Large sheets of paper printed on one side and known as broadsheets or broadsides were, from the earliest days of printing in Europe, printed in the tens of millions. They were used for everything from official government pronouncements and announcements to letters of indulgence, propaganda, news-sheets, ballads, almanacs, and even proto-typographic posters.
Although broadsides are often described as cheap and ephemeral — and indeed many were — not all were. Many were handed out for free, and soon discarded or recycled; but many other broadsides lived longer lives. Some were engraved by accomplished artists and even hand-colored, and their artistic merit, curiosity value, and price ensured their survival. Today we’ll take a brief look at several curious examples.
Rebus broadsides
Among the most curious broadsides are those printed in rebuses. Rebus writing substitutes pictures or symbols for words, but not in the same way that pictograms do. With pictograms, a picture of, for example, a bee simply represents the insect. But in rebus writing, a picture of a bee is used to substitute for the letter b or its sound — as in the title of this article. Likewise, a picture of an eye represents the letter i, and so on. The use of rebuses turns what is otherwise an unremarkable broadside advertisement into something much more engaging, fun, and valuable. Can you guess what it’s advertising?
British LibraryI’ve transcribed the first line of the above Hieroglyphical Advertisement. Now, it’s over to you!
Notice that the above broadside, like many others of the time, were dubbed ‘hieroglyphical’ — part of the Egyptomania that swept across North America and Europe in the nineteenth century, following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and the subsequent discovery of the Rosetta stone which was crucial to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s.
1
2
The British Museum2. A rebus broadside, satirizing Count Tilly’s defeat at the Battle of Breitenfeld. 1632.
The British Museum
The British Museum
Bodleian
Emoji before emoji?
Although emoji started out as a limited number of symbols, they were eventually expanded into a dizzying number of pictograms and ideograms, many of which can be used in rebus writing. The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese, to name just a few, used rebuses thousands of years before emoji appeared on our screens. And it would appear that our fascination with symbols, of all kinds, and our willingness to experiment and use them in reshaping how we communicate is motivated by the very same thing that inspired our very distant ancestors — a desire to communicate better. ◉
I Love Typography is made possible by the generous sponsorship of Positype, & the support of these friends of ILT