***where’s the remote?
Sid Caesar has said that the invention of the TV remote control (late 1960’s) began the decline of attention span by eliminating the need for patience. Perhaps Sid’s insight can also be conveyed to an impatience with print. Perhaps channel surfing and web surfing are related. And does the action of surfing itself, become so addictive that it precludes programmatic meaning or the appreciation of a sustained comedy routine?
grasped
“Yet with an ironly we may never fully grasp, the
Palimsest forces us to take it apart before before we can make it into any kind of whole. It obliges us to acknowledge the disunity of the text. Its authors never saw it whole, and its owners can never read it whole. Noel calls it the greatest manuscript ever, but it may instead be the greatest book – the one that most fully achieves the potential properties of the book.” Avi Davis, “The Brain and the Tomb, Adventures with the Archimedes Palimsest”, The Believer, January, 2008.
structures for book conservation
The FotB
SLIS class concerning the
efficacy of the codex will begin in just a few days. We will adventure in an environment of hand craft and its strange relevance to context of electronic transmission, surrogate presentation and network augmented meaning.
This course will present principles and practice of book conservation. There will be a focus on prototypes for conservation rebinding with discussions and demonstrations featuring the University of Iowa Libraries
Bookbinding Model Collection. The course will also include book craft projects to develop book structure skills. In addition, students can develop career skills. Career interests include those of library preservation, book production by hand and academic book studies.”
letterpress facsimile
One of the esoteric genres of book production is the letterpress facsimile, especially when the means of production mimics the exemplar. Here is a Lee County Iowa
example. FotB and
Iowa Book Works is producing the 500 facsimile bindings.
it almost seems
“People in virtual libraries spend a lot of time simply finding their way around: in fact they spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find.
The average times that users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of `readingí are emerging as users `power browseí horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” via
British Library via
Rough Print
“Why is it that, even when Iíve realized that the book Iíve started reading isnít the text I actually need to be reading ó either it doesnít do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere ó I nonetheless feel the need
to finish the thing before moving on to another book?”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick