition’ whose typographical arrangement was protected under the CDPA 1988 referred to the newspaper as a whole or to the individual articles. Did the publisher hold copyright in the typographical arrangement of each article of the newspaper or only in the layout of the entire publication? If the former was true, any photocopy of a press cutting would likely mean a ‘facsimile copy’ of the typographical arrangement of the article that constitutes copyright infringement under section 17(5) of the CDPA 1988; if the latter, there would arise the further question of whether the replicated typography was a ‘substantial part’ of the layout of the entire newspaper, the substantiality requirement for infringement being referenced in section 16(3)(a) of the same Act.Footnote ¹⁶

Lord Hoffmann’s decision may be understood in reference to two positions advanced by the lower court judges that he would overrule. For both the High Court judge, Lightman J, and the dissenting judge in the Court of Appeal decision, Chadwick LJ, typographical copyright materially aligned with literary copyright in that the former subsisted in the layout of each literary work.Footnote ¹⁷ Insofar as each article of the newspaper constituted a ‘literary work’, it also constituted a distinct ‘published edition’ whose typographical arrangement was protected under the CDPA 1988. In support of this position, Lightman J cited Walton J’s decision in Machinery Market Ltd v Sheen Publishing LtdFootnote ¹⁸ as an agreeing precedent. The earlier case concerned advertisements in a trade magazine published by the plaintiff that had been photographically reproduced without permission in another rival magazine published by the defendant. In addressing the question of whether the defendant had infringed any typographical copyright provided under section 15 of the Copyright Act 1956, Walton J held that each advertisement was a ‘literary work’ whose printing in the magazine constituted a ‘published edition’ within the meaning of that section. Since only the head and foot of the original advertisements had been altered in their reproduced forms, there was a substantial copying of the typographical arrangement of each advertisement that amounted to copyright infringement. Affirming the precedent, Lightman J held in the present case that copyright subsisted in the typographical arrangement of each newspaper article, and the typographical arrangements were substantially reproduced by the defendant in the photocopies distributed to its employees.

When the case reached the Court of Appeal, Chadwick LJ diverged from the majority reversal of Lightman J’s decision, agreeing instead with the latter’s construction of typographical copyright as being attached to the individual literary work within the newspaper. Nonetheless, less reliance was placed on Machinery Market Ltd v Sheen Publishing Ltd, which Chadwick LJ found to lack evidence of the Court’s substantial engagement with the possibility that the pertinent layout might be that of the entire publication rather than that of the individual contribution.Footnote ¹⁹ According to the majority opinions by Gibson LJ and Mance LJ, the intended legislative meaning of ‘published edition’ was that of its ‘natural’Footnote ²⁰ and ‘commercial’Footnote ²¹ meaning, which they understood to be the entire product made and sold by the publishers. As the latter put it, ‘What is on this basis protected corresponds with the commercial product which the publisher creates, publishes and sells, that is the whole edition.’Footnote ²² Opposing their interpretation, Chadwick LJ based his interpretation of section 8(1) of the CDPA 1988 on a definition of ‘edition’ in the Oxford English Dictionary: just as ‘edition’ was defined as ‘[one] of the differing forms in which a literary work … was published’,Footnote ²³ so too did ‘published edition’, in its reference to ‘one or more literary … works’, extend to the entire publication and to each of the constituent works. For Chadwick LJ, it would be ‘artificial’Footnote ²⁴ to hold that each of the literary works of a newspaper did not constitute a ‘published edition’. For instance, where a musical score and lyrics were published as a single choral work, there would be three published editions with their respective typographical arrangements: the published edition of the score as a musical work, that of the lyrics as a literary work, and that of the combined work.Footnote ²⁵ By analogy, the multiple literary and artistic works published as part of any newspaper would imply multiple typographical copyrights, with those of the individual articles subsisting alongside that of the newspaper as a whole.

Departing from the interpretations of the two lower court judges, Lord Hoffmann delinked the concept of published edition from that of the literary work, arguing that the statutory definition evidenced the lack of any ‘necessary congruence’Footnote ²⁶ (nor any ‘necessary correlation’Footnote ²⁷) between the two concepts. Unlike Chadwick LJ, Lord Hoffmann did not think that the phrase ‘one or more literary … works’ in the definition of published edition implied any legislative recognition of the constituent work as an object in which typographic copyright subsisted. Rather, the same phrase was read to affirm that the published edition could well comprise multiple works, which meant that it exceeded the proportions of the individual work and referred to the published product as a whole. Echoing the majority judges of the Court of Appeal, Lord Hoffmann adopted what he understood to be the meaning of the term as used in the publishing industry: ‘The edition is the product, generally between covers, which the publisher offers to the public.’Footnote ²⁸ Parliament intended for ‘published edition’ to mean ‘what a publisher would understand by an edition’,Footnote ²⁹ which was not that of a literary work within a larger publication. With respect to each newspaper whose parts had been photocopied by the defendant-respondent, then, only one typographical copyright (namely, typographical arrangement of the publication in its entirety) had been vested in the publisher and later assigned to the plaintiff-appellant.Footnote ³⁰

Before commenting on what Lord Hoffmann’s reply to the first definitional issue reveals about copyright’s treatment of the literary artefact and its material form, let us note his no-less-illuminating response to the second issue concerning the substantiality requirement of typographical copyright infringement. Having decided that the pertinent typographical arrangement was that of each newspaper in its entirety, Lord Hoffmann then considered whether the partial photocopies made by the defendant-respondent amounted to substantial parts of each arrangement. The starting point was that the substantiality requirement for copyright infringement involved a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, assessment of that which had been copied.Footnote ³¹ This meant that it was not a question of how much had been reproduced, but whether the reproduced matter sufficiently reflected the sort of underlying ‘interest’Footnote ³² protected by the particular category of copyright. In the instance of a literary or an artistic work, the protected interest was reflected in the standard of originality based on which copyright protection was granted, namely in the ‘skill and labour’Footnote ³³ that the author had invested in the work’s creation. Similarly, with respect to typographical copyright, the substantial copying of any typographical arrangement was to be determined in reference to the skill and labour involved in its original production. As Lord Hoffmann put it, ‘one must ask whether there has been copying of sufficient of the relevant skill and labour to constitute a substantial part of the edition’s typographical arrangement’.Footnote ³⁴

In Lord Hoffmann’s brief account of the nature of the skill and labour involved in producing the typographical arrangement of a modern newspaper, we find an instance of copyright law’s attempt to find a vocabulary with which to describe the visual materiality of the printed text and the processes that produced it:

Lord Hoffmann analytically divided the visible form or ‘appearance’ of the newspaper as a whole into different types of content, ranging from its ‘typeface’, ‘fonts’, ‘columns’ and ‘margins’ to various examples of its textual (‘headlines’, ‘strap lines’ and ‘articles’) and visual images (‘photographs’ and ‘advertisements’). Further, he recognised these typographic components to be spatially interrelated, their ‘arrangement’ evidenced in the relationship between different types of pages (e.g. the ‘front page’ of headlines and other pages with advertisements) and in the combination of elements that constitute a single page.Footnote ³⁶ For Lord Hoffmann, it was the making of these various aspects of the newspaper’s presentation, described in terms of a ‘typographical vocabulary’, that instantiated the ‘skill and labour’ protected by typographical copyright. Since copyright law recognises the publisher to be the proprietary author of the published edition under copyright law, the publisher is the very subject to whom the law attributes the exercise of such protected skill and labour.

Taking the newspaper page to be the basic evidential unit by which the publisher’s typographical labour was expressed, Lord Hoffmann agreed with the Court of Appeal decision that none of the photocopied press cuttings sufficiently replicated a substantial part of the presentation of each newspaper. Because many of these photocopies entailed items that were refitted to appear on A4-sized sheets, they did not even reproduce the full article itself. Accordingly, the House of Lords unanimously held that there was no infringement of typographical copyright.

Lord Hoffmann’s reply to these two issues in typographical copyright suggests that copyright law is no stranger to the visual materiality of the text. To begin with, the very recognition of a property right in the typographical arrangement of a newspaper, as opposed to only those in the literary and artistic works comprising it, evidences the copyright system’s understanding that the book consists of more than what are typically regarded as its interpretable or semantic ‘contents’. Rather, the very optical conditions that make these contents legible to the reader, variously called the newspaper ‘design’, ‘layout’ and ‘presentation’, are registered in copyright law as useful products of skill and labour deserving of protection. Already in the High Court decision there was a dual recognition of the pertinent subject matter of protection as ‘the image on the page’Footnote ³⁷ and of its basic significance to the reading experience: ‘The typographical arrangement of a newspaper is of importance to the general reader, for it affects how reader friendly are the newspapers and the articles in it and the impact of the contents on the reader.’Footnote ³⁸ Those instances of the ‘typographical vocabulary’ cited by Lord Hoffmann would suggest the law’s recognition of some of those tangible means by which its contents are relayed to the readers.

