Poem: "Naked Knowledge"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem was inspired and sponsored by mdlbear. It also fills the "not entirely devoid of interest" square in my 1-1-23 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. It belongs to the series Arts and Crafts America.

Warning: This poem and its references are very Not Safe For Work at most jobs.


"Naked Knowledge"

[1880, 1931, 1971]

How do you make illiterate people
want to study an alphabet?

In 1880, French artist Joseph Apoux
created an erotic alphabet illustrated
with scenes of kinky sex making out
the shapes of individual alphabet letters.

In 1931, Soviet sculptor Sergey Merkurov
did the same for the Cyrillic alphabet,
inspired by Greek and Roman art.

The peasants found these to be ...
not entirely devoid of interest.

As more people learned to read,
so the demand for printing grew.

Technology developed, and fonts
along with it, but not everyone was
thrilled with the aesthetic results.

In 1971, Dutch creatives Anna Beeke,
Anthony Beeke, Ed van der Elsken,
Pieter Brattinga, and Geert Kooiman
made a photographic alphabet by
posing nude models in letter shapes.

It became a protest against what they
called a protest dehumanising and
indecipherable mechanistic alphabets,
reminding views of the beauty in letters.

It just goes to show that if you
want to attract attention, then
you can't beat naked knowledge.

* * *

Notes:

These are the (very explicit) alphabets featured:

The Erotic Alphabet of 1880 by Joseph Apoux

The Soviet-era Erotic Alphabet (in Cyrillic) by Sergey Merkurov

Belles Lettres: The Naked Alphabet by the Dutch team

Comments

[acelightning73]

When I was doing webpage design, I collected interesting "artistic" fonts. I've got the kinky-sex one, I've got one that's all penises, I've got one that's all lizards in uncomfortable positions, I've got one that's all sunflowers, I've got one that's lightning bolts, and various pseudo-Gothic, pseudo-Oriental, pseudo-Arabic, and pseudo-Hebrew, and then of course Klingon. There are still places where you can donwload interesting stuff for free or for a very small donation.