Against Legibility: A Material History of Typographic Authority: This research paper challenges the modern design narrative that treats typographic change and the rise of roman type as the inevitable evolution towards more essentially readable letterforms. Drawing on book history, scribal studies, and early print culture, the paper argues that roman’s dominance emerged from a convergence of humanist ideology, institutional power, production economics, and trade infrastructure. By tracing how early printers mechanized existing scribal traditions and how script choice functioned as a semiotic system indexing authority, genre, confessional identity, and audience, the paper shows that typography has never been neutral or purely functional. It further examines how twentieth-century modernist historiography recast historically contingent outcomes as universal design principles, transforming mechanical efficiencies into claims of perceptual truth. The paper concludes that contemporary legibility doctrine reflects inherited ideological frameworks embedded in design education and digital infrastructure, and calls for a reintegration of material, political, and semiotic history into typographic theory.

Lauren Donohue is a visual designer and graduate student. She earned a bachelor’s degree in film studies at Yale University, working all four years in access services at Sterling Memorial Library and falling in love with librarianship. After a stint in academic publishing, she earned an MFA in design from Parsons School of Design. Grounded in ethnographic research, her master’s thesis took the form of a fully illustrated, hand-bound short story as proof-of-concept on material and textual interventions to engage teen readers. After several years in professional design practice, she returned to school and has just completed her third semester at San José State University, intending to pursue research-oriented work in academic librarianship.