Yet, this remains a quite specific, and parochial, understanding of the visual materiality of the printed text. By virtue of its operation as a problem-solving institution with its own substantive doctrines and interpretive practices, copyright law apprehends the visible surface of the publication only in a way that accords with the norms and rationality of the system. For instance, Lord Hoffmann only enumerated the typographical components of ‘typeface’, ‘columns’, ‘margins’ and so forth because these were understood as comprising the product of the publisher’s ‘skill and labour’. It was by reference to the perceived interest underlying typographical copyright, particularly the interest in protecting the publisher’s investments, that the typography of the newspaper was defined. Further, the significance of typographical arrangement is limited to its role in presenting a ‘reader-friendly’ product, the making of which the utilitarian copyright system regulates and promotes through the granting of intellectual-proprietary rights to publishers and authors. Viewed alongside the system’s broad objective of encouraging the production of new works, typographic arrangements matter only in terms of their communicative-commercial function.

Despite recognising the importance of typography to reading and communication, copyright law insists on a strict bifurcation of the literary artefact into its constitutive ‘literary and artistic works’ on the one hand, and its overall ‘typographical arrangement’ on the other. This is apparent not only in the statutory ascription of a distinct category of proprietary right with its own mode of infringement to each subject matter but also in Lord Hoffmann’s delinking of the concept of published edition from that of the underlying works. Pursuant to his judgment, the pertinent ‘typographical arrangement’ under section 1(1)(c) of the CDPA 1988 is doubly removed from the literary work: one, consistent with the Act’s categorisation of objects and rights, copyright in the ‘literary work’ is affirmed to be distinct from copyright in the typography of its published form. Whereas the latter can be infringed only with a ‘facsimile copy’,Footnote ³⁹ that is, with an exact reproduction of the visible surface of the work, the former may be infringed with the reproduction of the work ‘in any material form’, that is, with an inexact copying of its expression that, nonetheless, reproduces something essential to the work. Recognising this difference between the two types of copyright, Lord Hoffmann cited the case of Designers Guild Ltd v Russell Williams (Textiles) Ltd (trading as Washington DC),Footnote ⁴⁰ which had found there to be a substantial reproduction of a fabric design amounting to copyright infringement even though the reproduced fabric lacked any ‘photographic fidelity’Footnote ⁴¹ to the original. Though the case pertained to artistic copyright, it attested to copyright law’s protection of something beyond the material surface of the work, which Lord Hoffmann recognised to be no less applicable to literary, dramatic and musical works.Footnote ⁴² Second, in so affirming a ‘holistic’ understanding of ‘published edition’, Lord Hoffmann distinguished the typography of the publication as a whole from that of each of the contributing works, thus further separating the spheres of literary works and typographical arrangements.

My claim is that copyright law’s bifurcation of the literary artefact into the two aspects of authorial expression and typographical arrangement works to generate and sustain the order of proprietary rights ascribed to the subjects of authors and publishers. On the one hand, the object of the original ‘literary work’ is recognised to be the creation of its author or authors, whose investment of skill and labour into the work’s production is protected through the law’s granting of a property right in the work, including the exclusive right of reproduction. On the other, the conceptually distinct object of the entire typographical arrangement of the work’s published edition is conceived to be the output of the publisher or publishers, which similarly warrants copyright protection. Both instances converge in their (re)production of an originalist aesthetics of the literary artefact as being divided between the labours of authors and publishers, both of whom are perceived to be the creators of those intangible objects fixed in the medium of the text. As publishers, too, are seen as author-creators, reproduced across the rift between the rightful domains of each of the two subjects is a common myth of authorship: the idea that embodied in literary artefacts are distinct ideal objects with their respective subjects standing over against them as their rightful owner-creators.

This chapter continues to problematise the myth of authorship ratified and entrenched by the doctrines of typographical and literary copyright. I probe the limits of the legal account of literature by attending to the materialities of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which Kant’s 1785 essay was set. To sharpen Kant’s account of the visual-corporeal dimension of literature, I juxtapose his text with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s 1793 contribution to the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the latter of which both anticipates and undermines the contemporary copyright perspective.Footnote ⁴³ I then turn to some aspects of the production and perception of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in which the essays were set, attending to their implications on the question of authorship. In line with Chapter 2’s focus on the print machinery of the German Enlightenment, I argue that these materialities of Breitkopf Fraktur direct us to the profound interactions between human actors and print technologies that constitute the printed book, the complexity of which far exceeds copyright’s account of literature.

The Eyes and Bodies of Literature

More than a century and a half before typographical copyright was first legislated in the United Kingdom, questions about the relationship between the ideal and material dimensions of literature, between the intangible and tangible properties in books, had already surfaced in Germany. The typographical materiality of the printed book was explicitly broached in Kant’s 1785 essay, though it also fundamentally informed Fichte’s later text. Comparing these two exemplary contributions to the Berlinische Monatsschrift would not only sharpen our understanding of the aesthetics of literary property today and its continuities with older modes of thinking dating back to the German Enlightenment but also uncover an alternative way of approaching the literary artefact that displaces the limits of copyright.

Fichte’s and Kant’s pieces contributed to a long historical debate concerning the wrongfulness of the reprinting of books and other publications, which occurred within the broader context of print proliferation, unauthorised reprinting and the weakly regulated book trade of the Holy Roman Empire during the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁴ As discussed in Chapter 2, amidst the growing demand for reading materials during that time, German authors and publishers were confronting the unauthorised reprinting of their texts. Though dating back to at least the late fifteenth century, the problem of unauthorised reprinting only reached ‘epidemic proportions’Footnote ⁴⁵ during the eighteenth century with the heightening profitability of books corresponding to their rising demand amidst higher literacy rates, a shift in reading habits and other contributing historical changes. In the literature on this topic we often find mention of the lack of effective legal mechanisms to regulate the unauthorised copying and sale of publications within the markedly fragmentary political context of the Holy Roman Empire, which was comprised of more than three hundred states unbound by any common government or uniform legal code.Footnote ⁴⁶ Prior to the first German copyright lawsFootnote ⁴⁷ it was principally a system of privilege (privilegium impressorium) that regulated the book trade.Footnote ⁴⁸ Upon application to the pertaining German state authorities, privileges could be issued to authors, publishers and printers to prohibit the reprinting and sale of particular books in the territory within a specific period of time without the privilege holder’s consent.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fragmentary political context, however, frustrated the efforts of privilege holders to take action against pirate publishers and printers. Privilege protection was geographically limited in the sense that it applied only within the borders of the state that had granted it.Footnote ⁵⁰ To seek full protection, then, the author, publisher or printer had to apply for a privilege in every state, which was impractical. Further, the states held divided positions on book piracy, which effectively meant that book pirates could continue with their otherwise prohibited activities in those states that endorsed them. Whereas the Prussian government was willing to negotiate with other states to vindicate the interests of Prussian publishers whose books had been pirated, the government also silently endorsed the pirating activities of its own publishers.Footnote ⁵¹ Piracy was even actively promoted in Austria and other southern German states, producing the infamously prolific Viennese pirate publisher and bookseller, Johann Thomas von Trattner.Footnote ⁵² Pursuant to the activities of reprinting and sale, legitimate publishers and authors suffered losses that affected their trade and livelihood.Footnote ⁵³ The circumstances led to a long debate over the wrongfulness of reprinting, which Woodmansee dated as having happened between 1773 and 1794.Footnote ⁵⁴ Participants in the debate ranged from publishers and jurists to poets and philosophers, amongst whom were Fichte and Kant.Footnote ⁵⁵

