Detail from Cetvorojevandelje, a manuscript in the Serbian National Library (17th century, RS 555). From an image post by Bibliodyssey. The script is called vyaz. Most frequently encountered in Old Church Slavonic manuscripts dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, the hand was created half a millennium earlier by Byzantine scribes.Vyaz has been the subject of recent work by Aegir Hallmunder and Ivan Gulkov, who also designed a logo forTypegirl that illustrates how the densely ligatured, tightly interlocked letterforms work.
To modern eyes, vyaz bears a strong resemblance to the ISO barcode. Of course, the two could not be more different in function. Vyaz is decorative and liturgical, a practice for the pious hand and an object of contemplation for the believing eye; the barcode is a printed thing, meant for “reading” not by human minds, but by computers. Nonetheless, I’ve often wondered if a time will come when barcodes are legible, when we will read them as easily as any other typeface. In a sense that time has arrived: the iPhone and other mobile operating systems now offer applications that will “read” a photo of a barcode and instantly deliver product information to the user’s device—spectacles for a consumer consciousness, delivering into the magisterium of reading and writing an information transaction until quite recently restricted to machines.
