While we
might presume the ability to rearrange a book’s parts is an affordance reserved
for the digital realm, artists’ books showcase several historical forms that
turn the book into a recombinant structure, allowing readers to create new
juxtapositions within it. Such interactivity is present already in the
accordion book, which, as an intermediate point between scroll and codex,
allows readers to open one spread at a time or unfold several, seeing across
the folds’ peaks and valleys to survey the text.
The ability
to completely open this structure makes it especially useful for topographic
work like Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 collaboration La Prose du
Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the
Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), a vertical cityscape of
colorful pochoir paintings and poetry where the eye’s traversal of word and
image suggest the simultaneity of a dark past and a vivid present for the
poem’s speaker as he recalls a railroad journey from Moscow to Harbin during
the Russian-Japanese war of 1905; or like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, which allows a kind of armchair tourism across the Los Angeles
landscape. The form lends itself to exhibition for this reason—we can see more
of its contents at a glance than a codex if the accordion is stood on end and
extended, revealing every peak and valley, front and back. When the accordion’s
ends are attached to a cover, it creates a loop, potentially inviting us to start
again. But the accordion need not be a linear or landscape experience. It also
permits new juxtapositions by allowing readers to refold peaks into valleys and
bring distant pages close to one another. Artists’ books in accordion form
remind us that the book is, as Stewart notes, “Western culture’s first
interactive medium.”
This
recombinant quality of the book takes place not only across but within the
page. The technique, in fact, appears in some of the earliest movable books,
which use volvelles, turnable discs affixed to the page with a pin or piece of
string, to facilitate calculation and navigation. The earliest volvelles, those
of thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramon Lull, precede print, and the technique
rose in prominence during the incunable period for its scholarly utility. The
Regiomontanus Kalendarium (1476), for example, also included volvelles for
astrological calculation. Another important recombinant tool appears in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of flap books or turn-up books
composed of a printed page with a sequence of flaps that alter the narrative
each time the reader lifts a hinge. Also known as transformation books or
Harlequinades, for the London pantomime figure they often depict, such
eighteenth-century novelty books were among the first marketed to children (by
London bookseller Robert Sayer around 1765) offering morals and lessons through
the transformations they depicted. The harlequinade’s legacy continues in children’s
mix-and-match books that use sliced pages and a spiral binding to allow one to
swap a face’s features, create hybrid bodies, or otherwise interchange an image
or text’s parts.
The
recombinant form lends itself to text as well. French author Raymond Queneau
(1903–1976), inspired by such childlike “têtes folles” and intrigued by the
possibilities offered by a series of cut pages hinged along a spine, composed
fourteen Petrarchan sonnets with the identical rhyme scheme, bound them, and
sliced the lines apart. Published in 1961, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One
hundred thousand billion poems) offers the reader 1014 different poems,
accessed by turning the lines one at a time to make new texts. To read them
all, Queneau calculated, would take more than two hundred million years of
devoted study. The work is thus a conceptual one but also offers a pleasurable
reading experience borne of the novelty inherent in using the author’s text to
generate new poems. No wonder, then, that this work is popular with coders,
whose digital implementations enact its computational potential. Such
remediations, however, lack the tactile pleasure of the interlocking strips
that compose the book. They also cannot replicate the sense of potential made
palpable by seeing these strips in front of you, lifting themselves away from
the spine of the open book and fluttering apart.
Queneau
joined forces with a group of French writers in the 1960s who were interested
in creating new literary forms based on scientific and mathematical principles,
and this text is seminal to the movement. Dubbed Oulipo, short for Ouvoir de
Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of
Potential Literature), the group pioneered constraint- based writing, which set
up a rigid conceptual basis for the production of a work, but one that could
yield any number of potential results. Cent mille milliardsis rife with
potential, and the interactivity through which we activate that potential, while it gives some
agency to the reader, also highlights Queneau’s authorial genius. The task of
com- posing interchangeable sonnets in the identical meter and rhyme scheme
draws attention to his authorship, as does much Oulipo work, including Georges
Perec’s La disparition (Editions Denoël, 1969), a novel composed without the
letter “e” that provides a parable for the disappearance of millions of Jews,
including the author’s own parents, during the Second World War; and Anne
Garréta’s Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), which remains silent throughout about the
gender of its protagonist. Members of Oulipo would go on to generate recombinant
and computational poetry under the auspices of Alamo, short for Atelier de
Litté- rature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (Workshop for
Literature Assisted by Mathematics and Computers), founded by Paul Braffort and
Jacques Roubaud in 1981.
Such
game-like recombinant texts are not limited to artists’ books, of course. Many
of us enjoyed interactive books published for a mass audience in the 1970s and
1980s. These multisequential books, perhaps the best known being the Choose
Your Own Adventure series, offered the reader a series of vignettes, each
followed by a choice about what to do next. One path through the book led to
the best of all possible endings, while the rest led to trouble, heartbreak,
even death. These interactive books—while suggesting that there are many paths,
but that we, like Robert Frost, cannot travel them and “be one
traveller”—actually allowed readers to pursue them all, thanks to the ability
to bookmark the choice point with a finger or slip of paper and read each of
the potential outcomes before moving on. One such book, Inside UFO 54–40, took
advantage of readers’ tendency to cheat by including a page spread inaccessible
through any of the reading paths. To reach the miraculous planet Ultima it
described, you had to break the rules.
The legacy
of these multi-sequential books lives on in digital interactive fiction (IF),
which was among the first game genres made possible by computing. IF, which can
be presented on the web, in standalone apps, and even in print, presents
readers with choices that alter their path through a work. Jason Shiga’s
Meanwhile (2010), a graphic novel boasting 3,856 possible readings, uses a
print analogue to hypertext: pipes that extend from a sequence of panels off
the edge of the page to create a kind of tabbed thumb index by which one can
leap to other points in the book. Designed to emulate what comic book artist
and theorist Scott McCloud calls an “infinite canvas,” Meanwhile also exists as
an app in which all potential paths are available in an interface that scrolls
in every direction.
While we
might presume the ability to rearrange a book’s parts is an affordance reserved
for the digital realm, artists’ books showcase several historical forms that
turn the book into a recombinant structure, allowing readers to create new
juxtapositions within it. Such interactivity is present already in the
accordion book, which, as an intermediate point between scroll and codex,
allows readers to open one spread at a time or unfold several, seeing across
the folds’ peaks and valleys to survey the text.
The ability
to completely open this structure makes it especially useful for topographic
work like Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 collaboration La Prose du
Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the
Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), a vertical cityscape of
colorful pochoir paintings and poetry where the eye’s traversal of word and
image suggest the simultaneity of a dark past and a vivid present for the
poem’s speaker as he recalls a railroad journey from Moscow to Harbin during
the Russian-Japanese war of 1905; or like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset
Strip, which allows a kind of armchair tourism across the Los Angeles
landscape. The form lends itself to exhibition for this reason—we can see more
of its contents at a glance than a codex if the accordion is stood on end and
extended, revealing every peak and valley, front and back. When the accordion’s
ends are attached to a cover, it creates a loop, potentially inviting us to start
again. But the accordion need not be a linear or landscape experience. It also
permits new juxtapositions by allowing readers to refold peaks into valleys and
bring distant pages close to one another. Artists’ books in accordion form
remind us that the book is, as Stewart notes, “Western culture’s first
interactive medium.”
