In his own words, Alasdair Gray was a ‘fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian’. He was also a committed citizen who reimagined the city of Glasgow, indelibly marking it through his expansive creativity. Gray had a roving mind and a broad diverse practice ranging from plays, poems, novels and political essays to paintings, prints, drawings and murals. For the majority of his career he was best known as a writer, with his novels gaining international recognition and being supported by publishers such as Canongate and Bloomsbury. However, to better understand Gray it is critical to look at connections across space and form and make links to and from his visual work.

This essay will discuss Gray’s unique approach to lettering and typography. It draws on sources across multiple media, but most prominently, my personal experience of working with Alasdair to create his Gray Display typeface. In gathering examples of Gray’s lettering and typography alongside selected correspondence and other sources the intention is to explore his interwoven use of text and image. Or to be more precise, text as image: a vehicle for elucidation and conveyance of meaning through design. Gray described himself as ‘an artist who fell into writing’ but here I aim to show how these two seemingly separate roles were bound together, mutually constitutive even, in the production of his unique contributions to multiple fields.

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