stay tuned
The Codex Foundation symposium is in progress. A wonderful array of Centers and Presses will ask each other how letterpress book making will advance beyond the challenge of doing it at all.
It is a strange feeling to see a conceptual work of imagination and expression set and locked up in metal. Its a fixture of thought and then the press is worked and the reading begins all over again. The printing is an interlude of art and action.
imprimatur
The second edition of
The Book History Reader is bigger than the first. This textbook for book studies courses now includes a completely new section titled “The Future of the Book”. Three essays by Mark Poster, Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg provide the substance with introductory supplied by the editors David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.
The editors have also published a stand-alone
Introduction to Book History which also features an essay on the future of the book.
Anyway, it about time. The legacy of the book is the futures that it has engendered across the centuries. Many would say that the future of the book is even more relevant now in the context of digital delivery, but, really, the future of the book has always been relevant.
searching for the engine
Search engine accessory is not peculiar to screen reading. The precursor paratext and matrix text format goes back to Origen and his
Hexapla. What is more and more novel is the
automation of prompts to reading uninitiated by the reader. This diversion has advanced to activities of artificial or machine reading.
radio with video
Screen presentations do not mimic previous presentation conventions, materials or formats and they donít mimic them in a very interesting way.
Screen presentations compile audio, video, text, and navigation, writing and reading interfaces with increasing disregard for boundaries previously imposed by precursor media. In this context they have skipped the mimic phase of incunabulum. But composite screen based presentation may not skip another phase exemplified by the print book as it progressed in uses and refinements across centuries. This trait is even stranger.
It is now recognized that books printed in the 15th century are, to this day, exemplars of what the print book can achieve. They were not primitive but elegant, robust, legible, efficient and persistent. Why this maturity should be projected by the first productions is a bit of a mystery, but that mystery may also be a clue to the as yet unrecognized maturity of computer screen presentation. What you see is what you get.
Side effects of the influence of composite presentation are emerging beyond the domain of the screen in
radio. Can print be far behind?