This
recombinant quality of the book takes place not only across but within the
page. The technique, in fact, appears in some of the earliest movable books,
which use volvelles, turnable discs affixed to the page with a pin or piece of
string, to facilitate calculation and navigation. The earliest volvelles, those
of thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramon Lull, precede print, and the technique
rose in prominence during the incunable period for its scholarly utility. The
Regiomontanus Kalendarium (1476), for example, also included volvelles for
astrological calculation. Another important recombinant tool appears in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of flap books or turn-up books
composed of a printed page with a sequence of flaps that alter the narrative
each time the reader lifts a hinge. Also known as transformation books or
Harlequinades, for the London pantomime figure they often depict, such
eighteenth-century novelty books were among the first marketed to children (by
London bookseller Robert Sayer around 1765) offering morals and lessons through
the transformations they depicted. The harlequinade’s legacy continues in children’s
mix-and-match books that use sliced pages and a spiral binding to allow one to
swap a face’s features, create hybrid bodies, or otherwise interchange an image
or text’s parts.
The
recombinant form lends itself to text as well. French author Raymond Queneau
(1903–1976), inspired by such childlike “têtes folles” and intrigued by the
possibilities offered by a series of cut pages hinged along a spine, composed
fourteen Petrarchan sonnets with the identical rhyme scheme, bound them, and
sliced the lines apart. Published in 1961, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One
hundred thousand billion poems) offers the reader 1014 different poems,
accessed by turning the lines one at a time to make new texts. To read them
all, Queneau calculated, would take more than two hundred million years of
devoted study. The work is thus a conceptual one but also offers a pleasurable
reading experience borne of the novelty inherent in using the author’s text to
generate new poems. No wonder, then, that this work is popular with coders,
whose digital implementations enact its computational potential. Such
remediations, however, lack the tactile pleasure of the interlocking strips
that compose the book. They also cannot replicate the sense of potential made
palpable by seeing these strips in front of you, lifting themselves away from
the spine of the open book and fluttering apart.
Queneau
joined forces with a group of French writers in the 1960s who were interested
in creating new literary forms based on scientific and mathematical principles,
and this text is seminal to the movement. Dubbed Oulipo, short for Ouvoir de
Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of
Potential Literature), the group pioneered constraint- based writing, which set
up a rigid conceptual basis for the production of a work, but one that could
yield any number of potential results. Cent mille milliardsis rife with
potential, and the interactivity through which we activate that potential, while it gives some
agency to the reader, also highlights Queneau’s authorial genius. The task of
com- posing interchangeable sonnets in the identical meter and rhyme scheme
draws attention to his authorship, as does much Oulipo work, including Georges
Perec’s La disparition (Editions Denoël, 1969), a novel composed without the
letter “e” that provides a parable for the disappearance of millions of Jews,
including the author’s own parents, during the Second World War; and Anne
Garréta’s Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), which remains silent throughout about the
gender of its protagonist. Members of Oulipo would go on to generate recombinant
and computational poetry under the auspices of Alamo, short for Atelier de
Litté- rature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (Workshop for
Literature Assisted by Mathematics and Computers), founded by Paul Braffort and
Jacques Roubaud in 1981.
Such
game-like recombinant texts are not limited to artists’ books, of course. Many
of us enjoyed interactive books published for a mass audience in the 1970s and
1980s. These multisequential books, perhaps the best known being the Choose
Your Own Adventure series, offered the reader a series of vignettes, each
followed by a choice about what to do next. One path through the book led to
the best of all possible endings, while the rest led to trouble, heartbreak,
even death. These interactive books—while suggesting that there are many paths,
but that we, like Robert Frost, cannot travel them and “be one
traveller”—actually allowed readers to pursue them all, thanks to the ability
to bookmark the choice point with a finger or slip of paper and read each of
the potential outcomes before moving on. One such book, Inside UFO 54–40, took
advantage of readers’ tendency to cheat by including a page spread inaccessible
through any of the reading paths. To reach the miraculous planet Ultima it
described, you had to break the rules.
The legacy
of these multi-sequential books lives on in digital interactive fiction (IF),
which was among the first game genres made possible by computing. IF, which can
be presented on the web, in standalone apps, and even in print, presents
readers with choices that alter their path through a work. Jason Shiga’s
Meanwhile (2010), a graphic novel boasting 3,856 possible readings, uses a
print analogue to hypertext: pipes that extend from a sequence of panels off
the edge of the page to create a kind of tabbed thumb index by which one can
leap to other points in the book. Designed to emulate what comic book artist
and theorist Scott McCloud calls an “infinite canvas,” Meanwhile also exists as
an app in which all potential paths are available in an interface that scrolls
in every direction.
Interactive
books come in other game-like forms, including Mad Libs, storytelling dice and
decks, and magnetic poetry. Publishers and book artists have used the deck of
cards as another playful model for the book that can be sequenced by the
reader. John Cage’s work with indeterminacy in the 1960s might be included
among such works; as would French author Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1
(Éditions du Seuil, 1961), a box of 150 leaves printed on only one side that the
reader is instructed to shuffle at the outset; and B. S. Johnson’s The
Unfortunates (Panther Books, 1969), whose opening and closing quires enclose
twenty-five sections that may be read in any order. This bracketing method, in
which the story’s opening and closing are set, was used by Robert Coover for
“Heart Suit,” a story in McSweeney’s Issue 16 (May 2005) printed on fifteen
oversized heart-suited cards including a title card and a joker providing the
tale’s introduction and conclusion. Artist Christian Marclay, whose work
focuses on found and appropriated materials, published a deck of cards called
Shuffle in 2007 that, in Cagean fashion, presents the reader with seventy-five
images of musical notation in situ (as a decorative element on mugs, jackets, murals,
and the like), which are meant to be shuffled to create a playable score.
Artist
Carolee Schneeman’s ABC—We Print Anything—In the Cards (1977) is seminal in
this regard. Consisting of 158 colour-coded cards in a blue cloth box, the work
was intended as a score that could be variously interpreted by the reader.
Including dream and diary excerpts on yellow cards, quotes by characters A, B,
and C (based on Schneeman; her soon-to-be ex, Anthony; and her new lover Bruce)
on blue cards, and comments from friends on pink cards, the book suggests that
as a relationship ends, it can feel as if every possibility were predetermined,
or “in the cards.” “We print anything,” perhaps the slogan of a print shop or
tabloid, tells us that this ABC, far from rudimentary schoolbook, is for an
adult audience, and that it holds nothing back, just as Schneeman kept little
off limits in her body art and performance work. Black-and-white photographic
cards intersperse images of her nude body, her domestic space, and erotic artwork
as if to reinforce the fact that the book lays all her cards on the table.
