futureofthebook.com

real steampunk

“I have never seen any man manipulate the keys as rapidly, or set so clean a proof.” Henry Alden (as quoted in The Swifts, Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races, Walker Rumbel, 2003)

More Steampunk culture the dominance of women in the early era of keyboard prompted automations. The first all-women labor union was the Women’s Typographical Union founded by Augusta Lewis in 1869. Soon women were at work on city directory and straight newspaper copy. The gendered specialization continued with typewriting. Men disregarded the sweep of keyboard prompted technology until it was fully established by the line casting Linotype. Then they disregarded the typewriter until the advent of the computer.

power point flood

The salvage of library and archive collections following floods in Iowa is presented at the Preservation department
site, University of Iowa Libraries.

my amazon daily

The
Kindle blog is silent on the future of the book, but it is busy, busy.

muddy polkas

We are cleaning and drying thousands of vinyl recordings and their jackets from the flood of the
Czech Museum in Cedar Rapids. Our Oakdale paper mill is the perfect place for such activity.

device books

Wouldn’t it be strange, weird, poignant if hand held reading devices proliferated just as physical books proliferate? Their numbers and varieties could begin to engender library-ness. Note their physical morphology providing substrate for page presentation, note their different in-use and static configurations. While so many attributes and disadvantages are exclusive to either print of screen presentation, it is suggestive to consider similarities.

less comfortable

“If we take libraries-as-first-resort in search out of the equation, what is left looks something
like stewardship, loosely defined: ensuring long-term access to content in reliable, secure,
and authentic form. But we already know that a significant portion of digital scholarly
literature and primary resources, the portion available through licensed agreements, is
seldom in the possession and care of research libraries. Perhaps a preliminary answer to the
question ìWhat are the
core functions of the research library with respect to collecting,
preserving, and making accessible resources for scholarship?î might be that research libraries
will be stewards of some sectors of the information universe, but they will not be the same
sectors as before.” Abbey Smith

Tangible collections have a future too. Not just relevance of past reference, but new transmission functions. The library interacts originals and surrogates, tangible and electronic, personal and global collections continuously.

more comfortable

“From the worlds of business, technology, sports, entertainment, politics, and more, Kindle Blogs are delivered wirelessly to your Kindle throughout the day. Check back often–we’re adding more blogs every day.”

Jeff Bezos mentioned (on NPR) that Kindle has a mission to “make long form reading more comfortable.” According to him, backlit display causes eyestrain and distracts from concentration. Electronic ink overcomes this obstacle, although full color is years away.
Another aspect of the Kindle mission is “green product” attribute. Trees are saved and gas is saved.

Just as possible the Kindle is a template device for hand-held purchasing. As such, fulfillment to paper may still play a role. As for greenness, life cycle costs and systems maintenance could factor into e-book distribution. And comfortable or not, it looks like Kindle will gravitate to short form reading.

backward, not

“Publishing is going through a fundamental sociological and technologic shift. The
way books, magazines and newspapers are published is being democratized.
Print is becoming personal. Users want to choose how and when they consume content. They want it published on demand. And increasingly, social retailing drives todayís bestseller lists.
HPís new
BookPrep technology capitalizes on these trends by enabling publishers to digitize any existing book and turn it into a virtual asset that can be sold over the Internet and printed on demand ñ either as is, or personalized by the consumer.”

Digital technology and connectivity advances
print reading.

e-book illegibility

“finding the book, selecting it/putting it in a shopping cart, checkout, then receiving an activation code via e-mail, etc. The potential problems include: the e-mails often go into junk filters or are not received, the activation fails, the book download fails, and/or browser compatibility issues arise.”
Book Business

Forget navigational issues. Time loading and rendering and blank screen moments and browser errors are equivalent to smudges and torn out pages.

new rehousing

The library and archive preservation field has inspired, through research and practice, the rehousing of collections. The process exchanges damaging enclosures for non-damaging and improves collection organization and retrieval.
This continuous rehousing effort has been a success story and venders have strategically joined the effort with the needed advocacy, design, investment and supplies manufacturing.

Now we need a new momentum and again the venders and restoration industry can work with us. We need to locate collections and interpretive exhibits in larger protective “rehousings”. These new rehousings can be both installed storage and mobile containers, they can feature temporary power independance, stand-alone control and aisles both for evacuation or compaction routines. These collection protection zones can benefit access and collection order and can displace concern for collections before disaster imposes many other priorities. The macro rehousing program could benefit the smallest institutions most. Their collections are most diverse and their exhibits are most complex, yet they have few resources to survive disruptions.

