by Dr. Paul Dijstelberge -

Of e-Books and old books – or what the 21th century can learn from the 15th.

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

 

by EBoeckeler -

Angels & Books

(A guest blog by Erika Boeckeler, Northeastern University)

“An angel..vnderstondyth and knowyth sodaynly wythout collacion of one thynge to a nother.”

-Bartholomew de Glanville, De Proprietatibus Rerum (13th c, translated 1495) ii. xviii. 43

Somehow any quotation about angels evokes the most lovely romantic notions: fluttery wings, a breath of air, purity, beauty as knowledge and knowledge as beauty, the color white or the rainbow wings of painted Renaissance angels or just a sparkling light of the “Let there be light” variety…

What I love about this quotation is that it describes a fantasy of angelic epiphany that evokes all those notions. We cherish those moments in which we suddenly, instantaneously just know and understand, with a knowledge so pure that we flutter free from the weight of the world’s thingyness.

But the word I want to focus on in this quotation is collation. The Oxford English Dictionary, which lists this quotation as an early example of the word, defines collation as “the action of bringing together and comparing; comparison,” with the more specific definition given as the “textual comparison of different copies of a document; critical comparison of manuscripts or editions with a view to ascertain the correct text, or the perfect condition of a particular copy.” Angels don’t need to collate–they already have the perfect text–but we mortals do. The practice of collation seems a fitting way to think about what we’re doing as we experience the once and future history of the book.

I owe my knowledge of this quotation to the bibliographer Carter Hailey, inventor of a collating machine called Hailey’s COMET (see below) and whom I met in person during a seminar on the first printed version of Hamlet last weekend at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America. Hailey’s paper for the seminar describes two kinds of collation that bibliographers–people who meticulously describe books–perform: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal collation involves the comparison of multiples copies from the same printed edition of a given work. You may wonder why anyone would need to do this; aren’t all books in an edition exactly alike? In fact, early modern books from a single print run may differ wildly from each other! Corrections would be made while the book was in press, but paper and labor were expensive so pages with mistakes would be bound up with other pages further along in the run. The three main printed versions of Hamlet contain hundreds of differences within each, including one that calls the title character “Hamlee.” While that example may be merely surprising, others can be more substantial and radically alter the way we understand a passage.

What I’m interested in exploring here is the second kind of collation: vertical collation involves comparing different manuscripts and/or different printed editions across time. In the case of Hamlet, this involved noticing that successive readers encountered a play with characters first named Corambis and then Polonius, Ofelia then Ophelia, Rossencraft and Gilderstone then Rosencraus and Guyldensterne then Rosencrance and Guildenstein, Gertrard then Gertrude. Would the real Hamlee please stand up?

Working across time in ways that readers rarely or never did, collators bring invisible histories of books to light. Bibliographer and mad scientist inventor of another collation machine, Randall McCleod, reads Renaissance books that were never printed –the faint indent contours of type never inked- and books hiding within other books –-the traces or ink from one page in a book dried upon the pages of another. Sometimes the findings of collators spawn heated debates in the halls of academic academies, sometimes they spur actual revolutions. The great religious schism of seventeenth century Russia in which thousands died was caused by–yes!–an act of collation: someone discovered that fundamental religious texts had radically altered over centuries of copying and recopying.

In a future of the book study, the work of vertical collation is inevitable. In some ways, our non-angelic brains are constantly collating–measuring the experience of one book form against another. Books now are becoming less weighty thynges or not even thynges at all; collation technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated and scholars are performing more sophisticated kinds of reading with them. Collation may morph into a different kind of work altogether.

Collation in the twentieth century has been intimately associated with technologies. Here are a few collation machines:

A fifteenth century collator from the first European bestseller, Sebastian Brandt's _Ship of Fools_ (1494).
The Hinman Collator, invented by Charles Hinman in the late 1940's to collate Shakespeare's texts. It's gigantic.
The McLeod Portable Collator, designed by Randall McLeod in the early 1980's. The picture features McLeod himself.
Hailey's COMET, an even more portable collator designed by Carter Hailey in the 1990's. Image courtesy of Carter Hailey.
by Julia Panko -

The Tactility of Books

– guest post by Julia Panko (University of California, Santa Barbara)

In the past several years, the concept of “touch” has become a strategic marketing point for digital devices, from the iPod to the Kindle. But how might “touch” matter as we think about the print book? How might tactility impact the book’s role as an information storage medium and reading platform?