What
happens, though, when a book is boxed and unbound? Do we still recognise it as
a book? Of course we do; the box acts like a familiar slipcase for a hardbound
book. It presents a rectilinear volume that can be arrayed on a bookshelf, and
it contains the pages or cards that come together in its content. Yet, while it
looks like a codex from outside, the moment we open the box something changes.
These pages can be “turned” in that they can be flipped over, creating two
stacks of loose sheets facing one another. Is the space between them properly
an “opening” as one finds in a codex or accordion book? Yes. And no. In an
accordion or codex, the author and designer have conceived of the opening and
the interplay between the facing pages. In an unbound book, that interplay will
be different each time it is read, since we can shuffle and reorder them at
will. If the cards or pages are not numbered, then the order is truly left up to
the reader, and perhaps even the orientation—the page can now be rotated
(though in some cases, this will render its text illegible without a mirror or
Blake’s skills).
Some of the
loveliest works to play with this potentiality are Swiss-German poet Dieter
Roth’s (born Karl Dietrich Roth, 1930–1998) series titled simply Bok (Book)
from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Germany, Roth’s parents sent him
to Switzerland in 1943 for the duration of the war (his family reunited there
in 1946) and there he trained as a graphic designer, met concrete poet Eugen
Gomringer, and began experimenting with visual poems and artists’ books. When
he moved to Reykjavik in 1957, Roth created his own small press, forlag ed.,
and began to issue books in a variety of cut-paper formats. Famously playful
with book form, his first publication, Kinderbuch (Children’s Book), originated
as a gift for his friend Claus Bremer’s son and consisted of twenty-eight 32 x
32 cm pages letterpress-printed with red, yellow, black, and blue circles and
squares in a variety of arrangements and sizes. The spiral-bound book was
produced in an edition of one hundred, twenty-five of which also had die-cut
shapes, which would become a technique of great interest to him. That playful
spirit continues in the schlitzbücher (slot-books) he began work on in 1959.
These collections of loose cardstock pages, each around fifteen inches square
with a smaller central square of hand-cut slots varying in width and
orientation, have an immediately cheeky quality. Rather than titling them, each
bok was given a number or double-letter designation. Minimalist in aesthetic,
they consist of ten to twenty-four leaves of cardstock in two or three colors
(black and white, red and blue, red and green, blue and orange, and in one
case, red, green, and blue) encased in a portfolio. When stacked and turned by
the reader, they alternately reveal and conceal portions of the pages below,
creating a variety of optical effects and transformations. The portfolio
format, here as in Blake’s illuminated prints, reminds us that our definition
of the book cannot rely on formal qualities alone—a book’s meaning arises
through use and through the apparatus set up to shape our interpretation of it.
Because
they are unbound, each leaf of the slot-books can be oriented four ways (not
all are symmetrically centred) as well as flipped, offering eight possible
orientations for each sheet, which in turn are influenced by the arrangement of
the pages below. These interactive works play with our notions of the book by
presenting us with a space that references text (that central cut-out area
evoking a prose block with ample margins), but that only becomes legible
through flipping—rather than moving our eye to scan these lines, we move the
page to make meaning from it. Though we can examine and appreciate an
individual sheet as a work of op art, we must, in fact, look through it for
juxtaposition with the page below, much as a single page of text gathers
significance through its place in a book’s sequence. One such recombinant book
has been remediated by generative artist The55 into a visual simulation that
allows us to layer the pages to our heart’s content, illuminating the extent
and variety possible in the work, which must be activated by a reader to
generate meaning, since, after all, the pages contain no text.
The Book as
Recombinant Structure: A Century of Art and Experimental Books. By Amaranth Borsuk. The Writing Platform , October 10, 2018.
ANDY FITCH:
Your preface situates books not just on an anthropological-historical timeline,
but on an experiential trajectory foregrounding books’ foundational role in the
development of present-day human beings. The Book presents the book as one of
“the first playthings we encounter” (with that plaything providing an encapacitating,
multi-sensorial source of “contrasting colors and bold patterns…to stimulate
vision,” of “contrasting textures to activate touch”), suggesting that readers
and writers might never fully depart from those early intense attunements to
bookish experience — as not so distinct from realms of identificatory
immersion/incorporation more typically associated, say, with religion, magic,
mom and her body. And so, from the start, your own distinctive lived vantage on
intellectual biographies of the book stands out as worth discussing. This
project’s preface sums up your own subject-position quite succinctly, as “a
poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital
technology…long…fascinated by the book as a malleable medium for artistic
inquiry and by writing technologies as spurs to authorship.” Could you describe
how coming at the study from that particular personal perspective shapes this
contribution to broader historical/critical/artistic conversations about the
book, and how it helped you to shape this specific volume’s linear (but not
afraid of interruptions), lucid (but not afraid of desire-infused digressions),
propulsive (but recognizing so-called anachronisms lingering productively
alongside each other) march across roughly five millennia of writing?
AMARANTH
BORSUK: My own interest in the book as a technology is deeply embedded in my
creative practice, starting with my study of letterpress printing and books
arts when I was in graduate school (not as part of my academic studies, but as
a side practice that kept me engaged with material craft while doing the
intellectual labor of the PhD), and continuing through my more recent work on
mediated approaches to reading. When I was at USC (writing my dissertation on
modernist poets and their relationship to writing technologies, while also
working in the letterpress lab at Otis College of Art and Design), I became
interested in the question of the relationship between page and screen — two
interfaces I found myself using regularly in my research and creative practice,
but which pop culture was telling me were at total odds with one another. This
concern led to my collaboration with Brad Bouse on a book of augmented-reality
poems, called Between Page and Screen, that unpacks their relationship through
an epistolary romance, one which unfolds only when the reader opens our printed
book in front of a webcam.
The process
of making Between Page and Screen was truly an investigative practice in which
my research into etymologies of the words “page” and “screen” revealed that,
though they might appear at odds with one another, they in fact share myriad
connections embedded in their very names. But the greatest revelation of that
project for me was just how performative the act of reading is. As someone who
had studied feminist and poststructuralist theory, I recognized that the book
gets shaped by its reader, but the reality of how much of a book’s meaning
arises from the moment at which we encounter it physically didn’t come home to
me until I beheld my own body on screen, holding open a book and reading a text
that would only stay fixed as long as I cradled its pages. Seeing other readers
interact with Between Page and Screen fundamentally changed the way I approach
writing, with an eye toward the reader’s engagement and a desire to foreground
the material qualities of the reading interface we tend to take for granted. So
for me, “essential knowledge” about the book must account for the interplay of
form and content that happens each time we read — whether we are looking at a
15th-century book of hours or a pulp paperback.
