Of course, unbinding is about the process of breaking down– of designating what does and does not belong, what is kept in, what is left out; or what is left in, what is kept out.

This year, while working on The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education as a project assistant, I have been exploring the possibilities of unbinding material and digitally publishing archives that are nimble and can freely circulate.

I turn to  the work of translating notes on Lucy Martin Donnelly (1870-1948): a biographical research project which began with a small collection of citations and material in Special Collections, was then collated into a ten-page paper, and is being currently re-envisioned as an iBook.

Unbound
While researching Lucy Martin Donnelly, who was first an alumna of Bryn Mawr and then ended her tenure as head of the English Department, I began sleuthing through the files in Special Collections. I chose to work on constructing a small biography of Lucy Martin Donnelly, because it seemed that many of the history books and biographies I was reading on Bryn Mawr College’s history had glints of Donnelly’s influence though never more than a paragraph or two. The chosen epigraph for the title page  (shown in Figure 1) reads, “For many years hers [Donnelly’s] was the most influential voice in the planning for the English Department–and none the less influential because it was a quiet voice.” The words are in the “Memorial Introduction” honoring Donnelly’s career given by former Bryn Mawr President Katherine McBride. My foray into researching Donnelly’s life began with the question of how to highlight this powerful voice in a fashion that complements McBride’s description.

Binding
Donnelly’s archival material mostly consists of remnants from relationships through recollections of friends, saved dinner invitations, and letters that were sent to her. These documents were in most cases related to prominent figures in  Bryn Mawr’s history: Helen Thomas Flexner, Betrand Russell, Edith Hamilton, Edith Finch, M. Carey Thomas, Marianne Moore, or the Bryn Mawr English department.

Instead of pulling apart these facets, I found myself following the desire to bind; to create a collation of these materials which could provide a composite portrait, to provide depth through the heft of compilation. My process began with collecting the materials, references, and citations to create a fuller portrait of Donnelly.

I began to think about how the work of unbinding requires us first to recognize the necessity of boundaries. Before I could imagine what digital possibilities were for the materials I was working with, I needed to understand them in the context of one another; I had to bind them together in a narrative.

What I found when constructing these pieces through an analogue biography, is that rather than following a chronological narrative, the materials seem apt to push against the boundaries of a linear chronology. The different references to Donnelly were specific to each person and privileging one account over another would only overshadow what I saw as a core facet to Donnelly’s history: her ability to reach out to many people and ideas and to connect them. Donnelly’s impact arose out of a desire to create ties between people long before social media 2.0. She was in a sense, the creator of a 19th century Facebook-type network. For example, Betrand Russell was quoted in the July ’36 Alumnae Bulletin article “Miss Donnelly Retires” as saying: It is nearly forty-two years since I first met Lucy Donnelly and during those years we have discussed many topic literary and other. We disagreed about Matthew Arnold and the first sentence of The Golden Bowl but, passionate as the argument was on those two weighty subjects, it did not impair our friendship. It was from Lucy Donnelly that I first heard of [Joseph] Conrad, who afterwards became my friend and my son’s godfather.”  
This brief praise from Russell illustrates his affection for Donnelly’s friendship, her breadth of knowledge and intellect and also her ability to connect.

It was through the constraints of the page that I was able to better grasp why Donnelly’s biography seemed so intangible and resisted archiving on a traditional page. The kaleidoscopic narrative of Donnelly’s life, a life tangled with serendipitous meetings, threads of interwoven tête-à-têtes, and lasting influences, was one that required a networked representation.

Re:binding
I wanted to think about how to create a record of Donnelly’s life that echoed its vibrancy through many strands. Part of the benefit of the multi-vocal, sometimes conflicting accounts is that we see the multiple versioning of Donnelly as the archives of her life are constructed through the memories of others. Some, like Russell, may remember Donnelly’s passion for literature and philosophy, others might recall her work in an administrative capacity like founding the Chinese Scholarship committee but all accounts provide a rich rendering of her impact.

I turned to the iBook– a newly developed platform by Apple which would allow me to collage pictures, sound, and hyperlinks. As Figure 3 demonstrates, the iBook platform allows me to create a series of portraits that would recount Donnelly through the profiles of people  she worked with and influenced. Through this dynamic text, it was possible to design a flexible path that would illustrate multiple accounts and perspectives for the reader to tie together–binding and unbinding her portrait of Donnelly as she read.

Yet, even with the new flexibility of these features and their platform, I created an area of boundedness:  one of hardware. Even while the interface became haptic and multimodal, it necessitated an iPad to circulate and MacBook to create.

While the kinds of binding may have changed, even with fluid, digital networks, we are creating ties and facing fixed boundaries. It is then our work to do the unbinding and rebinding so that we stretch wider towards the possibilities that are just beyond their margins.

