***” and lightning so cheap”
“One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning – unconsciously at first, consciously later – to discriminate between the two “
Here we see Sam Clemens at age fifteen as a type compositor in Hannibal Missouri. He has set his name in the stick. He knows he must set it backwards for the camera. A and M are symetrical, but the letter S will appear reversed regardless of how he turns it. So how did he do it?
Answer: He didn’t use an S. Quick young Sam went to the sorts and pulled out a squash ornament. As a piece of type, it just happens to look like an S.
(On April 30, Larry Raid and Gary Frost had the honor of demonstrating 19th century printing for the official opening of the Sam Clemens
Home Museum in Hannibal Missouri.)
Bookless Future
The ìbookless futureî in the David A. Bell essay (The New Republic, May 2&9, 2005) will be realized when scholarship finds itself incapable of producing persistent publications. It must be apparent that the three examples of on-line research in the essay describe access in ìtwo minutesî, ìin less than a minuteî and in a ìfew clicksî to call up texts that have persisted in print for over two centuries. So which attribute; the quick access or the long persistence is more crucial for the scholar? Scholarship must depend upon text transmission that is, by default, persistent. Electronic publication does not yet assure persistence.
The essay does project the importance of changing reading behaviors and the needed versatility of the scholarís reading skill. I feel that this premise is not emphasized enough. Who cares how nearly book-like the hand held reading device becomes, if the on-line reading skill is fundamentally different from classical parent modes of reading? Screen based reading now compiles elements of the verbal/visual mode, the written mode and the print mode of expression, simultaneously mimicking and mixing the classical formats in a single screen presentation. Add to this the layers and branching options for the reading pathway. Then add to all this, keyword searching and the real possibility of wandering off. Of course books have multiple readings too, but the reader is the interface.
One missed opportunity here is a better description of the emerging interactivity of print and screen reading. Search engines and data bases such as Google Print are moving quickly to interplay screen queries with print results, but the more scholarly path from print to screen is still mysterious. The search engines mine information, but only a librarian or scholar can build coherent collections and effectively follow the implications of books shelved or positioned together. Between each shelved book is another latent book and these multiple arrangements of books prompted the real revolution of print over manuscript.
There are a number of other fundamental attributes of the book as an ergonomic device for comprehension and there are deeply embedded reasons why we chose to convey conceptual works in physical objects. In my view, the booke vs. ebook contest is an arbitrary dispute unless the contest clarifies the attributes of each used together.