I have always loved to handwrite my own name. Learning to write, my childish self-absorption fixated on the lines and curves possible in the letters that spelled me, the bizarre but delightful balance between the capital “E” and the lowercase “e” that unify a shape I recognize as my own. Somehow, loving the letters made my name my own.
My budding narcissism fortunately pushed outward into my delight in letter forms and book arts and perhaps led me to the era I study (Renaissance England with its nascent print culture) and the courses I teach, such as Making the Book. While researching contemporary fine press books in preparation to teach that class, I learned of Fr. Edward Catich (1906-1979) who, across the boundaries of time and space, has become something like a late-found friend to me.
Catich, calligrapher, stonecutter, author, musician, liturgical artist, photographer, historian, teacher, fine press founder, creator of two unique typefaces and Roman Catholic priest, though not a Jesuit, exemplifies the Ignatian mandate to find God in all things. Orphaned at 12, Catich and his three brothers were sent to the children’s home in Mooseheart, Illinois. While there, Catich apprenticed under Walter Heberling, a brush writing instructor who trained him in the commercial art of “show-cards,” an early form of hand-painted advertisements displayed in shop windows.
After graduating high school, Catich relocated to Chicago, where he studied at the Chicago Art Institute and joined up with the Union of Chicago Sign Writers. During this time, he also entered the seminary, eventually becoming a priest. Catich studied monumental letter inscriptions in Rome, creating large scale rubbings and squeezings* of the Trajan inscription found at the base of Trajan’s Column. Catich’s rubbings are archived across the United States, and his work to document and understand monumental Roman letter forms has had an impact on everything from brush-written calligraphy to the history of writing. After returning to the U.S., Catich founded the Art Department at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, where he also taught and ran his printing studio for the remainder of his life.
Catich’s almost mythical capacity for craftsmanship and his ability to translate his hyper-focused attentions into tools, teaching and community ignites my mind and my own efforts at making and teaching. In a series of happy rabbit-hole research scrambles, I discovered that not only does my university’s Archives & Special Collections hold two (of the 1400) copies of Catich’s foundational “The Origin of the Serif: Brush Writing and Roman Letters” (1968), but Catich carved three large-scale stone plaques embedded into walls on campus, two of which I walk past almost every weekday. One plaque covers a wall in the Bevier Engineering Library, depicting a world orb encircled by a heliocentric elliptic. The shapes combine to illustrate the Pythagorean theorem.
The plaques that I see every day are embedded into walls within the Cathedral of Learning, the University of Pittsburgh’s 42-story neo-Gothic educational building. Though more difficult to photograph due to the placement and, in one case, the thick glass that overlays the plaque, each one witnesses to Catich’s total vision and attention to form and shape as communicative and expressive.
When I see the precision of the carving and the way that the letters and design appear effortless, straightforward, clearly communicating their intent at scale across decades, I’m filled with wonder. For me, the expression of art — the piece that calls my attention to a higher mode of contemplation — also activates my fascination with questions of making and learning. Catich’s stonework and his book on serif forms often leave me baffled as to how he managed to make these objects, how he learned to compose letter forms with varying tools on differing surfaces.
Catich, called Ned or Neddy by his friends, sometimes remarked that he considered himself a priest first and a calligrapher second. Spending months with his “The Origin of the Serif” and feeling the presence of his handcraft in stone blooms another wonder about the entangled pieces of ourselves and how we shape them and hierarchize them for others. Surely, Catich’s vocational expressions witness to his gift for attention, the bedrock of prayer, contemplation and craft work. Yet, my curiosity over Catich’s methods reveals to me that I’ve always believed that the expressive use of tools and gestures is essential to any consideration of attention. The uncanny bond I feel with Catich is through his work, which brings me to an awareness of myself, and these processes are founded upon a belief in mediation. Whether in objects, imaginative prayer or ritualized bodily movement, mediating our minds, our memories, our emotions and our experiences expands attention toward what we cannot grasp and what extends, serif-like, from our frame of vision.
Catich’s theory of the serif’s origin in Roman lettering rests on his understanding of tools as mediating forms of embodied knowledge. The prevailing theory on the serif when Catich wrote “The Origin of the Serif” claimed that the letterform’s extension resulted from effects of stonecutters’ chiseling, slips and slight protrusions above and below the guidelines while incising v-cuts.
