The friendship of text and image is an age-old affair, but Petr Nikl takes it literally in his book Word-view and shows the world that books do not have to have only illustrations and text, but that they can also be linked. The interweaving of short rhymes, puns or subtle cascades of gradually changing words will captivate not only children, to whom the book is primarily dedicated, but also any adult who wants to step out of the world of ordinary text. Here and there the typograms take off into abstract planes, as in the text entitled Skrvna, where the entire page is filled with text with a small patch of blank page in the middle. At other times, such as with Zoo, a giraffe, a peacock, and a whole herd of other animals scurry across the page, whose identity Nikl leaves to the reader.
Moreover, the author plays not only with typography but also with a lot of really rich colours in the text. These either enhance the text and help it to emerge from the pages into reality or, on the contrary, drown it out. This is what happens in the short typogram entitled Station, where the light grey background almost swallows up the apricot pink text and almost does not allow it to speak to the reader. If this was the author's intention, then he has succeeded very well. The result is indeed reminiscent in some ways of the atmosphere of arrivals and departures, where the traveller finds himself in grey somewhere between his destination and home. However, this happens in other texts as well, where it is rather to the detriment and the letters, characters and shapes, along with the colours, do not find a meaningful dialogue. Such cases are, of course, a minority.
Magdalena Maňáková
NIKL, Petr. Slovohledě: typogramy. Praha: Meander, 2016.
The review was created at the Department of Journalism of FSV UK under the supervision of PhDr. Jana Čeňková, Ph.D.
