rT

The ligature is an obsession of mine.

A ligature is a sewing-together of two separate letters of the alphabet. Its goal is to make more eye-appealing those pairs (and sometimes triplets) of letters. The ligature brings two letters closer to another, makes them a single character, so that they might sit more comfortably in a line of text.

For instance, the common ligatures, the fi and fl, fuse the opening eff to they eye (removing the tittle in the process) and the l. These are such natural characters to our eyes, that when they are not in place in a printed text our eye feels the difference, even sometimes when we don't consciously note that fact.

But other ligatures are rare, even the ct ligature, which once was common but fell out of practice years ago. The way these lost ligatures fused two letters together became too ostentatious for us, so we dispensed with them.

Though sometimes the process of moving forward is a process of moving backwards to older ideas.

So Cartier, well known for having a logo that joins all the letters of its name together cursively, and a jewelry enterprise that is known for the showy, put together a little ad campaign for this season, now upon us, of buying. And the campaign is called Winter Tale, not A Winter's Tale, not Winter's Tale.

There is something a bit awkward in that title, just as there is something a bit awkward in the ligature formed between the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the last word.

The r and the T are brought together in a gaudy, yet breathtaking way. This is the ligature as an act of visual defiance. It is not there to make the words less obvious to our eyes, not there to disintegrate into the background, into the mere sense of the words. It is there to make us see this ostentation, there to make us look with our eyes, because we are meant to see the jewelry that comes with this ligature.

This ligature is strange (and thus almost awe-inspiring) in a number of ways:

It joins together letters in separate words

1. It joins together a minuscule and a majuscule letter

2. It begins with the minuscule letter and ends with the majuscule

3. It fuses the two letters with a swoop (making it a throwback to the ct ligatures and others of its kind)

4. It joins the letters together clumsily at both ends:

a. the curving and lowering arm of the r is sent backwards, around, and up in a loop toward the T

b. the flat arm of the T accepts the loop, after a bit of widening in that loop, into the middle of the head of the T as if it were an extension of the downward stem of the T.

This ligature is quite a remarkable feat, and probably quite appropriate for the use it has. Though it's still a bit of a typographical gryphon, a beast we can imagine but one so bizarrely constructed we might never want to meet it in person.


ecr. l'inf.