Fichte’s essay offers a Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks (‘proof of the wrongfulness of reprinting’), the focus of which coheres with the author’s prioritisation of the moral and legal question raised by the practice over that of its utility (see Figure 3.1). Contrary to preceding voices in the debate that had argued for the permissibility of reprinting based on its public benefits, Fichte thought that no utility could justify a wrongful practice.Footnote ⁵⁶ To prove the wrongfulness of reprinting was to overrule all arguments for the practice grounded in its usefulness. There are two parts to Fichte’s case that may seem to cohere with certain aspects of modern copyright and intellectual property law. One, it was from a proprietary perspective that Fichte evaluated the practice of unauthorised reprinting, arguing that the author held ‘ownership’Footnote ⁵⁷ (Eigenthum) of something in the book implying the wrongfulness of the practice. Contrary to the limited terms for copyright protection in today’s legal systems, however, Fichte understood literary property as being ‘perpetual’Footnote ⁵⁸ or ‘enduring’Footnote ⁵⁹ (fortdaurend). Two, Fichte advanced a concept of the book premised on a twofold distinction that some copyright scholars have suggested as having anticipated the idea/expression dichotomy of modern copyright law.Footnote ⁶⁰ Fichte distinguished the ‘physical aspect’Footnote ⁶¹ [das körperliche] of the book, particularly the ‘printed page’Footnote ⁶² [das bedruckte Papier], from its ‘ideal aspect’Footnote ⁶³ [sein Geistiges], the division of which resembles our present legal categorisation of literary objects into personal property on the one hand and intellectual property on the other. As Fichte noted, whereas the lawful purchase of a physical book would have granted its buyer absolute ownership of it (including the right of its destruction), the transaction would not have necessarily granted the buyer any property right in its ideal aspect.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet, Fichte also observed that a book was typically bought to be read, that is, not for its paper per se but for its ‘content’ [Inhalt], suggesting then that a right in something relating to its ideal aspect had passed to the purchaser.Footnote ⁶⁵ This was where Fichte drew a second distinction between two parts to the ideal aspect of the book that served as the conceptual basis on which to prove the wrongfulness of reprinting:

Having thus differentiated between the ‘content’ and ‘form’ of the ideal aspect of the book, Fichte argued that the buyer of the book acquired, along with its printed paper, the right to appropriate its ideal content through the investment of mental labour. Not accidentally, Fichte illustrated the exercise of such an acquired right through the example of an ‘assiduous and rational study’Footnote ⁶⁷ of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (‘Critique of Pure Reason’). The book’s content was potentially ‘the common property of many’Footnote ⁶⁸ in the sense that it could at once be held by multiple readers by virtue of its ideal or intangible nature. As regards the ‘form’ of the ideas in the book, Fichte claimed that it remained ‘forever [the author’s] exclusive property’.Footnote ⁶⁹ It was on the basis of this perpetual and exclusive property of the author that Fichte both justified the practice of authorised publication and condemned the practice of unauthorised reprinting. Through a publishing contract the publisher acquired from the author a particular property right or ‘usufruct’,Footnote ⁷⁰ which permitted the publisher to ‘sell’Footnote ⁷¹ the right to appropriate the ideas of the book by printing and marketing it to the public. Reprinting without the author’s permission was wrongful because it effectively ‘usurped’Footnote ⁷² the usufruct that only the author, as the rightful owner of the ‘form’ in the book, could have granted.

Figure 3.1 First page of Fichte’s 1793 essay.

In Fichte’s distinction between form and content, one may find echoes of the modern idea/expression dichotomy. Specifically, Fichte’s recognition of the ideas presented in the book as potentially exceeding any individual’s exclusive right of possession or control could be compared to the ‘idea’ limb of the modern dichotomy, which affirms ideas as being unencumbered by intellectual property rights and belonging to the public domain.Footnote ⁷³ In Hollinrake v Truswell,Footnote ⁷⁴ the English Court of Appeal offered one of the earliest formulations of the dichotomy: ‘Copyright … does not extend to ideas, or schemes, or systems, or methods; it is confined to their expression; and if their expression is not copied the copyright is not infringed.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Lindley LJ held that the copied method of measuring parts of the arm and elbow for the cutting of a sleeve, which had been printed on a piece of cardboard, was not the subject matter of copyright protection within the meaning of section 2 of the Copyright Act 1842. The dichotomy is often justified on the grounds that ideas should not be monopolised by any private individual, but rather should remain freely available for public use.Footnote ⁷⁶ For instance, in Baker v Seldon,Footnote ⁷⁷ which was the precedent cited by the English Court of Appeal in support of the dichotomy, the United States Supreme Court held that an author’s copyright in a book describing a system of book-keeping did not extend to the system itself. The latter was seen to be the ‘common property of the whole world’Footnote ⁷⁸ that could be used and explained by any author in their own way. As Justice Bradley put it, the object of publishing a book on science or the arts, which was ‘to communicate to the world the useful knowledge which it contains’,Footnote ⁷⁹ would be ‘frustrated if the knowledge could not be used without incurring the guilt of piracy of the book’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The judicial recognition of ideas presented in the book as ‘common property’ belonging to no single author would seem to resonate with Fichte’s concept of content, the latter of which was understood to bear the potential for appropriation by those labouring to read it. Similarly, Fichte’s ascription of property rights in the ‘form’ of the book, described to be the ‘phrasing and wording’ in which ideas are presented, seems to anticipate copyright law’s understanding of original ‘expression’ in modern copyright law, or the ‘way in which ideas are expressed’, as the proper subject matter of protection. Copyright scholars such as Friedemann Kawohl and Martin Kretschmer have, accordingly, stressed the ‘huge influence’Footnote ⁸¹ of Fichte’s distinction between form and content on the development of national, regional and international copyright law, which have codified the idea/expression dichotomy.

Nonetheless, Fichte’s concept of form was based on a theory of the mind as the giver of literary form – a theory that copyright doctrine could, at most, be said to tacitly reflect in its recognition of the author as being the originating source of literary expression. Early in the essay, Fichte foregrounded the central importance of the mind to his proof by noting that the proof was grounded in the ‘immediately self-evident’Footnote ⁸² presupposition that ‘we are the rightful owners of a thing the appropriation of which by another is physically impossible’.Footnote ⁸³ This inalienable thing, as Fichte would clarify, was the ‘mind’Footnote ⁸⁴ or ‘spirit’ [Geist] of the person. For Fichte, it was the mind that gave ideas their perceptible form, without which ideas would be incapable of being thought, much less of being presented to another. The perceptibility of form was stressed in his recognition that there were no ‘pure ideas without sensible images [reine Ideen ohne sinnliche Bilder]’,Footnote ⁸⁵ the latter of which had to be supplied by the individual mind. In the case of books, it was the mind of the writer that gave perceptible form to the ideas presented in the books. It was impossible for this form to be appropriated. To read the book was to ‘assimilate [aufnehmen]’Footnote ⁸⁶ its ideas to the reader’s own ‘system of thought [Gedankensystem]’,Footnote ⁸⁷ which meant giving a new form to those ideas that necessarily diverged from the preceding form given by the author. To publish the book with permission was to exercise the usufruct the author had granted to the publisher, which involved the passing of a property right but not the property itself. To reprint the book without permission was to appropriate not the form of its ideas but only the usufruct that the author alone was capable of granting. In all three instances the literary form remained the inalienable property of the author by virtue of its origination in the latter’s mind. Insofar as copyright expression, too, is understood as causally deriving from its author-creator, the doctrine could be said to grant a similar sort of priority to the author’s mental labour. However, copyright law does not go so far as to articulate any equivalent concept of inalienable property in the book that is generated by mental processes of formation and assimilation unique to the minds of authors and readers.

The theory of mind that defines Fichte’s concept of form leads us closer to the place of materiality in his essay. Notions of materiality have already surfaced in our reprisal of Fichte’s twofold distinction between the physical and the ideal and between content and form, structuring it from within. In the initial fold, the matter of the book was valuable to Fichte as that which served to be negated to identify the ideal object in which authors and readers were truly interested. It was against the ‘printed paper’Footnote ⁸⁸ of the book that its ideal dimension was defined, the latter of which was prioritised as being the ultimate object of the book transaction. Nonetheless, as if defying conceptual repression, the negated term would return in the second fold, this time informing both sides of the binary forming the book’s ideal aspect. The content and ideas presented in the book were understood to be its ‘material aspect’,Footnote ⁸⁹ suggesting that those ideas shared a material basis with the printed paper. The materiality of ideas would be reaffirmed in Fichte’s recognition of the impossibility of ‘pure ideas without sensible images’Footnote ⁹⁰ and of the concomitant necessity of ideas to bear perceptible form. Thus, despite being the prioritised term in the second fold, the form of ideas, too, was understood in terms of the visible letters appearing on the page: ‘the phrasing and wording in which [ideas] are presented’.Footnote ⁹¹ Literary property was, at once, material property. Rather than being external to the proof advanced by the philosopher of German Idealism, materiality was the integral structural motif that defined its basic distinction.

