Dan Brown's creepy clues are from a real-life Langdon
BY TIRDAD DERAKHSHANI
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Saturday, May 30, 2009



Bonnie Weller/Philadelphia Inquirer/MCT
John Langdon is the artist behind the funky-looking word designs in the 'Angels & Demons' film, including the messages gruesomely inscribed on the murder victims' chests.
PHILADELPHIA — It's not exactly a conspiracy. Or even a secret. Still, it needs to be exposed if fans of fabulist Dan Brown are to have any peace.

Brown's creation, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks in the 2006 box-office smash "The Da Vinci Code" and its shiny new sequel, "Angels & Demons," isn't quite fictional. He's based on a very real, rather pleasant Narberth, Pa., native.

But this Langdon is named John, and he's not at Harvard but at Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. And he doesn't decipher symbols, he makes them.

John Langdon is the artist behind the funky-looking word designs in "Angels," including the messages gruesomely inscribed on the murder victims' chests. Not to mention the inspiration behind the name, if not the soul, of Brown's most famous literary hero.

A painter and graphic designer, Langdon is a recognized pioneer in the mathematically precise art of ambigrams — words or phrases that read the same from different perspectives. Some can be rotated 180 degrees, others work when reflected in a mirror.

"Angels" opens with Langdon's ambigram Illuminati, which announces that the game is afoot, that there's a mystery burning for solvation.

Langdon lives in an impossibly sunny, airy and spacious house with his wife, Lynn, who serves as senior vice president and CEO of the Philly-based American Board of Internal Medicine. (Their daughter, Jessica, 33, lives in Brooklyn.)

Langdon, 63, whose graying, ponytailed hair is the only sign that he's over 50, has an energy level and enthusiasm that would shame any 30-year-old.

Langdon's playful paintings hang on the first floor. He challenges visitors to decipher them. "For me, it's always been words," Langdon, author of "Wordplay: The Philosophy, Art, and Science of Ambigrams" (1992; revised 2005), said of his focus (or obsession) as an artist. "I was an English major but I've always been an artist somewhere beneath." He said that after years of struggle, he discovered "that, for me, the visual representation of words was my direction."

He discovered ambigrams in the 1970s, famously designing the Starship ambigram used by the band Jefferson Starship on its 1976 album, "Spitfire."

His inspiration, he said, came from the yin-yang symbol, which visually represents the concepts of balance and harmony and embodies the idea that everything can be seen from multiple perspectives.

Langdon said he first came to know Dan Brown's father, mathematician Richard Brown, who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. "Dan's father ... was trying his hand at doing some ambigrams himself ... and he wrote me for pointers," Langdon said.

"He called up one day and said, 'My son, Dan, is a singer-songwriter and I wondered if you could do an ambigram for his album.' " (At the time, Dan Brown was working as a not-too-successful singer-songwriter, and Langdon did an ambigram for his 1995 CD, "Angels & Demons," which ended his singing career.)

Four years later, Brown turned to Langdon for help designing elements in the novel "Angels & Demons." "So (Dan) was halfway through the novel and he calls up and says, 'You know, I decided this morning I want to name the character after you,' " Langdon recalled.

"I thought of it as a kind of quaint honor. I mean, at the time he was nobody and I wasn't well known. And I thought, you know, nobody's ever going to hear about 'Angels & Demons' or Dan Brown."