Having
experimented with many different book forms in my book-arts and
interactive-media practice, I’ve come to this present subject from the
perspective that, to understand what a book is, we have to reckon with the fact
that the book had many forms before the codex form now so familiar to us, and
that our relationship to the book has been naturalized and commodified to such
a degree that we no longer recognize books as having any materiality at all. To
know what books are and understand where they might be going, I argue, we must
see the book’s body again, and think about the ways that even digital reading
interfaces remain material, embodied, and performative — shaping us as much as
we shape them. The Book uses the work of book artists as an essential point of
reference because their work brings the book’s body back into focus by
defamiliarizing the familiar object or reifying tropes about how books
function.
AF : Your
study definitely directs us away from any fixed, unexamined assumption of what
“the book” must be, preferring a kaleidoscopic account that can show many among
the infinite possibilities of what a book might do. But for present purposes,
how precise could we get on a working definition of the book, for instance by
provisionally differentiating between “the book” as abstracted idea versus
specific book copies as discrete objects in the world, and/or by cataloguing
some of the book’s characteristic or exemplary functions (say of efficient
information storage and easy information retrieval), and/or by outlining how
the book’s
phenomenological/relational/sociological/epistemological/philosophical
circuitry helps to shape “the very nature of thought itself” (as the book
prompts, structures, extends specific modes of human expression/reflection, and
as certain pressing forms of human expression/reflection restructure
possibilities for the book)? However you see fit, could you give us the book on
how The Book goes about figuring the book?
AB : First
and foremost, this study acknowledges the slipperiness of the term “book,”
which most of us use to describe both object and content. When we ask someone
if they have read a book, we’re generally not thinking about a particular
edition, but rather the text itself. My process of figuring out what a book is
here takes four chapters, and traces a loose narrative that involves: first
diving into the history of the book’s changing forms preceding the codex;
second considering the ways the book’s mechanization separated its form from
its content; third recounting the ways this shift sparked a rebellion on the
part of poets and artists in the 20th-century, who begin making artwork in book
form that draws attention to and exploits the material affordances of books;
fourth turning to how mass digitization makes the book’s body both disappear
and reappear at the same time, by literalizing the notion of the reading
interface (books have always been interfaces, but we adapt to them and they
adapt to us quickly enough that we forget this fact). Object, content, idea,
and interface: that is the four-chapter structure by which The Book figures the
book.
At first I
develop a working definition of the book that treats it as a portable information-storage
and information-retrieval device — a broad enough category to encompass clay
tablets, khipu, bamboo jiance, and myriad other forms that both precede and
follow the codex. This can’t, however, be the perfect definition, so my volume
seeks to bring in as many voices as possible to weigh in on what books are
(perhaps most properly defined by how books work). Pull quotes strategically
placed throughout the volume provide alternate perspectives from scholars and
book artists whose writing has shaped my thinking about the book. Due to space
limitations, I could only fit about 30 voices into the text, yet I feel
strongly that the book is a living artifact we can understand better through a
sort of cubist approach to seeing it from multiple angles. So I have recently
started an ancillary project to ask scholars, writers, and artists what is
the/a book? and to publish their answers at t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com. I have collected
100 so far, and with each one I receive I have a better and stronger feeling
not just for the present, but for the future of the book.
AF : Here
could you also outline your decision to depart from any teleological story of
the book’s ever-increasing contribution to civilizational progress, or any
“death of the book” approach declaring the book’s definitive displacement (say
by radio, TV, film, audiobook technologies, or, of course, by present-day
digital media)? Could you take us through the thought process by which treating
the book as an ongoing cultural-historical negotiation (regarding, say,
prevailing conceptions of authorship, art, economic production, audience
participation) might lead to Frederick Kilgour’s conception of a series of
“punctuated equilibria,” with seemingly discontinuous technologies of the book
(“tablet and scroll, scroll and codex, manuscript and print, paperback and
e-book”) existing side-by-side rather than eclipsing each other (and with such
historical unevenness perhaps most acutely crystallized by the dynamic status
of the book today, with texts potentially appearing in so many different media
forms all at once)?
AB : I
started the project with a strong desire to avoid a presentist perspective that
sets up early books simply as precursors to this current moment, because that
perspective fails to acknowledge the power, significance, and validity of
preceding book forms. Similarly, I’m highly skeptical of any narrative of
improvement or perfection, because digital media are not simply neutral
interfaces providing greater accessibility to text — these interfaces are
embedded in power structures and in a capitalist system that tries to gloss
over the ways they restrict our ability to intervene into those interfaces. I
do want to acknowledge the ways mediation can improve accessibility for certain
readers (through tools like DAISY text-to-speech, and the ability to alter the
type size and contrast of an e-book), but I don’t want to set up digital
technology as some kind of perfect solution to the question of portable reading
technologies. I hope, instead, to show that at every point in the book’s
development, it has offered a handy format suited to the needs and material
capacities of the communities in which it arises. It makes sense that the
Mesopotamians would develop a book technology from the material they had in
abundance: clay drawn from the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, a
material whose use they had developed extensively for architecture and crafts.
Likewise, scrolls of bamboo and silk provide wonderful materials for early
Chinese books, because the cultivation of these materials already was so
advanced. By extension, I don’t think of an Etruscan wax tablet, say, as an
imperfect codex. It could be inscribed and erased. It could be annotated, and
it was portable. It served the needs of its users.
I like
Kilgour’s notion of “punctuated equilibria” because both history and lived
experience tell us that these forms don’t simply give way to one another on a
tidy developmental timeline. The clay tablet and papyrus scroll were used side
by side for two millennia, because they served the needs of different
communities and different readerships. Likewise the scroll and tablet overlap,
as do the scroll and codex. Even though e-readers make it possible to carry a
whole library of texts within a device as slim as a poetry collection, plenty
of people still opt to buy paperbacks and hardbound books, sometimes using
e-books for research and paperbacks for their manga collection, or e-books for
their romance novels and hardbound books for school texts — any number of
combinations. Readers are finding the interfaces that allow the kinds of
engagements they want with particular texts, and there’s no reason to believe
that portability is the only factor shaping these decisions about what and how
to read.
AF : Following
the focus of your present study, my questions likewise will focus primarily on
a book tradition emerging in Renaissance Europe and continuing to present-day
Anglophone digital media. But which aspects of Mesopotamian innovation with the
clay tablet, Egyptian cultivation of papyrus, Chinese invention of bamboo
jiance and paper and type, Inkan traditions of the khipu (or any other
traditions you want to describe) would you especially have enjoyed exploring
more here?