Page scan from Google Books, capturing an image of the scanner’s fingertips touching the page:

Personal archives

When a reader touches a book, she leaves physical traces—fingerprints, crumbs of food, bent pages, pencil markings, etc. We touch digital devices when we read from them, of course, but these surfaces tend to be more resistant than paper to acquiring such traces. The haptic “data” that readers leave in books has forensic value: it can reveal information about a reader’s body, reading habits, emotional attachments, or favorite brand of coffee.

The three-dimensionality of the book also allows it to function as an archival space. A reader might accidentally leave a bookmark or a pressed flower between the pages. Or he might choose to keep significant objects in a book, such as photographs or letters. Print books are storage media in the sense that they contain textual information, but in cases like these, they also become material archives.

Social networks

As books circulate among readers, acquiring annotations or simply traces of wear, they become sites of social exchange. As Virginia Woolf put it, “We like to feel . . . that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers. . .”

Many annotations in books are social in nature. Readers might argue or agree with the author in the margins:

“The frame of mind in which a reader can address a book as though it were another human subject, and present, is one we must all recognize. It can be compared to the more often discussed dramatic illusion, our voluntary and habitual submission to the conventions of the stage. It is not that we are actually hallucinating, believing the actors to be the persons they represent, and us invisibly in their company. Nor does any reader believe the writer of the book to be speaking the words in it, and available for conversation. That fact does not prevent us from cherishing the illusion of intimacy, much as we do in the theater” – H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books

Alternately, we might write an inscription in a book that we plan to gift to a friend or scribble notes in a library book. I have vivid memories of discovering a lively discussion in a library copy of an Agatha Christie mystery years ago: several readers had recorded their speculations about the murderer’s identity at various stages in the story, inspiring later readers to debunk these guesses and offer alternate theories. The book became a tactile record of a community’s interpretive debates.

Aesthetic artifacts

Our awareness of tactility also factors into our appreciation of books as aesthetic objects. When Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, he spoke of the importance of his book’s design: “Those of you who’ve seen my book—whatever you may think of its contents—will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.”

As we speculate about the future of the book, we must admit that it cannot compete with computers and e-book readers when it comes to sheer storage capacity. The register of touch, however, reminds us that information storage is not the book’s only affordance. Our experience of books as material objects is also meaningful.

Books produce tactile, visual, and even olfactory effects.

The range of sensuous experiences that books provide is perhaps one of the reasons that so many readers describe feeling emotionally attached to—touched by—their books.

by Bonnie Mak -

The look of an argument

— guest post by Bonnie Mak, University of Illinois

 

"How the Page Matters," design by Jimmy Luu (2011)
Title + first pages of "How the Page Matters," design by Jimmy Luu (2011)

 

How the Page Matters explores the different embodiments of a fifteenth-century text as it is translated into different languages and across manuscript, early print, and digital media. By investigating the ways in which the page of the “same” text was continually reconfigured for different audiences through time and technologies, I considered the ways in which materiality and meaning-making are always dynamically entangled. Furthermore, I experimented with how the physical instantiation of the book publication itself, including its cover, the layout, and typeface, could be used to embody my argument. Was there a way to argue using both words and matter?

"A Cabinet of Curiosity: the Library's Dead Time"The experiment with the book project led me to think more about the look of research, and to imagine alternative embodiments of an academic argument. To this end, I developed “A Cabinet of Curiosity: the Library’s Dead Time” with Julia Pollack, an exhibition that sought to embody the practices of the librarian. Each of the six sculptures in the exhibition was hand-crafted by the “librarian” to make evident her own role in the collection, classification, and curation of knowledge. The purpose of the show was to expose the manifold and complicated ways in which information is produced, processed, and circulated — not only in the book and in the library, but also elsewhere.