Exactly because the library and archive preservation field is focused on tangible collections the field should now protect collections and exhibits so effectively that they can be discounted at times of disaster. With this strategy the inefficiencies of post event collection salvage need not displace or distract other recovery actions.

dark matter

Opaque, mute and immutable, paper books can appear obsolete. But it turns out that opacity, muteness and immutability are attributes. They enable self-authentication that a fixed and obvious encompass of content provides; the reader can actually know what is there and what is missing and confirm that over and over across time. Artifactual witness of time and place is also an allure. Other efficiencies of haptic navigation built into the paper book add to quick comprehension of content. Best of all physical books enable utilities of endless electronic indexing because they do not change. Physical books are the dark matter of digital libraries.

flight of the condor II

“One of the most important library repositories of Arequipa is the Franciscan library of the Recolecion de San Jenaro, or ìThe Recoletaî as it is commonly known. It is located in a ìlarge and well-illuminated room over the cloister of the gate-keeper, with book shelves of wood on two levels.î “

The
sequel is coming up soon.

ode for tangible collections

Even though computer media are less robust in muddy water than paper media and all electronic communication depends on electrical power, still there are new disregards of legacy collections. And even while newsprint production doubles in blacked-out cities and libraries are crowded, still there is a feeling that media from the past are passÈ.

I blame displaced metrics of customer service used to value physical collections. Libraries and archives are being measured by service metrics used for car repair or fast food. It is not that apparent that libraries and archives could have very few customers and yet serve to organize and convey knowledge.

The current generation is not really living alone. We need perspective that physical collections and cultural transmission provide. And any effort to preserve collections at a time of risk and disaster is an action of pride and a thrilling effort of regard for history.

lip balm

The writer mentions an early silent reader who could “speak without moving lips”. It is not certain if anyone has managed screen reading prompted by lip motion.

“Perhaps the real danger posed by screen-based technologies is not that they are rewiring our brains but that the collection of search engines, news feeds and social tools encourages us to link, to follow and read only that which we can easily assimilate.”
Bill Thompson

katrina-like

We finally got access to the
Czech Museum and Library. This is a relatively small institution, but with highly varied and specialized collections. The situation is severe with an 8 foot water mark inside. We opened, cleared and mucked out the building today and will begin to snake out wet collections tomorrow. A cooperative and helpful Steamatic crew is working with us. We did not get clearance to inspect the African/American museum today.

Cedar Rapids is very Katrina like, especially with the sudden very high rise and sudden run-off. Building contents surged and broke through windows and doors. Large residential areas are a mess. We will be going in in the morning to deshelve and pack out. One good workday should do it. The card catalog and other indexes were immersed, but look OK. Very little was washed down stream although we have a percentage of collections in the mud inside. Entire collections, except select pre-flood evacuations and storage building mezzanene, are soaked.

book chain

Two human chains from the basement to the upper floors evacuate books while the servers ride the elevator. This interplay of electronic and paper resources is a side drama as the 500 year flood comes down on the campus. Some suggestion of a human network is at work as the line of 100 volunteers shifts speed and snakes to new locations.
(more)

churn or dissolve

“While a simplistic egalitarianism would propose that participatory media flatten all creative hierarchies, the reality is that many are content to engage with and develop a pre-existing fiction, and have no desire to originate such.”
Sebastian Mary

Authorial rights to conceptual works are in increasing churn in the strange shadow of the electronic dissolve of the physical and bibliographic integrity of the book. The simple displacement of physical objects as a medium of transmission has only complicated and disguised our situation. In the medieval period every thing was an exemplar yet no thing was capable of its own photo surrogation. The idea of an exemplar as its own photo master could not exist. Some how the efficiency of transmitting conceptual works via physical objects was better understood then than now.

the disaster of inconvenience

Officially remorse for inconveniences is everywhere but not a mention of the dangers of disconnection. But the dangers of disconnection are why sandbag crews and human chains invent their own societies; they are not concerned with inconvenience but with disconnection. There is special concern with disconnection from purpose and a hunger to know that selfless acts are selfless.

steampunk tag

The rambling steampunk
enclave votex funnels and retracts like a tornado breeder cloud. But it appears somewhat unaware of the role of the book prior to the keyboard or to the mechanical keyboard era of the book. There is a need for authentic post-electronic fantasy.

print-on-reflection

The print-on-demand precept can mature as well. The promise is that digital technologies will convey us to a spectrum of print-to-paper manifestations. A print-on-reflection mode is exemplified at
Diffusion. Note the re-reference of the 18th c. pamphlet as a populist, liberation trope. (from
if:book)

flood of thought

The Obermann seminar on Extreme Materialist Readings of the Medieval Book has flooded participants with a different immersion in exemplification and transmission of conceptual works. At the same time weird meteorology and high water give a sensual feel of the remove needed to sustain a spirit/body routine. So polarities require a triangulation at-least to a third force of the weather or of the voice of the book intruding between discourse. FotB .get a grip The Iowa River is rising and promises a second 100 year flood only 15 years later.

tipping point

if:book, a forum for anticipation of new modes of digital discourse and publication, has encountered an accumulation of its own postings which is suddenly weighing down its future flow.

“I was on a panel with Robert Boorstin, a senior Google executive. He didnít talk about Iran. He talked about the worldís 1.4 billion Internet users and the way that numberís growing by 250 million a year.

