‘At the Sign of the Cross in St James’s Street,
When next you go thither to make yourselves sweet
By buying of powder, gloves, essence, or so,
You may chance to get a sight of Signior Dildo.’
So wrote John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in 1673. But the era of having to go to St James’s Street to buy dildos appears to be drawing to a close: the Daily Mail reports that owners of 3D printers can now design and make their own, thanks to a website that lets users ‘create different shapes and adjust the height, curviness, colour and angle of the toys to make a 3D model’. With a suitable printer, they can then produce their own silicon sex toys, ‘the likes of which may not be on offer at places such as Ann Summers’.
I can’t help wondering what the great Eric Gill would have made of this. Penguin recently reissued his Essay on Typography; its cover is handsomely set in his own Gill Sans, the font immortalised by various incarnations of British Rail, the Church of England, the BBC and the civil service. As well as his contributions to typography, Gill was probably best known for his modernist sculptures at Westminster Cathedral and at Morecambe’s Midland Hotel. Somewhat overshadowing these achievements, Gill is also now remembered for his sexual conquests of his sister, his children and his dog – making randy Rochester look a bit prudish by comparison.
Gill devotes much of his, er, seminal essay to the growing gulf between pre-industrial craftsmanship and modern methods of mass production, and to the aesthetic consequences of this gulf. The Victorians (as he saw it in 1931) had failed to grasp that the triumph of the factory had made it dubious and dishonest to try to recreate the individualism and ornamentalism of the workshop, which was why they made so much ugly and ridiculous stuff.
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