More images of the Cabinet are available here, and an interview with the artists is featured on the Library as Incubator Project blog.

 

by amaranth -

Christian Bök’s Bibliomechanics

We are grateful to Christian Bök for contributing the first guest post to the Unbound blog. We will be featuring another post on his “Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit” next week!

Bibliomechanics is “bookish artware,” consisting of 27 Rubik’s cubes, stacked together into a block (3 x 3 x 3) so as to create the kind of pataphysical writing-machine described by Jonathan Swift in The Voyage to Laputa—”a project for improving speculative knowledge by […] mechanical operations” so that, by such a “contrivance[,] the most ignorant person […] may write books […] without the least assistance from genius or study.” Every facet of these cubes displays a white word printed in Futura on a black label so that, when properly stacked together, the cubes create 18 separate surfaces (6 exterior, 12 interior), each one of which becomes a page that displays a readable sentence (81 words long). Each sentence paraphrases a poetic theory about the machinic function of language itself. The reader can, of course, scramble each cube so as to create an alternative permutation, generating a new text from the vocabulary of the old text.

 

Bibliomechanics is a kind of 3D-version of Cents mille milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau, whose flipbook consists of 10 sonnets, in which corresponding lines can replace each other without altering the rhyme scheme or the lyric sense of any sonnet, thus permitting 10 trillion possible variants. An insomniac, reading one poem per second nonstop, requires about 317,000 years to complete such a work. A single Rubik’s cube, however, provides more than 4.3 x 1019 different permutations (albeit many nonsensical), and when we take into account all 27 cubes, this number increases by a factor of at least 27! x 627. An immortal, reading one page per second nonstop, might begin this book at the Big Bang, yet never hope to finish the text before the expiry of the universe itself. My book is perhaps more like a gizmo than a codex; however, the work does suggest that, no matter what its form, a book can still become a folding rhizome of unlimited dimension.

–Christian Bök

 

from BIBLIOMECHANICS

 

Top Facets

THE STRANGERS WHO VISIT UTOPIA MIGHT FIND THERE THIS

COMPLEX DEVICE MADE FROM A CARVED FRAME OF WOODEN

CUBES THAT SWIVEL ON WIRE AXLES, ITS NUMEROUS FACETS

COVERED BY SQUARE PIECES OF PAPER WITH ALL THE

POETIC WORDS OF THE LANGUAGE WRITTEN UPON THEM IN

ALL THEIR MOODS, TENSES, AND CASES, BUT WITHOUT ANY

ORDER, SO THAT ANYONE TURNING THE HANDLES ON THE

EDGE OF THE FRAME MIGHT ALTER THE OLD SEQUENCE

OF RECORDED THOUGHT AND THUS CREATE A NEW SENTENCE

 

Front Facets

THE CHINESE PUZZLE, A SUBLIME DEVICE BUILT BY A

MASTER CRAFTSMAN, POSES A RIDDLE BECAUSE EVERY PERSON BELIEVES

THAT THE BOX MUST CONTAIN WONDERS, BUT THERE APPEARS

TO BE NO WAY INTO IT, NO CLUE ON

ANY OF ITS SIX BLACK, LACQUERED FACES AS TO

THE LOCATION OF THE PRESSURE POINTS THAT CAN DISENGAGE

ONE PIECE OF THIS JIGSAW FROM ANOTHER, AND ONLY

AFTER HOURS OF TRIAL AND ERROR DO CHANCE MANOEUVRES

MEET WITH SUCCESS, AN ALMOST SILENT CLICK, THEN VICTORY

by hendersong -

Open House of Rare Books

To ground the symposium’s future-looking slant on the BOOK, there will be an Open House in MIT’s Institute Archives, Special Collections, and Conservation Lab on Friday morning, May 4th (10:00-11:30 a.m.). The Archives have a fabulous collection not only of science and technology holdings, but also of materials ranging across disciplines and print media. Here are a few highlights that will be on display for visitors to see and handle, akin to a mini-history of the BOOK. To learn more about MIT’s Institute Archives and Special Collections, click here.