AB :
If I had
had more space (as it is, my volume pushes the upper limit of this MIT
Essential Knowledge series’ length), I would have liked to have delved into
Mesoamerican codices, which include painted pictographic writing on folded
barkcloth, animal skin, and other plant fibers. It’s a complex narrative that
really reflects the role of conquest in shaping the book. Because the codex
form was so deeply ingrained in Renaissance consciousness as the medium for the
dissemination of ideas, Mesoamerican media forms were denigrated or destroyed
as part of the colonial enterprise. Conquistadors destroyed the Aztec books
they found, considering them pagan documents. They encouraged the Aztecs to
rewrite these histories for a Spanish audience, using European language and
hieroglyphic writing in concert. The resulting works took more traditionally
Eurocentric forms, like the codex and scroll. This Eurocentrism also helps to
explain why colonizers didn’t dig deeply into the Inkan khipu or try to
understand its workings — a tremendous setback to contemporary scholars. The
khipu was seen as inferior to the teleologically more “developed” form of the
written word and bound book, and many khipu were simply destroyed, with little
thought given to this highly developed textile form of information encoding.
AF : From
your project’s opening page onwards, the codex takes on particular
significance. Since, again, one might unreflectively conflate “the book” and
the codex as equivalent concepts or objects, could you here present the codex
as one distinct type of book: a handy, human-scaled format fluidly combining
functional possibilities for sequential reading and for random access; a
deliberately differentiated cultural product departing from Hebraic scrolls in
favor of emergent Christian narratives; an intimate companion well-suited to
wide-ranging devotional practices across cultures and epochs, from
post-medieval “books of hours” to Frank O’Hara’s “heart in my pocket” lunch
poems; a distinctly dialogical engagement (at least compared to scrolls,
tablets) providing well-ordered space in the margins for further commentary by
experts and/or by the reader herself?
AB : You
just listed some of the codex’s most important affordances — all of which have
contributed to its staying power as an efficient readable and writable
interface for the dissemination of ideas. The contemporary codex (as a stack of
pages bound on one side and encased between covers) helps us find what we are
looking for through tables of contents, indices, page numbers, running heads,
and the like. It offers margins for our commentary (Renaissance readers took
great advantage of this), and it offers a series of openings into which a
bookmark or dog-ear can be inserted to hold one’s place. In so doing, the codex
offers us opportunities to mis-use it too: as a container for keepsakes pressed
between pages, and as a space to doodle, daydream, or talk back to the author.
The codex makes its identity known on the bookshelf by presenting a spine that
includes a title and author’s name, and when we pull it down we know which side
is front or back because we find the title again on one side and a barcode or
perhaps blurbs on the reverse. All of these techniques, though natural to us
now, developed over time and in response to shifts in readership from
monasteries to the academy, and from a wealthy elite to a mass audience. And
many of the things we take for granted about the codex are not universal
features (the direction in which the text is printed, for instance, will depend
on the language in which the book is written, as will the way the author’s name
and title are presented on the spine).
All of
these features are paratextual — they aren’t part of the work’s “content,” yet
they indelibly shape our reading experience. Some scholars argue that these
paratexts themselves define the book, situating it as something we identify as
“book” in a way we might not recognize a collection of blank pages or a pocket
calendar as a “book,” even when these are bound codices. If we think about
these elements as packaging the book for us, then it’s easy to see how other
shapes for the book are possible, and other definitions that don’t adhere to
codex form. Even though the codex is an exceptionally handy format, it isn’t
always the ideal one. If, for instance, a work relies on enabling its readers
to view multiple parts of the text simultaneously, a scroll or accordion is far
more accommodating than the two-page spread. And if, as is sometimes the case
these days, a text includes video and audio material, then a tablet or website
allowing multimedia content is better suited to our needs than a bound and
printed book.
It’s also
worth pointing out that previous book forms were likewise sized to the body of
the writer and reader, and likewise the reader learned to use his/her body to
navigate the text. Most clay tablets were smaller than a cell phone and fit
comfortably in one hand, for instance. And the papyrus or parchment scroll,
though larger, could be unrolled with one hand while rolled with the other,
revealing a single, accessible column of text at a time. And just as tables of
contents and indices developed with the rise of the academy, in response to
scholars’ needs, makers and readers of these book forms developed their own
finding aids — including an incipit announcing the work at hand, and
rubrication to highlight important passages.
AF : In
terms then of the codex book’s historical emergence, could we address some
specific social configurations that this book form tapped and eventually
reshaped? I found fascinating, for instance, your account of the historical
pivot from post-Hellenic monastic literary traditions (operating amid oral
reading cultures, producing continuous scripts absent of spaces between words,
absent of casing, absent of most punctuation, thereby indicating the text’s
destiny to be read aloud, to a community, perhaps a brotherhood, or at its most
expansive a network of monasteries) to Renaissance-era inventions of a silent,
potentially more solitary reading practice — still public in its own way, of
course, given this era’s efflorescence of constructive free-flowing idea exchange.
Here, for example, any nostalgia we might feel for preceding oral communities
gets mitigated by the fact that communitarian readings might not differ so much
from authoritative/authoritarian readings. Here Protestant emphases upon the
individual’s direct relation to divine text, further personalized when printed
in the vernacular, also come into play. But could you just describe, however
you see fit, what you find most compelling about socio-phenomenological
transformations the printed codex here helps to bring about?
AB : For
me, one of the most fascinating aspects of reading’s privatization (which
really democratizes the word) is the way this leads to the commodification of
the book. With literacy and the ability to study text comes greater demand for texts
to read, and thus both a flourishing of literature and the gradual development
of a book trade that seeks to make a luxury item into a commodity. The book
doesn’t stop being a social space when it gets privatized, but that sociality
changes shape, for instance with the practice of many Renaissance readers
keeping a commonplace book — where quotations from many texts live side by
side, in a dialogue that also serves as a record of one’s own intellectual
development.
I think,
too, of the way reproduction leads to a boom in reading and a rise in libraries
in the Victorian period, with publishers and authors finding ways to capitalize
on the sharing of books: producing triple-decker novels that could be bound in
three parts (so that multiple readers could enjoy a book simultaneously), or
distributing books in periodical form to make each installment affordable (and
again shareable). Mass production eventually makes books lightweight,
inexpensive, and portable enough that they become highly shareable, and even
disposable by the time we reach the paperback revolution — with books for sale
in subway stations and on grocery-store racks. Shareability might be one of the
printed codex’s best affordances. It is deliciously easy to hand one to a
friend and say “I loved this book and I think you will too.” Portability and
shareability have been hallmarks of the codex from its inception — when the
codex really took root as the format for distributing early Christian texts,
because it was portable enough to be passed clandestinely. This is one of the
chief complaints I hear about e-books. A purchased e-book isn’t transferrable
in the same way my paperback copy of To the Lighthouse is. I can scratch out my
name inside the cover and write a personal note, then hand it over to someone
else to enjoy.