Yet, as Fichte’s underlying theory of mind would suggest, the literary form in which the author held perpetual property bore an ultimately subjective aspect that exceeded its ostensibly objective presentation in the material book. This meant that Fichte’s understanding of literary form was not reducible to the combination of letters printed in the book. Rather, it continually extended from the mind that had produced it, enduring as something beyond the book’s surface. A clue to the subjectivity of form was given in Fichte’s recognition of form as being no less inalienable, no less ‘physically impossible’Footnote ⁹² to appropriate, than the mind that had generated it. Form could not be the object of theft because, against the appearance of the book, it remained bound to its originating mind. In their own ways, Kretschmer-Kawohl and Mario Biagioli have similarly observed the non-exhaustion of literary form by the arrangement of letters in the book. Kretschmer-Kawohl have twice noted a ‘tension’Footnote ⁹³ and ‘contradiction’Footnote ⁹⁴ in Fichte’s concept of form, which at once referred to ‘the process of formation’Footnote ⁹⁵ of the literary work and its ‘result’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The former sense was dependent on the individual who had given the form, be they the author who had articulated the book’s ideas or the reader who had appropriated them, whereas the latter seemed to pertain to the book itself or at least some aspect of it.Footnote ⁹⁷ Biagioli has emphasised that, unlike intellectual property law, Fichte did not reify or ‘fetishize’Footnote ⁹⁸ the book as that in which the author held property, but instead simply suggested that it bore ‘material traces’Footnote ⁹⁹ of something else he called ‘form’. What has been commonly noted is that Fichte understood form to be something necessarily exceeding the material combination of letters in the book precisely because it remained attached to the mind in which it had originated. Hence, the apparent reassertion of materiality in Fichte’s concept of form is complicated by its underpinning theory of mind, whose relationship with the material remains ambiguous. It is unclear if Fichte understood the mind itself to bear any material basis, notwithstanding its predominant association with the ideal. What we can say, though, is that Fichte conceived of literary form as extending beyond the printed words of the book. Further, this object of literary property is recognised to be created by the author alone and, by virtue of the singularity of its creation, to be immune from appropriation.

Unlike Fichte’s account, Kant’s proposed solution to the problem of reprinting in late eighteenth-century Germany did not rely on any concept of intellectual property. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, Kant advanced a non-proprietary perspective on author’s rights that was grounded in a concept of the book as communicative medium and visual object in particular. For Kant, the book served to relay to the public a speech necessarily spoken in its author’s name. ‘In a book, as a writing, the author speaks to his reader; and the one who has printed the book speaks, by his copy, not for himself but simply and solely in the author’s name. He presents the author as speaking publicly and only mediates delivery of his speech to the public.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The right that the author held in relation to the book was conceived not as any proprietary right but as a personal right of self-expression that extended from the author’s personhood. In Kant’s view, the author had an ‘inalienable right (ius personalissimum)’Footnote ¹⁰¹ for the speech to be communicated in his own name. Under this ‘most personal right’,Footnote ¹⁰² it was ultimately the author who spoke through the book printed by the publisher. Pursuant to the same fundamental right, the author granted the publisher the right to publish the book by means of a contract.Footnote ¹⁰³ To reprint the book without such a right was to wrong both the legitimate publisher and the author: doing so not only subtracted the profits of the formerFootnote ¹⁰⁴ but further, in so relaying the speech without his permission, violated the latter’s ‘innate right in his own person’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ that is, to speak only as he willed.

Notice that, even as Kant prioritised the author as the ultimate subject in whose name the book’s speech was necessarily communicated, he credited the publisher’s involvement in the production of the book. More so than in Fichte’s essay, the publisher arose as a key figure without whom the book would not be presented to the reading public. Whereas Fichte had focused on the author’s act of giving form to ideas as the central act that created literary property, it was the process of ‘publishing’ [Verlag] and its significance to the problematic that Kant sought to clarify from the outset:

For Kant, it was simply misleading to see publishing as the exercise of a proprietary right in the written manuscript or printed book because the author’s right in his thoughts was essentially inalienable and, thus, not of a proprietary nature. As the right was ‘left to [the author] regardless of the unauthorized publication’, it should be understood to be a personal right instead. As we have recalled, Kant’s subsequent reconstrual of publishing as a process of relaying the author’s speech was based on such a personal understanding of the author’s communicative right, that is, a right to have the speech communicated in their own name that existed by virtue of their personhood. In so conceiving of the book as communicative medium, Kant did not lose sight of the publisher’s role in literary production.

Further, Kant saw the very visuality of the printed book to be that which afforded its relay of the author’s speech to the public. Whereas copyright scholars have tended to interpret Kant’s essay as prescribing a speech act theory of the literary work,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ the essay also sharply registered the medial-material conditions of possibility of literary communication. The optical medium of print, Kant observed, was the material basis on which eighteenth-century book publishing occurred: ‘[The publisher] indeed provides in his own name the mute instrument for delivering the author’s speech to the public; [footnote inserted] but to bring his speech to the public by printing it, and so to show himself as the one through whom the author speaks to the public, is something he can do only in the name of another.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As discussed in Chapter 1, Kant explained in the accompanying footnote that the printed book was ‘mute’ because it relayed the author’s speech not by means of sound as in the instances of the ‘megaphone’ or ‘mouth’, but rather by means of the letter: ‘This is what is essential here: that what is thereby delivered is not a thing but an opera, namely speech, and indeed by letters. By calling it a mute instrument I distinguish it from one that delivers speech by sounds, such as a megaphone or even the mouth of another.’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this contrast between acoustic and optical media, the materiality of the letter, specifically the visibility of the printed letter, rears to prominence. Prior to the evolution of audiobooks, books could relay the speech of the author only by means of the visible letters printed on the page. The opticality of print would be re-emphasised by Kant in a passage on the nature and legal status of the book in Die Metaphysik der Sitten [‘The Metaphysics of Morals’] (1797): ‘A book is a writing (it does not matter here, whether it is written by hand or set in type, whether it has few or many pages) which represents a discourse that someone delivers to the public by visible signs.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Though eventually elided in favour of their continuity as visual methods of communication, the taxonomic difference between handwriting and typesetting evidently surfaced in Kant’s reflections on the book.

These interests in the publisher and publishing, and in the opticality of the book and its typesetting, would resurface in Kant’s brief reflection on eighteenth-century German typefaces in Der Streit der Fakultäten (‘The Conflict of the Faculties’) (1798).Footnote ¹¹¹ There we find an acuter recognition of the perceptual materiality of type than in the earlier text, which accentuates the distance between Fichte’s and Kant’s perspectives on the medium of literature. Whilst the Berlinische Monatsschrift had silently served as the enlightenment periodical that conveyed Kant’s proposed regime of author’s rights in 1785, its typeface and typesetting would become the very subject matter of discussion in the later text. Specifically, Kant announced his support for the periodical’s use of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface because its letters were, in his view, less straining on the reader’s eyes than roman types were.Footnote ¹¹² This position was advanced against the then-prevailing ‘fashion in printing’Footnote ¹¹³ to set letters in the supposedly more attractive roman types. Dismissing the preference for roman types as one of several ‘wretched affectations’Footnote ¹¹⁴ of book printers in his day,Footnote ¹¹⁵ Kant asserted instead that letters ‘have no intrinsic beauty at all’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Consistent with his concept of the book as communicative medium and visual object, Kant prioritised the functionality of type, particularly the ease with which it permitted one’s reading of the text. Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf, the Leipzig typefounder and publisher who had designed the Fraktur typeface deployed in the German periodical, was cited as an authority for the position that roman type ‘tires the eyes more quickly than does Gothic type’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Kant would conclude by directing printers to the printed pages of the Berlinische Monatsschrift as the exemplary publication: ‘for no matter what page one opens it to, the sight of it will strengthen the eyes perceptibly when they have been strained by reading the kind of print described above [footnote inserted]’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As suggested by the accompanying footnote, Kant’s acute sensitivity to the opticality of the printed page was owed to his own perceptual experiences as a reader. Not only had he already gone blind in the left eye some years before writing the passage, but he also continued to suffer from a recurrent, intermittent condition of being temporarily overcome by ‘a certain brightness [that] suddenly spreads over the page’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This bodily affliction stressed the importance of visual perception to the activity of reading.

I am suggesting that, more so than Fichte, Kant understood the reading of print to be a corporeal experience, namely an interactive activity between the bodies of type and readers. For Fichte, it was the mind that gave form to ideas, thereby establishing the author’s perpetual ownership of literary form. Though literary form was affirmed to bear a material basis, such materiality was seen to consist only in an imaginable combination of words that, ultimately, transcended the visible letters printed in the book. The printed book only mattered as the medium of exchange between the minds of authors and readers. For the author, the book bore partial record of the literary form s/he had created and forever owned. For the reader, the book was simply a repository of ideas to be appropriated through the no-less-writerly act of giving original form to those ideas. From within each of the perspectives, the book ceded visibility and priority to the pertinent form and its generative mind. Kant, on the contrary, kept in sight the book as an optical medium composed of letters printed on paper. Instead of proposing any concept of intellectual property that exceeded the material dimensions of the book, Kant saw the book as a material artefact to be interacted with first and foremost through the organ of the eyes. Before the book could be read for its interpretable meaning or ‘speech’, it had first to be seen as a material composition of type set on paper. Reading, or what Fichte understood to be the application of one’s mind, could not take place without the sensory perception of printed matter, that is, the phenomenal encounter between eye and page. It is this corporeal dimension of reading, relatively muted in Fichte’s account, that distinguishes Kant’s from his student’s.

