Humans have been marking the world around them with signs since prehistoric times. A language of signs allows people to record the regularity they discern in the movements of the stars and the passing of the seasons in calendars, to communicate messages and orders during battles. Over the centuries, people developed all sorts of ways to process land use, irrigation, music, dance and language itself as information. They broke it down into functional units, linked these units to signs, combined these signs into functional code and incorporated this code in a working technology that made it possible to preserve the recorded information, transfer it, vary and expand on it. The Department of Signs is dedicated to this form of magic that shapes, wards off and externalises our desires, fears, fantasies. From alfabets to flags, from codes and cyphers to music notation, signs are omnipresent units in the practise of the Typographic Masoner.