AF :
We just
jumped basically into the present, but should we linger a bit more, as your own
study does, on technical innovations in print production from the Gutenberg era
onwards? Amid your account of this dynamic historical acceleration, I
especially appreciated again your resistance to any streamlined tale of
progress, your dilations upon Gutenberg and his peers designing then casting
their fonts in molten metal, upon “uppercase” letters getting their name from
the drawer in which early typesetters kept them, upon many navigational aids
that seem inherently reader-friendly really just emerging as manufacturer-focused
innovations (such as page numbers making it much easier for bookbinders to sort
through stacks of printed sheets). We can pause on any of those details, or we
could address more broadly your project’s direct appeal not only to authors,
readers, scholars, but to bookmakers. How would you describe that engagement
and identification with the bookmaker as helping to drive this study? And/or,
with luminaries like Gutenberg and Aldus in mind, could you articulate any
implicit call here for us to return to a fused array of writing, reading,
scholarly, and book-designing/-making/-producing practices as one idealized
conception of what it might mean to be “literary” (with the bookmaker the
figure most often left out of that conception)?
AB :
I do spend
a significant portion of this book looking at artistic practices that meld
authorship and production. Gutenberg interests me partly because he didn’t
write a word of the text he is famous for — the 42-line Bible printed with his
press, ink, and movable type. But each of the early printers you mention made
the design of the page central to their conception of the book. Aldus chose to
issue his classics without any commentary, in handy-sized volumes meant to
allow readers to enjoy these works unencumbered. He wanted to create beautiful,
simple publications, pleasing to the eye as well as accommodating to the hand —
because he thought this would make the ancient writers whose work he so loved
more accessible to his contemporaries.
And while
Gutenberg and Aldus didn’t write the texts they produced, a number of
subsequent book innovators played the roles both of originator and fabricator,
refusing to denigrate craft to creation. Mallarmé is an essential figure here,
since his conception of Un coup de dés encompassed not only writing this long
poem, but also envisioning its careful arrangement across each two-page spread
as central to the work’s meaning. Likewise, we can’t talk about the book
without mentioning William Blake, whose frontispieces call him “The poet and
printer” in order to emphasize the fact that he undertook every aspect of his
work’s production (save binding, left to specialists so that collectors of
Blake’s books could give their home libraries a unified look).
I find
bookbinding and artists’ books so useful in thinking about what the book might
be or do because these practices help us see the materiality of books as an
essential constituent of their meaning, rather than a secondary appendage. In
the words of Fluxus artist and publisher Dick Higgins: “an artist’s book could
be music, photography, graphics, intermedial literature. The experience of
reading it, viewing it, framing it — that is what the artist stresses in making
it.” I like how that definition reminds us that a book is an occasion, an
experience, a performance, and not a static thing. It isn’t simply a text
bestowed on a reader by an author (or perhaps, all too often, it is).
It seems to
me that most e-book publishers currently see the book this way — as “content”
to make available through devices, but not so much as an experience to be had
by a reader. In doing so, they forfeit design in the interest of text that can
flow accessibly into any interface, and ignore the distinct capabilities of
digital media (like sound, animation, touch, geolocation, all of which can be
used to create dynamic reading experiences). If The Book offers any kind of
“call,” it calls for a closer attention to what this medium itself can do, and
how it can shape storytelling. In the final chapter, I consider some app-makers
who have embraced the affordances of tablets to create truly new and beautiful
reading experiences — the kind of thing I look forward to seeing more of.
AF : Here again I wonder how much this particular
history of the book finds itself shaped by your own personal interests and
emotional/aesthetic/intellectual/labor-hour investments in book-arts
traditions. And of course Johanna Drucker’s
scholarly/curatorial/hands-on-practical precedent stands out, with her
formulation of the artist’s book as a “zone of activity” (creation,
dissemination, reception included) foregrounding: collaborative engagement,
institutional critique, alternate means of production and distribution,
dematerialized self-referentiality highlighting the idea of “the book” even
while disrupting conceptions of the book as transparent container of “content.”
And your own reflections on how the artist’s book uses its content to
interrogate its form (and vice versa) provide an especially instructive
paradigm for thinking through historical continuities all the way to future
digital explorations of how books will communicate and how we will read. So
before we even get much to specific exemplary book-arts practitioners, could we
again take an innocuous-sounding introductory line from your project’s preface
(the imperative that we must think of books “as objects that have experienced a
long history of experimentation and play”), and discuss how that perspective
might align your study with and/or distinguish your study from parallel
histories of the book? Or for a much more minuscule question, do you, like me,
hesitate every single time on where to put the apostrophe in the “artist’s
book” phrase (singular or collective, from an artist or for artists)? I notice
you vary it at least in the draft I have.
AB :
I certainly
do hesitate over that apostrophe, but any variety in the placement should only
be based on whether I’m using a plural possessive or a singular one — on how
many artists are involved in the making.
More
generally, my hope is that this book-arts orientation toward experimentation
and play can offer some touchstones for certain kinds of interactivity we tend
to associate only with the digital realm. Artists’ books provide some wonderful
examples of ways that the book has always been, say, a cinematic space, or has
always had the capacity to create virtual realities. So I do draw some examples
from book history, including early pop-up and lift-the-flap books, or the
Mutoscope as an early cinematic flip-book form, or unusual bindings like the
dos-a-dos (back to back) and cordiform (heart-shaped) books that put their
structure and their content into dialogue.
AF : When
you mention putting book structure and content into dialogue, I definitely do
think of Blake and Mallarmé — and also of Ed Ruscha circulating his serialized
photographic books outside conventional gallery confines, incorporating deadpan
deployments of the book’s paratextual norms (title page, typeset, etcetera) to
confound spatial/temporal dimensions all the further, questioning again what it
means to read. I realize I’ve addressed all white men, but could we here push
beyond those classic points of reference to give some more recent exemplary
models, say, of bookworks projects calling attention to the book’s material
production, of anti-books refusing the book’s conventional functions while
renegotiating its form, of recombinant books complicating perceptual dimensions
while returning attention to our imminent interface with the book?
AB : The
white masculinity of this particular lineage really bothers me, but I do feel
it belongs to the category of “essential knowledge” about the history of
artists’ books. I tried to include queer bookmakers, women, and artists of
color in my examples as well, but I do talk about all of those guys. I am
really interested in what you are calling “anti-books,” or books that refuse
reading. Ulises Carrión uses that term, which I consider both exciting (in that
is conjures up a subversive kind of book-destruction), but also somewhat
problematic (in that it seems to suggest that a destroyed or altered book isn’t
a book any longer). Books have always reserved the right to remain silent, and
done so in powerful ways, wresting censorship from the censorious, and using
this silence to make a point — whether witty, as in the case of the black page
in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or more serious.
I deeply
admire the way book-artist Alisa Banks uses silence in her series Edges (from
the late 2000’s). Each volume is a found and altered hardbound book whose
signatures she has bound along the fore-edge by crocheting them shut with hair
extensions in traditional African hairstyles like cornrow, lace braid, and
thread wrap. These volumes, displayed on their backs with their pages fanned
out above them, become faces with crowns of hair, reminding us that the book’s
body has a head and headband, and that a book itself is often a model of a mind
in action. Braided shut, the text refuses access, a gesture we can read as
commentary on the way intolerance further silences marginalized people. But we
can also read that silence as a refusal, a protective gesture that allows the
text its privacy, its intimacy, its individuality. Banks created these works in
response to political debates about immigration at the time, and they continue
to feel extremely relevant a decade later.