In Kant’s recognition of the visual materiality of the printed book, particularly that of its typeface and typesetting, we find both an anticipation and a potential problematisation of the doctrine of typographical copyright. On the one hand, Kant’s acknowledgement of the publisher’s contribution to the production of the printed text coheres with typographical copyright’s recognition of the skill and labour invested in the publication of the book and its typographical arrangement in particular. This continuity insists notwithstanding the obvious difference that copyright law sees the publisher’s contribution to be sufficient to grant the publisher a property right in the edition’s typography, whereas Kant declined to see the publisher as an intellectual proprietor. On the other hand, in so identifying the opticality of print and the corporeal experience of reading, Kant provided an arguably richer perspective on the materiality of book than that of copyright law. For whilst the typographical arrangement of the book only matters to the copyright system as evidence of the publisher’s skill and labour that warrants protection, the visual materiality of the book in Kant’s account implies a dimension of historical interactions between bodies that far exceed the copyright perspective. For Kant, Breitkopf Fraktur was the exemplary typeface that best relayed the speech made in the name of the author in each of the essays published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. The communicative affordance of the typeface made it significant to enlightenment practice.

Producing Breitkopf Fraktur

Typographical copyright takes the labour of the publisher in literary production to be the decisive criterion that grants them ownership of the typographical arrangement of the published edition. If an equivalent law were to have operated during the time of the publication of Kant’s and Fichte’s essays in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the periodical editor-publishers, Friedrich Gedike and Johann Erich Biester, would have had a property right in the typography of the issues in which the essays appeared. Reprinting those issues without permission would have infringed the copyright held by Gedike and Biester, who would have been treated as if they were the author-creators of each typographical arrangement. Their typographical authorship would have co-subsisted with the literary authorship of Kant, Fichte and other writers who composed the individual pieces in each issue.

It is my argument that the historical processes of literary production detract from this neat bifurcation of the literary artefact into intellectual works created by publishers and authors. As discussed in Chapter 2, the signature marks, catchwords, front matter and other material paratexts of Kant’s essay evidence the technologically mediated labour of not only the named publishers and authors but also others working within and outside the printing house, including compositors, printers, binders, advertisers, readers and so forth. Together with the postal system, text- and bookmaking processes participated in the gargantuan print apparatus that mediated the German Enlightenment. It was through the very medium of print that Kant, Gedike, Biester and others sought to advance public enlightenment and deal with print proliferation. Authorship in the German Enlightenment was intimately bound up with a broader medial-material assemblage, without which essays, periodicals and books would not have been possible. To claim sole proprietorship in some aspect of literary production, be it the typographical layout or literary work, is to deny that the other surrounding processes materially contributed to its emergence.

The making of typefaces such as Breitkopf Fraktur is one historical thread that unsettles copyright’s proprietary approach to literature. For Lord Hoffmann, the typeface of a publication only mattered as a part of the ‘typographical vocabulary’ in which the publisher’s labour of creating the overall design is expressed. Nonetheless, we may note that before any ascription of the utilised typeface to the publisher’s mental labour, the typeface has first to be made available as a technical possibility in which the contents are to be set. The historicity of typefaces is, to an extent, recognised in modern copyright law’s willingness to grant copyright in typefaces to their designers in certain jurisdictions.Footnote ¹²⁰ For instance, sections 55(1)–(3) of the CDPA 1988 acknowledge the possibility of there being ‘copyright in an artistic work consisting of the design of a typeface’Footnote ¹²¹ for a term of twenty-five years from its first appearance in the market. Apprehended as an ‘artistic work’Footnote ¹²² in which copyright could subsist, the typeface and its protection are similarly brought under the rubric of authorship, in which a human designer is seen to be its creator.Footnote ¹²³ Even where a computer has generated the typeface as artistic work, the law ascribes its authorship to some underlying creative personality: ‘the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Despite collaborating to reproduce the myth of authorship, the doctrines of typographical copyright and copyright in typeface design bring to light some of the technical preconditions for the production of books that perturb the legal insistence on authorial creation.

Kant’s endorsement of the ‘Breitkopf characters’Footnote ¹²⁵ printed in the Berlinische Monatsschrift offers us an inroad into the history of the typeface. When citing that periodical as the model for print in 1798, Kant emphasised the readability of its typeface and typesetting, which aligned with the communicative aim of publication. The modern conception of the ‘aesthetics’ of type, construed as pertaining to questions of ‘beauty’Footnote ¹²⁶ and ‘taste’,Footnote ¹²⁷ was de-prioritised in favour of its ancient sense of relating to ‘sense perception’,Footnote ¹²⁸ particularly the sense of sight: ‘for no matter what page one opens [the Berlinische Monatsschrift] to, the sight of it will strengthen the eyes perceptibly when they have been strained by reading the kind of print described above’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Despite his 1785 comments on literary materiality, Kant enacted an ‘ethic of typographical invisibility’Footnote ¹³⁰ or transparency that would continue to predominate in modern Western publishing and bookmaking. Under that paradigm, the best typeface and typesetting effaced themselves to reveal the printed contents. In 1951, a similarly practical and communicative account of typography was articulated by Stanley Morison:

Echoing Kant’s disapproval of the use of grey rather than black ink for its ‘softer and more agreeable’Footnote ¹³² contrast on white paper, Morison argued that ‘there [was] little room for “bright” typography’.Footnote ¹³³ All decisions in typography, whether they relate to composition, imposition, impression or paper, were to be made in the service of readability and communication within societal traditions and publishing contexts. Though recognising its historical decline in use, Morison noted some merits of black letter, affirming that it was ‘in design more homogenous, more lively and more economic a type than the grey round roman we use’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Kant’s defence of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface based on its perceptual advantage over roman types was, thus, not peculiar to the philosopher, but instead reflected the predominant modern understanding of type as a practical means of literary dissemination.

Though named in support of Kant’s case for the superior readability of German scripts,Footnote ¹³⁵ the Leipzig typefounder Breitkopf did not share the philosopher’s contempt for roman types, nor did he necessarily privilege the functionality of type over its aesthetic beauty. The beauty of roman types arose as a topic for reflection in a 1777 essay where Breitkopf praised the letters cut by the Parisian typefounder Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune. In Nachricht von der Stempelschneiderey und Schriftgießerey. Zur Erlaüterung der Enschedischen Schriftprobe (‘Breitkopf on Punchcutting and Typefounding’Footnote ¹³⁶), Breitkopf criticised a claim made by a Dutch typefounder, Joh. Enschedé, that the latter’s typefoundry in Holland was ‘the best and most beautiful’Footnote ¹³⁷ in all of Europe.Footnote ¹³⁸ The typefoundry’s most recent typefaces were partially cut by the German punchcutter, Joan Michaël Fleischmann, whom Enschedé recognised to be ‘the greatest or the most accomplished type-cutter since the invention of printing’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Against the use of these superlatives to describe Enschedé’s own typefoundry and punchcutter, Breitkopf sought to show that Fournier’s typefoundry in Paris was in fact superior, a key reason being that the latter’s types were cut by the artist Fournier himself. In Breitkopf’s view, ‘the best and most beautiful’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ typefaces were those whose full range of sizes exhibited the greatest regularity, consistency and harmony in appearance. He compared the pleasure of viewing these typefaces to that of seeing a beautiful work of art: ‘it is a pleasant, appealing sight, where the eye is just as much delighted when types of different sizes appear on a page as by a beautiful painting’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Because of this demand for consistency, Breitkopf stressed that the types had to be ‘cut from one and the same hand by a single artist’.Footnote ¹⁴² The advantage of Fournier’s foundry over Enschedé’s consisted precisely in the fact that Fournier had personally cut all of the typefaces according to a common design, whereas Enschedé had employed multiple typecutters. Juxtaposing Enschedé type specimens against Fournier’s, Breitkopf observed that the former not only omitted certain type sizes but also were only partly cut by Fleischmann, such that the type specimens lacked the uniform beauty of the Fournier’s. ‘How pleasantly one is moved by the consistency of [Fournier’s] round Romain or roman types, cut according to a common design, which one reads with pleasure; none of the type specimen from the other, previously-distinguished Parisian typefoundries come close; not the typefaces of the Sanlecques or those of Granjon.’Footnote ¹⁴³ In Breitkopf’s praise of Fournier’s letters we see the Leipzig typefounder’s clear admiration for the beauty of roman types. In the course of elaborating on the aesthetic principles of typefaces, Breitkopf went further to suggest that ‘a full round letter [was] always more pleasant to the eye than a long and condensed one’,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ which lends itself to be read as an implicit comparison between roman and black letter types. The rest of the essay was punctuated with exclamations about the beauty of the former. Considerations of the readability of letters arose only in occasional discussions of letters that were so tiny as to be nothing but ‘pure torture’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ for typecutters, printers and readers, or whose strokes and lines were ‘too fine’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ to be read and ‘burdensome to the reader’s eyes’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ German types and typefoundries were mentioned only in the concluding paragraphs, where Breitkopf reflected on the limits of typefounding in German as compared to that in France, Holland and the Netherlands. Christian Zinck, a punchcutter and typefounder in Wittenberg, was cited as possibly matching Fournier in vocational excellence ‘if only [Zinck] had possessed a good eye for beauty and correctness, in addition to his industriousness’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Further, Breitkopf recognised that the existence of two German types, namely Schwabacher and Fraktur, alongside that of roman and italic styles, made it difficult for German typefoundries to produce artists like Fournier capable of cutting every type.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Much had to be done for leading German typefoundries like Breitkopf’s to produce type specimens as beautiful and as complete as Fournier’s roman letters.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Breitkopf’s 1777 essay suggests that the visual materiality of type is by no means definitively or exhaustively explained by Kant’s communicative and functionalist account. Unlike Fichte’s movement beyond the surface of the text to the so-called ideal form belonging to the author, Kant’s account retained its focus on the visible letters of the publication as the material means that relayed a speech necessarily spoken in the author’s name. However, the optical medium need not be subordinated to the prescribed role of delivering any message defined in reference to the authorial figure. Rather, as suggested by Breitkopf, both the printed letters and the printing types that were cut for their production could be regarded as works of art that were, in themselves, pleasing to the eyes. Whereas Kant thought that the ‘letters, considered as pictures, have no intrinsic beauty at all’,Footnote ¹⁵¹ Breitkopf recognised their potential for ‘beautiful regularity’Footnote ¹⁵² and the aesthetic pleasure that ‘geometrically-correct’Footnote ¹⁵³ typefaces gave. ‘The beauty of every typeface consists in the correct relation of the strokes with the space between the lines, which cannot be neglected even in the intervals between one letter and the next; in the correct height and depth of the ascender’d and descender’d letters; and in the proper length of the lines’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The proportions of type could be determined with precision, not unlike those of sculptures. Roman types were not to be categorically dismissed for allegedly interfering with the reading of books, but instead admired as crafted objects whose aesthetic appeal was not necessarily in tension with their functionality.