BOOK OF HOURS use of Paris, Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis (France, 15th century) Uncataloged

This is a fine example of a manu-script, or a text “written by hand.” Books of Hours were private devotionals in the Middle Ages. One famous example is the Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry. A colorful anecdote about Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours recounts how she and Henry VIII used her book as a mode of flirtation! To learn more about Books of Hours, click here.

QUARTO SHEET (folded to make pages of a book)

To learn more about collation, see here.

LEAF FROM THE GUTENBERG BIBLE (Mainz, ca. 1454) Uncataloged

When this particular page was discovered in a hut in Germany, it was learned that other Gutenberg leaves were being used to cover local children’s schoolbooks. Compare copies on paper and on vellum here, or check out this “Anatomy of a Page.” When you’re ready to view the next item, try to judge that book by its cover…

BESTIARY, or Conrad Gessner’s Icones animalium quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum (Zurich, 1553) QL41.G391 1553

From its cover, this might be guessed to be a book of music rather than of beasts. But look below to see what lurks inside. The rhinoceros is a copy of Albrecht Dürer’s famed print. In addition to recognizable animals like lions and dogs, the book also contains unicorns and monsters. The book is printed, but the images all are finely hand-colored.

NUREMBERG CHRONICLE, or Hartmann Schedel’s Registrum hujus operis libri cronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493) D17.S315 1493

The Nuremberg Chronicle was an early printed book (or incunabulum) that served as a kind of illustrated world history. For efficiency, images often were repeated, which meant that the same-looking person might reappear labeled with a different name. The title exists on the fore-edge, rather than the spine. To see more images from inside the book (cities, people, and even a few more monsters) in a colored edition, click here.

DIDEROT’S ENCYCLOPÉDIE, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1751-1765) AE25.D555 1751

These volumes from Diderot’s Encyclopédie relate to the history of printing, including that entry: “Imprimerie.” (A translation of this entry can be found here.) The volume of plates includes an illustration of a print shop. Beneath it is a composing stick of type (set in reverse) facing the opposite page that illustrates how that type would appear once printed.

ELIOT INDIAN BIBLE Mamvsse wunneetupanatamwe up-biblum God naneeswe nukkone testament (Cambridge, Mass., 1685) BS345.A2 E42 1685

This bilingual English and Wampanoag Bible was used by MIT student, Jessie Little Doe Baird, SM ’00 to help revive the Wôpanâak language.

WALT WHITMAN, LEAVES OF GRASS (Brooklyn, 1855) PS3201 1855

This is a first edition of Whitman’s famed collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. A number of editions appeared during his lifetime ~ and since!

MINIATURE BOOKS Galileo Galilei’s Galileo a Madama Cristina di Lorena (Padua, 1897) BS480.G28 1897

Other examples of miniature books in MIT’s collection include the collected speeches of Abraham Lincoln. A wonderful repository of miniature books can be found here.

SCRAPBOOKS Remarkable light-houses, and beacons, in various parts of the world (ca. 1832-1844) Uncataloged

For practices like scrapbooking, see also commonplace books and extra-illustration.

AUTHORS MEET READERS

There are many interesting ways that readers interface with texts. Here is one case where the title page was reproduced by hand in ink, hard to notice unless looked at closely. (This particular text was used not far from here in its day in Salem, MA.) Richard Baxter’s The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (London, 1691) BF1445.B39 1691

Manicules Johannes Indagine’s Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes” by Johannes Indagine (Frankfurt, 1551) BF910.I53 1551

An early means of highlighting, using your own personalized pointing hand (manicule) to draw attention to interesting parts of the text.

Marginalia John Stuart Mill’s Principles of political economy (London, 1880) HB161.M645 1880

Marginalia in this particular text (small as microscript) is in both English and French.

