Ligature Love

You may have noticed that IPI has recently made some changes: a new company name, a new company website, a new-and-improved company blog. We are proud of many of these changes and we like to show them off. “Look at our new website!” we say to our family, friends, neighbors, clients, and anyone else whose attention we can get.

“What’s with the squiggly thing between the a and the t on your company logo?” they invariably reply.

I thought I would take this opportunity to answer the question once and for all. That squiggly thing is known as a ligature. From the Latin ligare (to bind), the word ligature refers, in general, to anything used in tying or binding. In surgery, a ligature is used to strangulate a tumor. In orthodontics, ligatures are the rubber bands that bind your teeth together. And in printing, a ligature is when two or more graphemes are combined to form a single glyph. That is — a ligature is the binding between two or more letters.

Did you know that the ampersand (&) is a modified ligature? It originated as the letters et, which is Latin for and.

Ligatures originated as time saving devices. Medieval scribes used ligatures while copying Latin texts — they even went so far as to combine the bowls of letters with right-facing bowls (b,o,p) and those with left-facing bowls (d,o,g). (Have you ever before thought of letters in terms of the direction of their bowl?) In typesetting, ligatures would allow a printer to combine multiple characters of a single block: think “fi” or “st,” or the still common œ.

Today, of course, typing “fi” is hardly labor intensive, and ligatures as time-saving devices are certainly out of fashion. (Maybe this is why the New York Times print edition, already an antiquated text, recently re-instituted ligatures.)

But we like the antiquated aspect of the ligature. We like that it they hark back to a time when words were printed on paper, with ink. A time when books as objects still had value. Even though we just got our first iPad last week, and even though we are constantly exploring new means of digital publication, we use a ligature because it binds us to a long history of literary expression.

And, of course, with thanks to our brilliant graphic designers, we like our ligature because we think it looks good.