futureofthebook.com

haptic evaluation of books

The haptic concern also follows from the peculiar essence of the book as hand held art. Books are only read at arms length and are notoriously intractable in gallery display. This is a legacy of writing as a picture of speech and its early use as a handheld prompt. And the codex echoes it own legacy as a folded letter inviting unfolding and re-foldings. The whole environment of this experience is tactile, manipulative, confined, tricky and surprising. If critically pursued, the consciously hand investigated book could induce a greater appreciation of artistsí books.
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paper or plastic?

The advent of case construction bookbinding in book manufacturing occurred in the United States from 1820 to1850. This is a period in which bookbinding was handwork with tools and equipment guided by physical effort alone. While case construction enabled the eventual mechanization of industrial bookbinding, that mechanization occurred long after the structure had first proven itself as a preferred method of book manufacturing by hand.
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er, analog freedom vs. digital regulation?

For the copying and distribution of conceptual works, the book presentation format is immune from regulation, but the screen presentation format is not. Why is this?

Books, in their long history, have passed through stages of content pirating, illicit copy production and content mutation in distribution environments much wilder than the Web. Perhaps screen presentations will just have to pass through such an era as well. It will not be a speedy process since regulation based on digital technologies can be more invasively and pervasively applied. (Harley-Davidson is contesting with Honda over infringement of the sound of a motorcycle.)

So regulation of distribution books vs. ebooks could converge across time, but it will take a long time to transpire. And the two presentation formats are just as likely to go their separate ways.

The book format has passed beyond public domain into a determinant of human culture itself while the screen format is only a mimic of that status. In essense, the screen format is infringing the copyright of the book format. If that is the underlying suit, and the book publishing model is certainly being applied, then the screen format will need to distinguish itself from the book format and it can easily do that. But not by mimicking books.

***making e-books into “real” books

Science Madness

rapid serial visual presentation

buddybuzz is a reading community. from
IftFotB

bionic memory synthesized?

“To create stability and permanence is the job of an archive; to facilitate a definitive statement is the job of an editor; and to make that definitive statement is the job of the author/academic. We imagined that all of these steps would take place online. But we had not considered that, perhaps, lasting and definitive is not what the web does best; rather than a fixed and stable archive, the web creates a flexible, fragile archive. Rather than a definitive interpretation of that archive, social software creates a forum for evolving, democratic statements that leave the question permanently open. Thus, the digital environment gives us a new way to think about archiving. It creates a collective memory environment that is truly collective. It provides a memory machine that supports a permeable and perpetually changing “memory,” which is, perhaps, akin to the way human memory really functions. And it gives us a way to quickly and efficiently collect and store a large body of work on almost any subject of interest.” Kim White, from
Making Sense of a Networked Archive

The description of the new archiving sounds eerie. It sounds like pre-literate memory except that it is out of body. This mechanisum, a planet and universe pervaded with information is detailed in Steven Wolfram’s New Science. But the human dimension is, possibly, not so expansive. Particulary as we migrate our hard won understandings to silicon based neural systems. There is a reason that we convey some conceptual works in physical objects such as books and attend to other conceptual works only as memories.

Memories and books scale well with our life span. That unit of one is divided by memories and multiplied by books.

“Understanding the networked aspect of digital books is central to understanding the trajectory of the bookís evolution. Electronic books are, like their paper counterparts, by-products of the surrounding culture. This is precisely why we are predicting that the networked structure of electronic communications will become an integral part of emerging book forms. The ubiquitous interconnectedness of the world wide web; the nature of exchange taking place in social software environments, and networking behaviors like email and text messaging, will spawn a type of book that incorporates these new modes of thinking, imagining, understanding, and interacting.” Kim White, from
Making Sense of a Networked Archive

This statement and the wonderful taxonomy of the future book that follows is a terrific achievement. I only wonder about the newness. It has always seemed to me that all the inventions that we currently credit to our time, actually were achieved in the 19th century. And they were then achieved in a context of pardigm shift.

Many of the network features such as instaneous transmission, digital encoding, photo imaging are from the 19th c. That’s when they were really new.

Think of how miraculous it was to encounter a railroad track and realize that the piece of rail in front of you was actually bolted to all the others that connected a vast continental web. And it was a web of steel. That’s how the late Victorians were actually awed by newness.

Bible not printed

“The St. John’s Bible is the only handwritten and illuminated Bible comissioned since the advent of printed books more than 500 years ago.”

One hundred
St. John’s Bible leaves are now on exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The immense size and wonderful calligraphy and illumination of this book can only be admired in silence and awe. As in Ethiopian illumination, the face of Jesus mirrors the face of the reader and this work has an unearthly status.

The leaves are displayed in oceanic spreads. Ultimately the Bible is to be bound in seven volumes, but the half scale binding model is not inspiring. If Chris Clarkson is involved all will be well, but the graphic consequences of the work now overshadow the ultimate challenge of making these artworks into a book.

printing at Princeton

Bob Milevski has set aside his preservation work to demonstrate hand setting and letterpress printing at
Princeton. But, like the immense printing instruction in Minneapolis at the
MCBA, these programs make letterpress printing look antiquarian.

Automated setting and casting instruction is also needed if students are to understand the historical technologies and working cultures of print production.

one hundred years of conservation documentation

Today at the AIC, Susan Russick and Giselle Simon presented a talk on treatment documentation at the Newberry Library. The story began with the Bindery records and examples of library binding beginning in 1894.

The documents portray a transition from bookbinding to book conservation that was accelerated by Paul Banks using the model of art conservation. As Russick and Simon suggest, the record is as much a documentation of the transitions of the field of book conservation as a record of item treatments.

I would stretch this interpretation a bit further. Perhaps book conservation documentation is most informative when considered as an institutional history with a wider implication that the field of book conservation does not “progress”, but evolves. The activities of specification and treatment report mirror the culture of work that prevailed at the time. And, conservation documentation is more interesting when read as cultural history.