Notes on this blog:

The images above are screenshots from the iBook in progress “Lucy Martin Donnelly and the Power of Female Networking.” All materials featured are courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.This blog entry is also cross-posted on the Educating Women blog.

These thoughts were inspired by a symposium recently held at MIT, Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book. It is the conversations and presentations resulting from this symposium that influenced my sense of boundedness and the productive processes which tether and unravel it.

Don’t put up my Thread and Needle is from an Emily Dickinson poem, 617, “Don’t put up my Thread and Needle –”

Of course, unbinding is about the process of breaking down: is a an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s opening line in his essay, The Crack-Up: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down”

(A guest post by Alana Kumbier, Library & Technology Services, Wellesley College)

I spent last Sunday afternoon at the Washington Street Art Center in Somerville, celebrating the arrival of spring with a roomful of artists and zine-makers. I had my doubts about whether this small, local event — the Spring Zine Thing — could compete with the lure of the outdoors on one of the season’s first hot, sunny days. When I walked up to the Center and saw folks waiting around for the doors to open, I realized I’d underestimated the appeal of zines, and of zine-fair camaraderie. I spent the afternoon chatting with other zine- and comics-makers, watching readers connect with zines, meeting people from neighborhood organizations and businesses, trading design and binding tips, and, best of all, making zines. The event’s organizers, Megan Mary Creamer and Marissa Falco had stocked a corner table with supplies — paper, scissors, letraset transfers, pens, crayons, glue sticks, a long-arm stapler, and a typewriter — for on-the-fly zine-making. In another corner, a group of participants worked on zines they’d started at Ladyfest Boston. At other tables, artists sketched the scene and worked on collages. When we packed up our zines and headed out the door at closing time, the room was still full, and there were several clusters of friends hanging out, relaxing and chatting in the Art Center parking lot. The Spring Zine Thing made local interest in zines visible, and emphasized the vibrant nature of the community supporting them.

Observing what happened at the Spring Zine Thing, noting the influx of new volunteer librarians at the Papercut Zine Library in Cambridge, and looking forward to the Somerville Arts Council’s zine-themed Salon, I want to say that zines are making a comeback (at least in Boston & its suburbs). But they never really went away.

Because I live in a bigger city, have internet access, and a wider social network than I did in the mid-late 1990s, I know more zinesters now than I did during my initial foray into zine culture. Some of these folks have been making zines for decades. Others, like me, made them in high school, college, or early adulthood, took a break, and and are returning to zines in their mid-thirties. Others are just starting out, eager to connect with radical histories and communities. More than a few of us are professional educators, graphic designers, and librarians, with access to institutional resources, faculty collaborators, and pedagogical spaces for teaching and learning about zines. Because zines don’t require much in terms of supplies, instructional time, or classroom (or other) space, it’s relatively easy to make them at home, on campus, or in the community. Zine libraries and archives require much more of an investment, but they, too, can be scaled to meet the needs of a particular community — and can operate in and outside of conventional institutions (i.e., academic or public libraries).

In the past year, I’ve collaborated with faculty, students, and staff at my institution, Wellesley College, on a variety of zine-based projects and events. We’ve incorporated zine projects in introductory and upper-level women’s and gender studies courses, offered zine workshops to students in the library’s Book Arts Lab, and this spring, student organizations collaborated on hosting a feminist zine fair. As a research and instruction librarian, I spend a good deal of my day in the realm of the digital: helping students and faculty use online tools and resources; developing strategies for teaching and learning in hybrid material-digital environments; creating online research guides; and troubleshooting problems with e-books, or our learning management system, or citation tools like Zotero and EndNote. Zine projects, organized around self-published, material texts, disrupt this digital-immersion in some delightful ways.

When I teach a women’s and gender studies class about zines, I’m able to engage students in conversations that rarely fit into a conventional research instruction session. Though most of the students are unfamiliar with zines, they immediately understand the potential of the medium: how it authorizes its creators to pursue questions they’re passionate about, to offer analyses based on research and critique, to write for a community of other zine makers, and to create something tangible to share with their peers. We talk about feminist knowledge production practices, the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing, intellectual property concerns, and the political, cultural, documentary, and educational work that zines do in the world. We get into debates about zines vs. blogs as feminist activist tools — and challenge the assumption that a person might make or read in one medium but not the other. We talk about the Queer Zine Archive Project and the People of Color Zine Project, and consider how online archives extend the life of these ephemeral objects, making old zines accessible to readers (like my students) who weren’t around to read them, and offering spaces for archiving and sharing new zines.

When students come to the library to make zines in the Book Arts Lab, they discover one of our campus treasures: a workshop full of printing presses, wood and metal type, bookbinding tools and many other (less-spectacular) supplies for zine-making. And they meet our book arts director, Katherine McCanless Ruffin, who can serve as a teacher and guide for future adventures in self-publishing. Most importantly, when students make zines with us, they claim the library as a space for making and creating knowledge, texts, and community.