AF : I
mentioned your acute investments in book-arts practices. Other personalized
reference points likewise stand out, at least to a friend reading your book.
For example, even as architectural prototypes for the book (with, say,
bookmaking terminology adopting terms like “frontispiece,” with some early
books’ printed frames “designed to look like a portico or a building’s façade,”
evoking the “vast intellectual space within,” I personally recall your own
lived desires when arriving in new cities to check out new buildings (and
especially museums). Or I mean to point more generally here to a desire
spectrum quietly traced across The Book. Your concluding return to a concrete
depiction of the embodied reading act, “arising in the moment of reception, in
the hands, eyes, ears, and mind of the reader,” might not specifically mention
affect, desire — but could you address how your own imaginative/desiring
relation to the book has found itself enhanced, expanded, perhaps further
refined, perhaps increasingly self-reflexive, as you’ve lingered upon King
Demaratus’s encryptions, and papyrus’s water-soluble erasures, and Aldus’s
clarified articulations of the page, and Renaissance printers designing “ever
more enticing entryways,” and itinerant 16th-century peddlers hawking
chapbooks? This may sound like an overdetermined reading, but a line like “The
codex, like us, has a body, and to know it, we must understand its anatomy”
strikes me as a classic alibi for eros-driven investigative pursuits.
AB : To be completely honest, I loved researching
this book in part because I am not a book historian or a textual-studies
scholar. My scholarly background is primarily in 20th- and 21st-century poetry
and digital literature, but my artistic practice is embedded in book production
and publication. So it was a wonderful experience to spend time learning and
thinking more deeply about histories of the material book.
I am wary
of overly sentimentalizing the book’s materiality. I actually cut out a section
of the manuscript that covered nostalgia over the book’s smell (it turns out
that the old-book smell some of us savor is in fact the smell of its decay),
because this felt both too judgmental and too sentimental at the same time. But
research did strengthen my belief that to truly know books you have to get
hands-on with the materials through which they are made. Binding a book is the
best way to get a sense of how this form itself makes meaning, and how it can
shape the things we say and the ways we read. I liked imagining how papyrus
gets made, but I’d really love to actually go out and experience stripping the
stalks, laying them in a cross-hatched pattern, and beating them until they
fuse — I know that would deepen my understanding of the material, much as
pulling a sheet of paper in Columbia College’s papermaking department deepened
my appreciation for, and understanding of, the grid of the page.
AF : Inevitably, The Book’s engagement with
digital-book production needs to stay somewhat provisional, though you do
provide a compelling catalog of projects from recent decades. Following your
book-arts considerations, your engagements with digital books likewise trace a
confluence of historically, technologically, commercially, ideologically,
epistemologically, aesthetically determined pressures shaping our creation of
and encounter with the latest range of interactive reading devices: devices not
eclipsing the codex, so much as foregrounding how books always have called
forth an improvisatory performance, negotiation, event of meaning-making — even
when marketed as fixed, stable, straightforwardly functional consumerist
commodities. Here Lori Emerson’s critique of transparent-seeming informational
interfaces encouraging impassive and/or unreflective audience consumption
proves especially useful. So rather than categorically lament the loss of
“deep-reading” potential in emergent literary forms, could we consider, for
instance, how certain contemporary works “use the affordances of the web and
mobile devices…as part of their structure,” encouraging critical reflection on
the immersive and/or interactive environments that they themselves construct,
evoking even as they undermine “the myth of digital disembodiment”?
AB : Yes, I think that’s exactly right. I don’t
believe “deep reading” has been lost, if it ever really existed in the first
place. Digital interfaces can invite absolutely immersive, thoughtful, complex
reading experiences that do not replicate the already rewarding experience of
print. I get most excited about digital books that allow the interface to be
part of the story they tell, which is why I give short readings of Erik Loyer’s
apps Strange Rain and Ruben and Lullaby. Loyer uses interactivity and touch in
ways that implicate the reader in how stories unfold, here requiring our
fingertips to shape what happens. That he incorporates strong writing with
beautiful visuals and mesmerizing music makes each experience totally unique to
the app interface. And again, these works make us physically see the interface,
since we have to pass our fingers over it to make anything happen.
On the
subject of “deep reading,” I do think that not all books have the same
function. I don’t go to poetry searching for the same things I search for in
Victorian novels. Every book presents a distinct engagement with language, so
why would we expect them all to be the same or look the same? That’s something
Carrión laments in his great manifesto “The New Art of Making Books.” Some conceptual
writer could probably repurpose this entire 1975 text, replacing the words
“book” with “e-book” and “bookstore” with “whispernet” to critique the lack of
innovation on the part of e-book publishers. The digital humanities scholar
Élika Ortega has written a twitter bot, BotCarrion, which, you might say, does
just that, periodically tweeting definitions of the book based on the corpus of
this manifesto.
AF : To close on questions of the book’s future
modes of interface, engagement, dissemination, could we consider, alongside
more familiar digital initiatives such as Project Gutenberg and Google Books,
the Internet Archive’s charmingly retro/inventive methods of having it “both
ways…it treats the book as an object, providing high-resolution color scans that
show the nuances of the page’s surface and include foldout images and
marginalia to replicate the book as closely as possible, but it also makes the
same book available in multiple digital formats to meet the needs of different
readers,” or how the Internet Archive goes about engaging various types of
reading disabilities, or how it bookmobiles its way to under-resourced reading
communities, bearing printers, or how it preserves books in multiple ways,
vowing not to destroy them while it copies them, then provisionally retiring
printed books in a bibliophile’s equivalent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault?
Again something tells me your own desire stays with the Internet Archive
throughout this section.
AB :
Oh, it’s
true. I did sort of fall in love with IA when I was writing that chapter,
though I didn’t want to. Maybe if it seemed like my heart was with them, then
your heart was with them too? But I appreciate this totally absurd gesture that
an institution founded to archive the most porous and changeable text of all
(the Internet) has developed an initiative to preserve physical books as well,
in climate-controlled cargo containers. And their system for making books
widely available in a digital public library makes a lot of sense to me:
particularly as libraries continue to reduce the amount of space devoted to
bookshelves, and to increase their footprint as public and social settings (an
important and valuable aspect of what they do, but one that makes browsing and
happening upon interesting books harder and harder). I do appreciate the
Internet Archive’s attention to the material and the digital at once, and my
hope for digital reading writ large is that more authors and publishers will do
the same — allowing the e-book interface to become as central to the reading
experience as the clay tablet or codex book are when held in the hand.
The Book’s
Body: Talking to Amaranth Borsuk. By Andy Fitch. Los Angeles Review of Books. June 22, 2018.
George
Miller talks with Amaranth Borsuk on her
book The Book, which appears in the MIT Essential Knowledge Series.