To these claims, Catich archly replies, “It appears a lack of knowledge of stone-cutting techniques is the reason for the “chisel” theory.”
As a stonecutter, Catich understood chisel work. But his argument for the relationship between Roman serif forms and brushwork derives from his years as a Chicago sign writer. Years later in Rome, while on ladders examining monumental inscriptions, Catich sees letter forms he recognizes not because of how a chisel shapes letters in stone but because he’s been on ladders in Chicago, painting signs with a brush. And what he sees in Rome is, for him, incontrovertible: Roman stonecutters prepared their inscriptions with brushwork. They painted the letter forms quickly, using a chalked snap line to set boundaries. Then they chiseled. The serif form derives from the shape of the brush, chiseled over as a pattern to form the finished letter.
From his experience, Catich reasons that the kinesthetic sense and proprioception “relieve the brain, in some part, of constant, tiresome, attention to such activity … bypassing the mind and thus allowing the mind to attend to more important phases of the action of which the muscular-skeletal-tendonous activity is a part.” Aspects of attention funnel through the actions of the body, some of which involve a tool or a particular gesture. Attention splits, and the mediating action takes on the burden of the technical so that creative expression and recognition can flourish elsewhere.
Though I want to resist the easy association of kinesthetic action and the mediations of the Mass, my own experience of liturgical gestures teaches me how much the ritual amplifies my attention by shunting part of it into behavior while the other abstracts toward what is sometimes prayer, sometimes expressive worship. With so much attention to give, was it mediating forms that brought Catich’s life as a priest and as calligrapher integrity?
I imagine Catich as a boy, parentless, taking the brush from his teacher’s hand. I imagine him standing in front of his students at St. Ambrose University, demonstrating the calligraphic brushwork Roman sign painters, street artists and stonecutters all used. Was he lonely as a child? Did the brushwork reveal something about himself to himself? How much pain and joy and creativity did the pens and chisels and printing presses mediate, so that he never had to think about it, only express it in a form of his own devising?
How much am I trying to tell you through the story of a mid-20th-century graphic artist?
Here, at the start of middle age, my thoughts form lines backwards and forwards in time, trying to understand who I am, why I like the things I like, why I do what I do. My life seems less assured, like the steady letterform “E,” and ever more like a dark night sky — rich, obscure, enveloping, extending — into which I peer, finding stars I constellate into the creatures of personal myth. The star-points of my life allow me to tell a story, moving my experience into language, naming myself even into the shapes of the letters of the words I write.
Around the orbs and theorem of the Engineering Library’s plaque, Catich carved stars. One is seven-sided to represent the classical liberal arts. The other three are six-sided, representing directions and galactic space. Decades ago, Fr. Edward Catich carved a star into stone, and he did not make it for me. Yet the wonder is, like all starlight, its beams — bounding off V-cut edges and playing against trenched shadow — and reaches me now, joining me within his asterism, constellating ourselves through the mediation of time and attention.
I return to the wonder that inspires my continued conversation with Catich through his work. Seeing the brushwork and the chisel cuts, I also see that wonder, too, doubles, splits and redounds upon itself. Wonder is a full measure, packed down and poured, overflowing into your lap. It’s getting more than you started with, a physical marvel of increased matter. Wonder comes, I’m starting to think, through the mediating dance of attention, funneling all that can’t be easily expressed into something that can contain it and make it into a new thing for our contemplation and our use, our study and our making.
***
Fr. Catich died on April 14, 1979 — Holy Saturday that year, as it turned out. He lay down under his drawing table for a nap (apparently a longtime habit), his body performing a familiar action to turn off his mind for a moment. He died there, the body leaving its familiar trace, while the serif-like soul extends to catch the light.
The author thanks the librarians within the University of Pittsburgh’s Archives and Special Collections divisions, particularly Megan Massanelli, for their work scanning page images from “The Origin of the Serif.”
Top photo: Fr. Edward Catich stonecutting. Image in public domain; taken from the 1976 News and Events, a newsletter published bi-weekly by the Rochester Institute of Technology.
*Squeezings are the most accurate way to study ancient stone cut work. A paste of wet paper is punched into the carving with a brush. Once dried, the paste can be removed to reveal a negative (mirror) image of the inscription, which can be studied in three dimensions and with a high degree of sensitivity to cut marks. (Back to story)