As they produce their zines at the end of the semester, I’m proud that our students join a constellation of zine-makers, radical librarians, teachers and archivists, feminist scholars, and community arts organizers dedicated to this form of knowledge articulation, material-cultural production, creative work, and political action. And that they get their hands on some scrap paper, markers, glitter and glue in the process.

Back in Cambridge, I can’t get through a seven-minute subway ride to work without seeing a dozen e-readers in action. To be honest, I think I see just as many commuters reading mobile devices as I do printed books. True, this could be the exception, since I live and work in one of those most literate and tech-savvy cities in the country. (Wish it were that I could place myself in one of those demographics!) At the same time, though, friends and family across the country have been talking about their Nooks, Kindles, and iPads. Some of them, perhaps due to the convenience of these devices, or perhaps due to their novelty, are reading now more than ever.

But I’m not at home right now. Instead, during my three-minute walk to the bakery here in Paris, I pass a comic book store, a traditional bookstore, and two small publishers. Despite the drastic changes to reading and publishing practices effected by digital technology, independent, brick-and-mortar bastions of the book still abound in this city. I’ve been here for over two weeks now. I’ve passed dozens of cafes, ridden the subway dozens of times, and only twice have I seen a tablet computer. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath for the unlikely sighting of a Nook or a Kindle.

Maybe Parisians are more prudent about using expensive electronic devices in public. Maybe they’re a little more attached to the traditional printed book than are their American counterparts. Then again, maybe I’m just not as observant as others who have been watching this trend. Whatever the reason, after a short ride on the subway or a morning coffee at a cafe, you certainly wouldn’t think the book is experiencing the same identity crisis in Paris as it is back home.

To know the future we have to understand the past. And of course there is also history repeating itself.

Gustave Flaubert would have loved these two sayings and he would certainly have used them for his dictionary of received ideas. Flaubert himself noted down a cliche that has some relevance for this lecture. It goes

photography: will make painting obsolete.

Karl Marx used the one about history for one of his funnier quips: history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a comedy.

Still, there is truth in both sayings. History – or humanity – certainly has a tendency to repeat itself and we can only recognize these repetitions and learn something if we have some knowledge of the past.

At the moment we are in the middle of one of the greatest sea-changes the world of information has gone through. Therefore I want to take a look at what happened during an earlier era and share some ideas with you about the lessons of history.

What can we learn from the 15th century change from manuscript to printed book? Does it tell us something about the fate of the printed book itself? What lessons might the early heroes of printing have for the internet publishers of our days – and of course for us bookhistorians who are going through such interesting times. I will say something about design but more about the financial circumstances that influence design. During my research for this paper I came to the conclusion that these circumstances are perhaps more important than changes in design we see on the page – and may expect to see on the screen of our digital books.

I consider the codex a far more important, interesting and influential invention than the computer or the internet. The codex has now reached a venerable age of more than 17 centuries. About a hundred generations have used it’s unique features.

There is a difference between a codex and a pile of papers held together by a pin or glue. The uniformity of the size of the pages defines the accessibility of a book. Quick and random acces to information, that is what the codex is about.

Creating such a book in the middle ages was everything but easy.

For a medieval codex you would have to slaughter ten or twelve pigs or sheep and have vellum made of their skins. After that you had to find that rarest of species: a man or woman who could write down a text for you. Early medieval society was hardly organized and places where you could have a book made or actually see a book where few. Monasteries were scarce and wide apart.

Secular reading – for instruction or pleasure – belonged to the city. To be able to live in a city and do something else than menial work, you would have to be able to read. Once you could read you probably wanted to read more than bookkeepers records. You wanted to read books. Religious books, scholarly books, adventures and poetry.

And soon an industry came into existence that catered for this new market of readers. Scriptoria in great cities like Florence where well organized companies that produced high-quality manuscripts for a decent price.

Then, halfway the 15th century came the printing press – invented by the Man of the Millennium, Gutenberg. More than 29.000 titles were printed up to 1500 are known today. If we put the number of copies of an edition on the arbitrary number of 300 this would mean that at least 9.000.000 books were made and sold during the first 40 years after Gutenberg.

It is clear that here we have a genuine information revolution. At the same time it is a rather curious revolution! What everybody knows, but hardly anybody seems to realize, is that printers played a relative small part in the making of a book. In the days of Gutenberg the typesetters and printers realized far less than half of the value of a copy.

The materials of which books were made, claimed the major part, even when paper was about ten times less expensive that vellum. So the actual printing of a book may have been 50 times less costly than writing it down by hand, but the printers could only claim about 20% of all work done on a single copy. The rest was done – or supposed to be done – by rubricators, illuminators and bookbinders.

