Richard at the College of William and Mary, July, 2001
Book Arts, 1974-1999
The Great Founder-Narrator of the Movement, Richard Minsky, tells all. Its hot and hot linked
changing change
FotB
comments on the new DLF/CLIR discussion white paper are starting to come in. Stay tuned. (This idea that libraries are changing is nonsense. Libraries are only undergoing an explosive expansion to encompass a multiplicity of reading modes.)
learning from the legend
comments on Chris Clarkson’s seminar at Rare Books School
***“the advent of a new, post-textual conception of the self”
Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart, University of Chicago, 2000.
This work not only tells us about books that open into the shape of a heart. It is also about the book as a pacer of the meaning of our hearts, and about the next role of the book as a surrogate of ourselves. Check this excerpt from the Introduction;
ì .three main historical configurations of the textual self. The earliest of these was the Platonic ìwriting in the soulî. which defined the (rational) soul as a noncorporeal human essence; the second was the medieval book of the heart, which invoked a biblical (and specifically Christian) anthropology where the heart occupied a liminal, psychosomatic zone and where the self was not wholly reducible to either spirit of flesh. By contrast with its predecessors, the
book of the brain was conceived in secular, autonomous, and radically materialist terms. Instead of innate ideas or eternal moral truths, it contained merely transient feelings or ephemeral sensations. Furthermore, it abandoned all relation to a divine or heavenly original, so that the ìpersonal identityî (in Lockeís phrase) now rested wholly on minute (but still mysterious) ìimpressionsî on the brain. Accordingly, the human individual who long had been the protagonist of a divinely supervised narrative now became the sole author, reader, and exegete of his own interior ìbookî – a truly modern self. But during the last half-century or so, even this modern book of the self has been rapidly losing ground to personal metaphors drawn from new technologies. If psychology tends to follow technology, as i contend in the final chapter of this study, what we are witnessing in the steady replacement of book metaphors by tropes of the machine and the screen is the advent of a new, post-textual conception of the self.î
What shape of the book to come is this?
Cites & Insights, I/19
A handle on the pulse of the eBook; http://cical.home.att.net/
The easier they are to read, the more difficult they are to understand. An increasing quality of the pop-up imaging disrupts the transaction of reading. Its an ergonomics of comprehension at work. Also note Walt’s wonderful measures of the ecological expenses of print books vs. book reading devices.