Other than exhibiting an emphasis of the aesthetic beauty of type, Breitkopf’s text also prompts the questioning of his putative creation of the typeface bearing his last name. Recall that when the Wittenberg typefounder Zinck was mentioned, it was to call attention to the gap between Zinck’s craftsmanship and Fournier’s. Breitkopf had not only been familiar with Zinck’s work but in fact enlisted his help for the making of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface more than two decades prior. As recorded in Christina Killius’s account of the ‘origins’ of the typeface, the letters of Breitkopf Fraktur were first cut by Zinck and two other punchcutters, Johann Michael Schmidt and Johann Peter Artopacus, in the Leipzig typefoundry around 1750.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Not unlike Enschedé, Breitkopf had relied on the labour of others to produce the typeface that would later bear his sole name. The ‘authorship’ of the typeface was thus separated from its very originary moment. Indeed, the visible irregularities of the script evidenced this co-production, and could well have informed Breitkopf’s later comments about the aesthetic requirement for typefaces to be cut by the same hand.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ As Killius put it, ‘Breitkopf Fraktur appeared somewhat inconsistent [uneinheitlich] because of the multiple typecutters. That is why the publisher advocated as early as 1776 that a good type foundry should have all its typefaces designed by an artist in order to achieve the greatest possible consummation and harmony.’Footnote ¹⁵⁷

This recorded collaboration in the initial cutting of Breitkopf Fraktur coheres with Harry Carter’s history of the manufacture of types.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Before the appearance of letters as two-dimensional ink marks on paper, first the three-dimensional metal types had to be made. ‘Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.’Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Though printers financed the operations by purchasing the types at book fairs and foundries, their making was undertaken by other skilled artists, namely punchcutters, matrix and mould makers and casters.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The technical skills required for the completion of these tasks derived from trades that historically predated letterpress printing, including coin and seal engraving (for punchcutting), goldsmithery (for matrix- and mould-making) and pewtery (for typecasting).Footnote ¹⁶¹ Punchcutters worked to cut by hand relief patterns of the letters on the end of long pieces of steel.Footnote ¹⁶² These completed ‘punches’Footnote ¹⁶³ were then struck into blocks of copper, creating impressions of each letter and thereby forming ‘matrices’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ After each matrix had been carefully trimmed or ‘justified’Footnote ¹⁶⁵ to give the preferred alignment, it was fixed in a two-part contraption called a ‘mould’Footnote ¹⁶⁶ so that molten metal (typically an alloy of lead, tin, antimony and copper)Footnote ¹⁶⁷ could be poured into the matrix while the matrix was held in place. Printing types were thus cast, the requisite number of which in a particular size constituted a ‘fount’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Printers could contract with specialist casters for the making of types using the matrices and moulds that they had purchased, though by the early seventeenth century most were already purchasing ready-made founts.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The co-cutting of those punches for the initial casting of Breitkopf Fraktur was but one moment in the longer production lines that manufactured the types utilised in printing houses of the period.

The technical derivation of typefounding from older trades suggests that the material history of typefounding predates the founding of any specific type. From Killius’s account of the ‘origins’ of Breitkopf Fraktur we can further identify at least two sets of techno-cultural inheritances on which the design of Breitkopf Fraktur had probably drawn. First, Albrecht Dürer’s writings on applied geometry, including his discussion on the production of roman types, had been closely studied by Breitkopf and shaped his own perspective on typefounding, particularly his demand for geometrical correctness.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Other than Dürer’s texts, Breitkopf owned an extensive collection of books on the art of printing that contributed to his understanding of it.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Second, the design of Breitkopf Fraktur was based on a classical model of Fraktur, the Neudörffer-Andreä Fraktur, which dates back to the early sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷² Thus, printing types are iterations of prior historical forms. In the 1777 essay, Breitkopf suggested that even the letters cut by the ‘peerless’ Fournier had identifiable precedents: ‘Fournier is not entirely the inventor of these cursive types; P. Moreau, a Parisian writing master who was granted a privilege to build a foundry and printing establishment in 1640, had the idea first.’Footnote ¹⁷³ Indeed, he noted that the technology of printing types historically derived from handwritten scripts:

The history of Breitkopf Fraktur incessantly points backwards to an earlier point in time, moving from an apparently self-contained form invented in Leipzig around 1750 to its precursors in the sixteenth century and, even further, to the material form of writing that it supposedly superseded.

I have been suggesting that the making of Breitkopf Fraktur was not only owed to the multiple hands that cut it but also indebted to prior knowledges and practices that animated its production. Theories and practices of punchcutting and typefounding, only crudely indexed in the proper names of Breitkopf, Zinck, Schmidt, Artopacus, Dürer, Neudörffer and Andreä, were part of the historical processes that produced it. Emergent from a dense history of collaboration, influence, imitation, adaptation and renewal, the material typeface undercuts the idea of sole proprietorship attached to its name and enshrined in copyright doctrine.

(Not) Perceiving Breitkopf Fraktur

Before specifying some ways in which Breitkopf Fraktur was seen and ignored in the late eighteenth century, let us note that there would have occurred a series of processes in literary production between the printing type’s initial manufacture and the reader’s later perception of its inked impressions on paper. Evidencing the socio-technological basis of the printed book, these intermediary stages may be sketched in reference to bibliographical studies of the hand-press period of print (1500–1800) that gave rise to the German periodical.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ After having procured the Breitkopf Fraktur types, the Berlin publishing house Haude and Spener (with whom Gedike and Biester had contracted to print the periodical issues) would task their workers with various modes of interacting with those printing types and their impressions. The metal types would be stored in ‘cases’, namely large wooden trays split into compartments assigned to each of the different symbols (and blanks) that made up the fount of type.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ From these cases the compositor retrieved particular types that would be assembled into words, lines and pages, the arrangement of which were based on the handwritten manuscripts supplied by Gedike and Biester.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Specifically, each line of type was gathered on a hand-held tray called a ‘composing stick’, before being tied with a string and transferred to trays large enough hold an entire page of type called ‘galleys’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Pages of type set on a whole sheet of paper were locked into position by a pair of iron frames called ‘chases’, thereby becoming ‘formes’ prepared for printing.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Known as ‘imposition’, this process of setting pages into formes was shaped by the spatial dimensions of the paper on which the text was to be printed.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

