Why don't they just go ahead and dress up [the letter] in grey prison clothes? You've seen the letters of their words - strung out in straight lines with shaved heads, resentful, each one just like all the others - grey, colourless - not letters at all, just stamped out marks. And yet if you ask a write-wright, a real writer, he'll tell you that a word written in one particular handwriting or set in a particular typeface is totally distinct from the same word in different lettering.
- Khlebnikov and Kruchonykh, 'The Letter As Such'¹

Script has become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.
- Walter Benjamin, 'The Mimetic Faculty'²

In their 1913 manifesto 'The Letter as Such', the Russian futurist poets Alexander Kruchonykh and Velemir Khlebnikov deride those who have failed to understand that letters are not just linguistic signs but also expressive forms. For them, to habitually use the same old fonts, to impose them uniformly on entire texts, and to overlook the possibilities of creative handwriting entirely without regard to the specific context in which letters are being written, by whom and to whom, is to unwittingly and unnecessarily allow language to become a prison-house. 'You've seen the letters of their words,' they write, 'strung out in straight lines with shaved heads, resentful, each one just like the others,' hardly letters at all, just 'stamped out marks.' We must, Kruchonykh and Khlebnikov exhort, stop treating language as if it were simply a transparent medium for the communication of meaning. Writing - handwriting in particular - is a more directly mimetic