Amaranth is a scholar, poet, and book artist who works at the intersection of
print and digital media. She’s also assistant professor in the school of
interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Her book in the MIT Press series examines, as the lapidary copy on the back
puts it, ‘the book as object, as content, as idea, as interface’. Its focus is wide: not just recent
developments in digital books, but also artists’ books that challenge the
notion of what a book is and does, or the books of Renaissance scholars, where
erudite debate would be pursued in marginal annotations, all the way back to
the earliest clay tablets which the Sumerians used over 5,000 years ago to record
important information.
The Hedgehog & The Fox , February 26, 2019.
I first
discovered Amaranth Borsuk’s work in Between Page and Screen, a romance story,
co-authored with Brad Bouse, told through printed visual designs that are
activated by a computer webcam. When I learned that Borsuk wrote The Book for
MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series (which provides “specialized subject
matter for nonspecialists”), I knew I had to read it. Books have a long history
as objects of critical study, to which Borsuk’s 12-page bibliography and
seven-page “Further Reading and Writing” section attest. Spanning disciplines,
from library science to conceptual art to philosophy, the study of books dates
back to early texts like historian and typeface designer Douglas C. McMurtrie’s
1937 The Book: the Story of Printing & Bookmaking, as well as librarian
Frederick Kilgour’s The Evolution of the Book (1998), and, more recently, Leah
Price’s historical study How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
(2012). Borsuk’s book on the book takes on the hefty task of synthesizing this
wide-ranging research into a cross-disciplinary summary text that examines both
historical and contemporary interest in this iconic form.
Broken into
four sections looking at the book as “Object,” “Content,” “Idea,” and
“Interface,” Borsuk begins around 2800 BCE in Southern Mesopotamia, tracing the
transition from oral to written history. She offers a meticulous account of the
object’s predecessors, from cuneiform tablets and scrolls to incunabula (early
forms of the printed codex) and manuscripts. This exhaustive lineage fills the
first two chapters. While a bit overwhelming, it provides a necessary charting
of the relationship between form, content, and reception. As the book changed
from something few people could make, read, carry, or own, to something
mass-produced and easily possessed, the nature of reading changed from an
activity practiced by a small number of scribes and religious scholars, to that
of the affluent and well educated, and then, finally, to a pastime of the
masses.
“This
normalization of reading practices bears remembering,” Borsuk explains, “since
from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, our own codex book has been
normalized to such a degree that we question the ‘bookness’ of anything that
challenges our expected reading experience.” It’s almost hard to imagine that
this reading experience was constructed over hundreds of years. With this
detailed history, the author provides a rubric for what lies ahead: digital
publishing and the current (and future!) landscape of reading, which is equally
determined by a tenuous balance between form, content, and culture.
The second
half of The Book (“As Idea” and “As Interface”) is devoted to technological and
practical advancements made at the hands of artists and designers. Borsuk runs
through an extensive list of achievements that will be well known to most
readers, and the people behind them: for instance, graphic designer Jan Tschild
who, among other things, helped design Penguin’s mass-market paperbacks;
William Blake’s 18th-century illuminated manuscripts; Stéphane Mallarmé’s
19th-century page designs based on the structure of newsprint’s columns and
typeface; the emergence of artists-as-publishers and conceptual art
publications, such as Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) and
Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975), which both use the sequential nature of
photobooks to turn the physical object into a conceptual space; and
performative book-objects such as Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), and
Dieter Roth’s unboxed books from the 1950s and ’60s. These latter works herald
a new wave of writing and critical thinking about the book, as both a
conceptual and physical object.
Since the
invention, in 105 CE, of the codex, which Borsuk defines in her handy glossary
as “a block of pages bound on one side between covers,” the bound book has
grown beyond its physical form into a metaphor; we call a new start “turning over
a new leaf” (an early reference to book pages) and we read people like open
books. The author highlights a number of artists’ projects that play on the
metaphor of the book as an opening into space and people, as in Fluxus artist
Alison Knowles’s The Big Book (1969), a human-sized, freestanding, multipart
“book” that viewers would walk around (and, in some cases, through — some of
the “pages” had holes to enter in). It is this area that is most interesting in
the digital age, as books’ bodies become new forms, yet the metaphors remain at
large in our culture.
Johanna
Drucker (both a theorist and maker of books) defines artists’ books as books
that “integrate the formal means of [their realization] and production with
[their] thematic or aesthetic issues.” Drucker is joined by a number of others
interested in explaining and exploring this wave of artistic creation. Borsuk
notes in particular the writings of art critic and historian Lucy Lippard, who
co-founded Printed Matter in New York; Ulises Carrión, founder of the
artist-book space Other Books and So in Amsterdam and author of the 1975
manifesto The New Art of Making Books; and Dick Higgins, a Fluxus artist and
publisher of Something Else Press. As with the early history, these figures and
their writings are likely familiar to most readers of The Book, who presumably
already have some interest in this subject. But what Borsuk does so masterfully
is create a fluid timeline that connects these narratives and forms. Much has
been written on the history of early European publishing; on graphic design and
how movable type transformed book publishing; and on Fluxus and other conceptual
art publishing. However, the author covers it all, and retains a relationship
between these moments and genres that is always tied to the form of the book.
In her
final chapter, “Book as Interface,” Borsuk explains that a good interface is a
“transparent vessel through which we access the information we need.” What
makes the book arts so interesting are the ways artists push against this. “As
with artists’ books, when digital books make the interface a visible and
integral part of the narrative, we begin to see the extent to which any book is
a negotiation, a performance, a dynamic event that happens in the moment and is
never the same twice,” she notes as she transitions from artists’ books to
digital publishing. “As the material form of the codex threatens to
disintegrate into the digital, works highly attuned to materiality give us a
chance to think about and savor the physical artifact, precisely by asking us
to reflect on the very immaterial ‘idea’ of the book.” This statement recalls
again the metaphoric quality of the book that remains.
Borsuk
traces electronic literature as well, from Brewster Kahle’s founding of the
Internet Archive in 1996 to the Google Print initiative in 2004 (which became
Google Books) and the iPhone and Amazon Kindle releases in 2007. As with her
other accounts, this evolution is not a straight line, but one that changes as
reading needs, alongside formats and cultural conceptions of a book, change. As
she notes near the end, “All books, I hope this volume suggests, arise in the
moment of reception, in the hands, eyes, ears, and mind of the reader.” Just as
the oral tradition needs an orator, a book needs a reader to be activated. Even
the most conceptual examples of art books play with the performative aspect of
words waiting to be read. Books are physical objects whose properties dictate
these experiences. “Both we and the texts we read have bodies, and it is only
when they come together that a book takes shape.” With many of us today
carrying reading devices in our pockets, and the potential of books to take so
many forms at the click of a button, the real question is not what will the
book become, but what its readers will become.
How Our Relationship to Books Has
Changed Throughout History. By Megan N. Liberty. Hyperallergic , May 21, 2019.
Website
Amaranth Borsuk
Website MIT Press
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