The presswork of this period typically involved a wooden hand-press operated by two pressmen.Footnote ¹⁸¹ After placing a forme on a small table mounted behind one of the side-frames of the hand-press (‘ink block’), the first pressman would use a pair of stuffed leather pads (‘ink balls’) to rub black ink (a mix of varnish and lampblack) onto the surface of the type.Footnote ¹⁸² After the forme was transferred onto a block of marble or limestone called the ‘press stone’, the other pressman would work to lower paper (probably wetted the night before so as to aid its absorption of the ink) onto it.Footnote ¹⁸³ Once each forme had been printed off, it was usually passed back to the compositor for the stripping and cleaning of its type (by scrubbing it with an alkaline solution and rinsing it with water)Footnote ¹⁸⁴ and the return of the type to the cases.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ After both sides of the sheets of paper had been printed, the warehouse-keeper would hang them up on racks to dry.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Once that was done, the sheets would be sorted and folded into the gatherings that constituted each copy of the periodical issue.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Once stitched, each issue would be ready for sale and delivery at various sites and in various modes, whether sold at retail bookshops and book fairs or sent via the postal system to the regular subscribers of the periodical. As the publishers of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Gedike and Biester would have financed and asserted some degree of control over each of these processes of print production, including their selection of the printing house.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Nonetheless, it was still only by virtue of this assemblage of industry actors interacting with the technologies available to them that the printed publication finally appeared before the reader.

Fichte, Kant and Breitkopf have provided us with three ways in which Breitkopf Fraktur was (not) perceived by late eighteenth-century readers. Each of their essays directs us to the corporeal basis on which the typeface interacted with readers of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. For Fichte, the combination of letters and words in the printed book only acted as a material index of the inalienable proprietary ‘form’ generated by the author’s mind. Notwithstanding his intimations about the materiality of ideas and the ideal aspects of the book, the particular typeface in which the book was set was invisible to Fichte, who prioritised instead the minds of authors and readers. Kant, on the other hand, kept in view the surface of the printed book, noting its operation as an optical medium that relied on the encounter between eyes and the printed letters of the book for the relay of a speech necessarily spoken in the author’s name. Differences in typeface readability, particularly the contrast between the ‘Breitkopf characters’ and the ‘Didot characters’ (an Antiqua or roman variant),Footnote ¹⁸⁹ were directly remarked upon, with Kant preferring the former for being less tiring to read. Still, Kant’s functionalist account of the book, in so prescribing to the typeface the definitive function of communicating a speech bound to the personhood of the author, disclosed a hidden allegiance to the modern ethics of typographical transparency. The visual and corporeal materiality of type, which Kant’s account already suggests, is brought into sharper focus in Breitkopf’s account of the aesthetic beauty of types. Rather than being optical instruments that simply facilitate the expression of the author’s personhood, types and their impressions on paper could also be seen as artistic objects capable of generating pleasure in readers by virtue of their geometrical proportions and consistency in appearance. Whereas the minds of authors and readers were prioritised in Fichte’s account, the eyes and bodies of the persons interacting with print in historical time rose to prominence in Kant’s and Breitkopf’s accounts. From the latter two perspectives, typefaces needed to be assessed for their perpetual effects on corporeal subjects.

To supplement Breitkopf’s perspective, let us note that perceptions of the comparative beauty of types tend to be entwined with those of the cultures that produced them. As a blackletter script, Breitkopf Fraktur would have evoked both the visceral and cultural associations of the script. In the preface to his redesign and republication of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface in 1793, Breitkopf observed that German typefaces tended to be reproached for looking ‘gothic’,Footnote ¹⁹⁰ that is, for their association with datedness, ugliness and barbarism.Footnote ¹⁹¹ This ‘negative image’Footnote ¹⁹² of blackletter was offered by Killius as an explanation for the general reluctance of typographers to reform Fraktur until well into the eighteenth century. Breitkopf’s work with Fraktur resisted contemporary efforts to abolish blackletter typefaces and pressures to make them closer in appearance to roman typefaces. Despite admiring the rounded characters of roman typefaces, Breitkopf sought to preserve the defining characteristics of Fraktur, namely its ‘long, narrow and broken’Footnote ¹⁹³ letters, while demanding for ‘geometrical correctness’Footnote ¹⁹⁴ in its redesign.

In some twentieth-century Anglophone accounts of blackletter types we can find reiterations of the earlier aesthetic dismissal of Fraktur with added tinges of xenophobia and a certain disdain for Germanic culture.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Consider, for instance, Daniel Berkeley Updike’s history of German types, 1500–1800.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ While accounting for the historical differentiation between two categories of blackletter types, Fraktur and Schwabacher, Updike utilised a slew of derogatory adjectives and phrases to describe examples of each in selected publications. The early Fraktur in which Hans Schösperger’s Diurnale (1514) was set was said to consist of descenders that were ‘all too restless’Footnote ¹⁹⁷ and of capital letters with ‘eccentric curves’Footnote ¹⁹⁸ that were ‘particularly disagreeable and vulgar’.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Similarly, the cursive Schwabacher type deployed in Chrystoph Froschauer’s Kunstrich Buch (1567) was described as having ‘imitated the German handwriting of that period–a fussy, restless kind of character, which is distracting to the rye and has somewhat the appearance of ravelled carpet-threads’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Compare these denunciations of blackletter types with Updike’s approval of the sixteenth-century roman types used in Canones Apostolorum (1525): the latter edition was noted to be set in a ‘larger and better roman character, accompanied by a charming type’,Footnote ²⁰¹ and overall ‘an elegant piece of work’.Footnote ²⁰² The occasional applaudable use of roman types was said to have declined across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, finally, ‘succumbed’Footnote ²⁰³ to the popular taste for Fraktur in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Other instances of the simultaneous criticism of blackletter typefaces and the people who produced them would recur across Updike’s account. ‘These types are characteristically German–which is, artistically, seldom a compliment!’Footnote ²⁰⁵ Perhaps the clearest sign of contempt for German culture would appear in his depiction of the printed editions of Historia von D. Johann Fausten, printed in Frankfurt in 1586, as being ‘very ugly and very obviously Teutonic’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Updike’s extreme account suggests that, against any pretensions to universality and objectivity, questions of beauty were bound up with those of cultural differences, with aesthetic judgements being shaped by the wider socio-political context in which they were made.

I would add that the cultural-political significance of Breitkopf Fraktur in late eighteenth-century Germany may well contest Kant’s communicative-functionalist account of type. Being an ‘improved’ Fraktur typeface that nonetheless stayed to the broken character of the script, Breitkopf Fraktur would have metonymically invoked the symbolic associations of Fraktur and blackletter types more generally. As historical studies of blackletter have suggested, Fraktur was not simply a neutral medium assessed based on its aesthetic or communicative merits, but instead bore the face of German national identity.Footnote ²⁰⁷ As previously discussed in reference to Woodmansee, the Holy Roman Empire of the late eighteenth century was a highly fragmented political entity composed of more than three hundred states with separate governments and laws. Nonetheless, the German language was understood to be the cultural glue that held together the disparate states. In Johann Gottfried Herder’s definition of nation, for instance, a common language used by the constitutive members of a group was identified to be the most important medium that held them together as a community. For Herder, a nation was ‘a community that was made of kinship and history and social solidarity and cultural affinity and was shaped over time by climate and geography, by education, by relations with its neighbours and by other factors, and was held together most of all by language, which expressed the collective experience of the group’.Footnote ²⁰⁸ As one of the four blackletter types that emerged in German-speaking localities during the Middle Ages and retained its popularity well beyond the late eighteenth century,Footnote ²⁰⁹ Fraktur came to be perceived to be the visual-material form of the language that united the Germanic peoples. Despite their formal differences, Textura, Rotunda, Schwabacher and Fraktur were grouped as scripts of the Middle Ages whose ‘darkness of the characters overpowers the whiteness of the page’,Footnote ²¹⁰ hence the name ‘blackletter’. The emergence of the rounder, more broadly spaced roman types in the late fifteenth century, and its competition with blackletter types since then, further enforced the division between German national identity and that of the wider European community.Footnote ²¹¹ As Peter Bain and Paul Shaw put it, Fraktur and other blackletter types had been ‘the visual embodiment of German national identity since the days of Luther’.Footnote ²¹² Martin Luther’s 1522 German translation of the New Testament had been fully set in blackletter, the body text taking the form of Schwabacher, and the title text, Fraktur.Footnote ²¹³ The historical emancipation of the German peoples from the Roman Catholic Church was thus associated with these blackletter types.Footnote ²¹⁴ The subsequent redesign, reproduction and reuse of Fraktur by Breitkopf and others would carry forward the cultural-political history of the German type and its symbolic resonances.

