The first issue of Contextual Alternate is now available for purchase. Envisioned as an avenue for constructive dialogue across a wide range of critical concerns, the journal aims to open new directions of enquiry and pave the way for exploration and further collaboration between fields of research that are often thought of as discrete or unconnected. The current volume contains the following articles:
Making tracts attractive: missionary print and the small book in nineteenth-century rural India, ULRIKE STARK
Popular woodblock print and lithography in the making of China’s global imaginary, JAMES A. FLATH
In-between technologies: the beginnings of Devanagari filmsetting and photocomposition in India, VAIBHAV SINGH
Nihon do-banga: an introduction to the Japanese school of etchers, 1783–1900, AD STIJNMAN
Going dutch at Colombo: the earliest years of the British Government Press in Ceylon, GRAHAM SHAW
The second volume is now in production and available to pre-purchase as is Drafts of history: the world in newspapers on a single day which is edited by Vaibhav Singh with an introduction by Amelia Bonea
Contextual Alternate publishes books, welcomes articles for its journal, and maintains a modest but growing archive of typographic material to serve as a springboard for new research.
Contextual Alternate is an independent publishing initiative which aims to generate critical conversations on visual and material cultures across geographical, professional, and disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on a multiplicity of outlooks, and exploring larger themes than are usually acknowledged within histories of design and communication, it aims to address a broad and diverse readership through more widely accessible modes of critical engagement. Countering both the subject matter and the conventional scope of design publishing, it offers books made with care and precision not as fine-printed commodities but as honest and useful instruments in creating and contesting knowledge.