VOLVELLES & MOVEABLE PARTS Jean Oursel’s Le grand guidon et tresor journalier des astres (Rouen, 1680?) CE91.O978 1680 and W. Häntzschel-Clairmont’s Die elektrotechnische Praxis (Berlin, 1907) TK145.H36 1907

To learn more about volvelles, see here and here. Given its technological bent, might these somehow anticipate future directions of the book? What about this next book that seems to conduct electricity? W. Snow Harris’s Observations on the effects of lightning on floating bodies (London, 1823) OVRSIZE TH9061.H37 1823

All these and more will be on display at the Open House on Friday, May 4, from 10:00-11:30 a.m. Come and see these items in person, talk with librarians, and discover more about how to access these treasures on your own after the Symposium. In addition to the Reading Room display, visitors will be welcome to visit the Conservation Lab and talk to conservators about preservation practices and techniques.

Special thanks to Stephen Skuce, Patrick Olson, and their colleagues for helping to plan the Open House. Photos in this post by Gretchen Henderson and Patrick Olson, with permission by the Archives.

by hendersong -

The Oscar Goes to… BOOKS!

Books are up for an Academy Award. At least, flying books in “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” just nominated for Best Animated Short. As the description reads: “Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, ‘Morris Lessmore’ is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor.” (What booklover will not be amused when the animated humpty-dumpty of a book uses his feet to play the piano, literalizing footnotes? Going to bed on a book, Lessmore later is lifted to the sky by a fluttering biblioflock, and conservationists may sympathize with the analogy of their careful repairs to a surgical dissection theater: a matter of life and death.)

Filmed book-trailers now litter the landscape. Beyond adaptations of one medium to another, films and books increasingly crisscross each other’s terrains, borrowing and blending techniques, suggesting new dimensions and directions for storytelling. “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” is far from a trailer. It uses the medium of film to draw attention back to the other medium’s bounds. And beyond. Far from antiquated, stagnant, paginated lumps, Lessmore’s books animate, embed and embody us, palpating with joy and pathos, transported to Oz-like lands.

At a time when apocalyptic proclamations about the end of the book recur, these animated pages remind us that books also are a technology–as the following two clips address with a twist. A contemporary book is called a “new device” and “revolutionary product,” while a medieval book requires a computer-like “help desk”:


What do we learn about our relationship with the BOOK by re-viewing it through animation, as a revolutionary device, and as a technology so complex that it needs an IT guide? In her “biography” entitled The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), Nicole Howard writes that books “may not immediately strike a parallel with more familiar technologies. Hundreds of pages sewn together, bearing printed or handwritten material, hardly compares to supersonic jets and Pentium chips. But in fact, no other technology in human history has had the impact of this invention. Indeed, the book is the one technology that has made all the others possible, by recording and storing information and ideas indefinitely in a convenient and readily accessible place.” Or, to jump back a few centuries to John Milton (1643): “For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

by amaranth -

The Secret Life of Books

This video made the social media rounds a couple of weeks ago. I thought it would be a fitting first post as we begin to think about where books have come from and where they are going.

While I love the use of stop motion and certainly get a kind of kid-in-a-candy-shop feeling from watching this, I can’t help but notice the subtle implication that these books come to life in spite of, or perhaps because of, the absence of readers. The intent may be to suggest that books are full of action and activity just waiting for a reader to discover them, but the implicit message, to my mind, is that bookstores are becoming a lonely place and that printed books (“real” books, as the title of the book in the closing shot says) need to be defended against the wave of digital publishing.

I found Janaka Stuckey’s recent post on the future of bookstores at the Poetry Foundation blog insightful on this point. He suggests increased specialization, an emphasis on community programming, and a closer interaction between booksellers and readers (through personal recommendations and in-store events) are the only way book stores can compete with Amazon. It’s not even more beneficial to publishers (like his Black Ocean imprint) to sell through mom and pop shops–Amazon kicks back a larger percentage of each sale.

The “Joy of Books” video subtly touches on this situation: at one point, we see a little brown moleskine turning the pages of a large hard-bound poetry book, a somewhat cute synecdoche for the reading audience Stuckey suggests is keeping bookstores alive: writers, and specifically poets.

Is the “joy” of books something inherent in their format–a material jouissance?
Is it perhaps in their content, which has historically been distributed in a wide variety of forms from the tablet and scroll to the codex and iPad?
Is it in the reader, without whose intervention the words stay locked in their covers, whatever form those covers take?

We’ll hope to consider some of these questions in the coming months.