In the 15th century a paper copy of a printed book would be half as expensive as a handwritten one. It will be clear that the prime importance of Gutenbergs printing press lies in being a catalyst. Printers printed editions and editions had to be sold.

Gutenbergs artificial writing machine was certainly not meant to be a prime mover that made knowledge available to the masses and revolutionized the world. That kind of book emerged almost half a century later and was created by a totally different kind of man. The 40 years between Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius brought us the modern book.

The birth of the book as we know it is the result of typical capitalist development with its system of trial and error, fuelled by greed. It is important to remember that, while the price of a single copy of a book might be halved, the total investment needed to produce that copy as part of an edition would rise more than twohundredfold. The return of investment would be slow as it might take years to sell an edition. And before work on that edition could start, there would be an initial investment in the equipment of a printing house and the hiring of an expensive specialist workforce.

It was only in the 16th that being a publisher or even a printer became a sure way to riches. In the early days the infrastructure to sell 500 copies of a book was non-existent. Early printers seem to have thought and act like the makers of manuscripts. The first printing press in Italy was up in the mountains and days away from Rome. It was rather difficult to print in Subiaco and still expect to sell a lot of books in little time. So Sweynheim and Pannartz moved their bussiness to Rome. And even then life was difficult. To be able to sell books printers and publishers had to create a close knit community that was parochial and international at the same time.

The advent of the printed book made rubricating and illuminating a booming business and that is perhaps the reason why the quality of manuscripts detoriated so much in the last decennia of the fiftheenth century. It was only in the fiftheen-seventies that printers started to experiment with printed initials and woodcuts, thus streamlining the production and reducing the costs of a single copy with at least another 20%.

Aldus Manutius established his firm in the great merchant city of Venice, had sound financial backers and reduced the size and thus the price of books. But he hardly if ever used the woodcut initials that would have reduced the price of his books even more, although he did so in his most famous publication: the Hypnerotomachia.

It seems clear that most 15th century printers did not realize the real potency of the printing press and indeed saw it as a form of artificial writing. There was no break with the past. They saw their activities in no different light than the makers of manuscripts.

Even today paid writers exist who ply their trade on the streetcorners in Mexico or India. They write letters but also newspapers. The investment for such a trade is small. You have to know how to write, which may take some years to learn and that is it. I will come back to these writers later on when I will discuss the impact of the internet on the publishing industry.

Many books have been written about how the layout of the page had to be reconstructed to conquer the oceans of information that suddenly became available. Pages had to be numbered. The paragraph had to be invented, just as notes and bibliographical references. Running titles. And most important of all: the title-page.

Most of these innovations come together in the work of Erhard Ratdolt, the Augsburg and Venetian printer already mentioned. He was an early adapter: he used a title-page, printed in color and so on. I especially mention the way he placed woodcut illustrations in the margins in one of the most beautiful and well-structured books ever published: his first edition of Euclid that dates from 1482.

Why did changes that were clearly great innovations not find their way immediately and sometime took ages to get accepted. Why did not all printers started to use woodcut initials right after they were invented – why did it take almost a century for such a simple but effective innovation to be generally accepted?

I have a few assertions that may play a role in the discussion of the digital age.

The first one goes like this: what we see as typographical innovation is often a ressurection of something older. Most typographical inventions of the 15th century are in fact reinventions.

My second obervation is that almost all real innovations come from outsiders. The power of tradition is very strong, especially in the field of printing and publishing were innovation is stultyfied by the conservatism of the trade and the consumers.

What does this mean for the future of publishing and more specifically for the future of design? I love the term Information Architecture as it covers perfectly what modern design is really about.

It will be clear that the internet and searchmachines have changed the way we look at information and how we use it. Will we need footnotes when all books have been digitized? I can imagine a searchmachine that analyzes texts in depth: a researchmachine. Now information is anchored to a page but digitized it can have any form – especially as we do not need to refer to a given page any more.

On the other hand the way we organize and read texts will not change. Writing and reading is about rhetorics and expectations and these are deep undercurrents that were probably hotwired into the human brain long before we were able to notice them.

Digital information will always be expressed in books and these books will be more beautiful and better made. More people than ever before are active as designers, of typefaces and of books. They are counted in tens of thousands where there used to be hundreds. Of course beauty and taste have nothing to do with numbers. But more practitioners create more choices for a public that has become more critical in its appraisal.

I think that a few years from now there will be less books than there are now, but they will be better edited, better designed and better printed. Part, perhaps even the greater part, of the mass market will go digital. This will make books less interesting to the kind of publisher or bookseller that now fill the great chains of bookstores with endless and depressing repetitions of soulless and bad designed books. The independent bookseller will rise again and so will the independent publisher. I think that this is the future, an interesting and humane future and certainly our future as bookhistorians.

paul dijstelberge Amsterdam – Netherlands