The aesthetic and cultural-political dimensions of type are even more discernibly suppressed in Fichte’s idealism. Fichte insisted on looking beyond the typography of the book to the mind that supposedly produced and owned the form evidenced in it, thereby eliding the materialities and meanings of blackletter type. This prioritisation of the authorial mind underlying the book was not missed by Friedrich Kittler in the latter’s discussion of the techno-institutional conditions or Aufschreibesystem (‘discourse network’) that generated the myth of authorship circa 1800.Footnote ²¹⁵ Though Fichte’s 1793 essay was only mentioned in passing as ‘one of the essays that led to the codification of authors’ copyrights’,Footnote ²¹⁶ Kittler commented extensively on Fichte’s reflections on reading and his pedagogical method as a university lecturer at Jena, suggesting the latter to be one of the exemplary representatives of the traditions of German Idealism and Romanticism that similarly prioritised the imagination (synonymous with ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’) over the letter. These passages from Fichte, I suggest, reflect his insistent prioritisation of authorial minds over the bodies of books, which screened the latter’s operation as subjectivising techniques that generated authorial subjects like himself.

In Fichte’s guidance to the reader on how his treatise Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (‘Foundations of the Science of Knowledge’) (1794) should be read, he wrote that it ‘cannot be communicated in any way by the mere letter, but must be imparted by the spirit’,Footnote ²¹⁷ thereby reasserting the priority of the latter. ‘It could not be otherwise in a science that returns to the very foundations of human knowledge, in that the very enterprise of the human spirit proceeds from the imagination, and in that the imagination cannot be grasped except through the imagination.’Footnote ²¹⁸ Notice that the imagination was set up as the transcendental ground for the very production of knowledge, including that of itself, relegating the letter to a secondary and derivative status. Whilst the book consisted of letters, it was dependent on the reader’s use of their own imagination to generate knowledge of the imagination itself. In other words, to ‘understand’ the subject matter of the book, the reader had to become an author like himself: that is, not just a body that writes, but more fundamentally a mind that ‘imagines’ or gives form to ideas.

A similar call to authorship was sounded earlier in Fichte’s Plan anzustellender Rede-Übungen (‘Plan for Speech Exercises’) (1787), which advocated for the subordination, even disappearance, of the letter by prescribing authorship as a remedy for the reader’s spiritual ‘stagnation’.Footnote ²¹⁹ Two modes of reading were juxtaposed against each other: whilst ‘to follow another’s train of thought’Footnote ²²⁰ – that is, to trace the letters printed in the book – ‘slackens the soul and lulls it with a certain indolence’,Footnote ²²¹ to ‘develop one’s own thoughts’Footnote ²²² instead and ‘put oneself confidently and subtly in the spirit of the author’Footnote ²²³ would help to ‘interrupt the stagnation thus induced in the human spirit’.Footnote ²²⁴ Fichte further claimed that it was by becoming an author that the fullest understanding of the author could be gained by the reader: ‘Certainly no one can completely understand a writer and feel himself his equal who is not already in some sense a writer himself.’Footnote ²²⁵ We may note that, in Fichte’s emphasis on understanding the author by becoming one, the book all but recedes from view. The materiality of the book gives way to authorial formation. Lost in the reverie of authorship, Fichte went so far as to suggest that authorship could take place in the absence of prior books: ‘There is certainly no greater spiritual pleasure for those capable of it than that which one experiences through, or during, writing itself, and which … would remain so even in a world where no one read or heard of anything read.’Footnote ²²⁶ The practice of writing itself was imagined to be an immensely pleasurable activity that could take place without the practice of reading. Fichte’s valorisation of the imagination extended to the extinction of letters. As Kittler put it, ‘The clear implication is that, in the writing of the Science of Knowledge as well the imagination had surpassed all letters.’Footnote ²²⁷

Fichte’s fantasy of the disappearance of books was re-staged in the first university lectures that he gave in Jena. Departing from the practice of assigning and paraphrasing textbooks of older thinkers, which Kittler observed to be a convention extending from the earlier discourse network of res publica litteraria (the ‘Republic of Scholars’), Fichte read aloud from his own newly written work, that is, instalments of what would later be published as Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre.Footnote ²²⁸ In so doing, Fichte not only performed his pedagogical duties as an author who exerted his imagination as if in the absence of prior books but also urged his students to enact authorship by giving form to the ideas that arose in the lectures. It was as if eighteenth-century authors were independent of books, publishers and the wider print machinery. ‘Where previously the printing press and professors simply republished the whole world of books, the author-ego (to use his favorite term) Fichte published himself.’Footnote ²²⁹ Instead of books, authors themselves were reproduced. For Kittler, Fichte was enacting precisely what the discourse network of 1800 demanded: the identification of the imaginative author-poet as the foundation of the European system of knowledge.

As a philosophical proponent of German Idealism, Fichte cooperated with the poets of German Romanticism to imagine the transcendence of the spirit and imagination over the material letter. An emblematic scene in Romantic literature that depicted the tradition’s ‘invisibilisation’ of the letter, as previously discussed in Chapter 1, was Anselmus’s enthrallment by Serpentina’s voice over against the manuscript that as copying.Footnote ²³⁰ Fichte was one of the late eighteenth-century authors who joined Anselmus in doubly ignoring the letters he was transcribing and the wider techno-institutional network to which he and the work were coupled. Unlike Kant and Breitkopf, Fichte did not attend to the Fraktur letters in which his 1793 periodical essay was set, nor those of his other publications. The typeface and what it might index about the historical context in which it was produced and used remained invisible to the philosopher.

Had Fichte attended to the materiality of the Fraktur letters in which his texts were set, he might have realised that the so-called transcendental and transcendent mind of the author was likely the effect of broader subjectivating processes that relied on the optical medium (see Figure 3.2). To cite one of these techniques: as Kittler has noted, the discourse network of 1800 was characterised by the mass printing, distribution and use of state-sanctioned ABC books or primers that enlisted mothers as the primary instructors in their children’s education:

Though set in Fraktur, these primers were created to be read not by children, but rather by mothers who thereby learnt how to use their own mouths to teach their children to vocalise the sounds of the alphabet.

Instead of Fraktur letters, then, the mother’s mouth and the sounds it produced were the chief sensory phenomena that first made the child a literate subject. Psychically, this meant that the child’s future acts of reading the book would entail the unseeing of the letters and the hallucination of a voice that recalled the mother’s. ‘And when later in life children picked up a book, they would not see letters but hear, with irrepressible longing, a voice between the lines.’Footnote ²³³ In so prescribing the maternal instruction that substituted the voice for the letter, the ABC books of 1800 inaugurated the birth of poet-authors such as Anselmus, Fichte and the German Romantics. Despite contributing to the alphabetisation of the author, those Fraktur letters effaced themselves, enduring only as traces in Breitkopf’s updated script. By virtue of their Breitkopf characters, Fichte’s and Kant’s essays subsist as palimpsests of the historico-material means by which authorial subjects were produced in their time.

Figure 3.2 Last page of Fichte’s 1793 essay.

In as early as 1982, Walter Ong had suggested the figure of the proprietary author to be a perceptual effect of the print medium and its typography.Footnote ²³⁴ The image of an authorial mind that stood over against an object it had created, versions of which were theorised in Fichte’s essay and redoubled in the various author-centric doctrines of copyright, was traced to the visual space of the printed page and its ostensible promise of intellectual proprietorship:

As a visible embodiment of the abstract literary work, the printed page seemed to reflect a mind of no less objectively ascertainable dimensions. Ong pointed us to what resembled a modern iteration of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage.Footnote ²³⁶ Just as the function of the ‘I’ had formed pursuant to the infant’s méconnaissance [‘misrecognition’]Footnote ²³⁷ of its ideal specular image as its present and future self, so too did the proprietary author emerge from a misidentification of the ostensibly self-contained printed page as external analogue of the author’s inner mind. In both instances, the complex historical processes that produced the image of the author-ego were submerged beneath it.

This chapter’s review of the production and perception of the Breitkopf Fraktur typeface has disclosed a similar elision of the literary artefact in contemporary copyright doctrine and Fichte’s account of the book. Whereas the law acts as if the literary artefact could be bifurcated into its constitutive literary (and other cultural) works and its overall typographical arrangement, the historical itinerary of the typeface disavows such a simple division, illustrating instead an array of criss-crossing interactions between human bodies and print technologies. Though registered in Kant’s account of the book as communicative medium, this corporeal dimension of literature ultimately exceeds it by bringing to light those aesthetic and cultural-political dimensions of type that defy any prevailing emphasis on communication and authorship. The materialities of type suggest the printed book itself to be doubly involved in the propagation and negation of the myth of proprietary authorship.