He talked about the 10 hours of video being uploaded on YouTube every minute of every day. He talked about the worldís 3 billion mobile devices, with another billion coming in the next three years. He described the ìlargest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.î”
Roger Cohen

three, four letter words

Three words; kerf, edge and crop all prompt field observations of the physical structure of a medieval book. These are the quick keys that indicate the presence of an initial binding and its possible relation to the period of production of the manuscript.

Kerf refers to the evidence of previous sewing stations and their patterns, edge refers to the clues of edge trimmings and re-trimmings and crop refers to evidence of missing annotation and margin.

reading more and less

“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. “
Nicholas Carr

Febvre and Martin

The 50th anniversary of the publication of The Coming of the Book is here. Jim Wells, Curator of the mighty
Wing collection and a wily conversationist at the smokey tables of the Caxton Club realized that new disciplines and new enclaves were emerging.

“The original French edition does not appear to
have been reviewed by a single major American scholarly journal in the
fields of history of literature. It was not even reviewed by the Times
Literary Supplement. The only review of which this author is aware was
written by James Wells of the Newberry Library and published in Library
Quarterly. It was a long and perceptive review of over three pages and
conveyed fully the significance of the work. Wells concluded,
‘L’Apparition du livre is a first-rate work in an area all too often
dominated by the second rate. One hopes that some enterprising publisher
will commission an English translation so that it may become more widely
known.” It took!” Barry Neavill

“I further noted, “The accessibility in English of the core text of
histoire du livre was an important prerequisite for the emergence of
history of the book as a scholarly field in the United States. But
mainstream scholars in the English-speaking world, if they thought about
book history at all, continued to regard it as a marginal subject of
interest mainly to specialists until the publication of two major works
by American scholars in 1979 attracted widespread attention to the
field.” These two works, of course, were Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change and Robert Darnton’s The Business
of Enlightenment.” Barry Neavill, LIS, Wayne State

the water is rising

The University of Iowa has a tide line from the floods of 1993 with the river 28 feet above the norm. At the moment we are at 23 feet with at least two more predicted. Will we be swept away? Floods surge to the shores as well as down stream.

Its a feeling that I also have at the mid point in the Obermann seminar on Extreme Materialist Reading of the Medieval Book. This seminar intended to provoke “advanced study” is now over extending my understanding of its own resolution. At the moment I have ten “lessons” but they are acting just like questions.

an Obermann lesson, #8

The great age of a medieval manuscript is fabulous. However the manifestations of great age may have no linear connection except that attributed by the equally fabulous “arrow of time”. For example, any antiquarian object has experienced cycles of veneration and neglect both sequential and simultaneous.

A combination of shorter lives and more durable goods would also color the sense of the age of a manuscript in its early existence. Today we expect our own writing during youthful learning to be manifest in different format and by different devices. A medieval scholar could have glossed a manuscript during his earliest learning and during his last months. The materialist reaction to manuscript, across a lifetime, would be distinctively different.

an Obermann lesson, #9

Applied explanations of technological determinism, purely genealogical lineage or similes of bionic evolution or any simple causal tracks are very suspect. So we should pause before invention of an ecology of the artifactual world. Such a life of material culture would be a “second life” entirely populated with simulations.

But it is fun. What if material culture has been transformed from a product of natural ecologies of jungles and mountains into a product from monoculture crop lands or transformed from origins of mystery to origins of automation? What if material culture was once rare but is now a nuisance? What if the artifactual world, like the world of dolphins, has a life of its own?

an Obermann lesson, #10

The bound format is an unnatural state for a medieval manuscript in the same way that a reliquarium is an unnatural state for a relic. The initial binding represented a separate decision and that decision may not have occurred in the period of the production of the manuscript. Likewise very few medieval manuscripts survive in their initial bindings. An improbable and unbroken chain of curatorial affirmations is required for the rare survivals of medieval bindings.

Bindings subsequent to the initial binding of a manuscript have always caused damage to evidence from the period of production including disruptive association of separate manuscript works and outright damage to physical pages and delicate images. The damage is notorious both to the object and to its study. It can consist of re-sewing, fold gluing, hammer rounding and backing, edge trimming and cropping, over pressing, inflexible back linings and, the final insult, a fashionable, ornamental new cover.

Undamaging, protective and sympathetic conservation re-binding structures have been developed for treatment of the most abused medieval manuscripts but they remain exceptional and are infrequently well understood or well crafted. Further development is needed, but the entire precept of the bound format may finally need conscious re-examination particularly in the modern context of digital reproduction.

futureofthebook theme park

The
Stories theme park is going public this morning. Here we will connect the destiny of the book with the precepts of tourism allure.
The story of the Stories is interwoven, heir-loomed right here in Iowa with FotB stealth agendas.

an Obermann lesson, #1

The arduous production of parchment has certain “golden” moments. One occurs as the stretched skin suddenly turns snow white under the lunging knife. Another occurs during the knife shaving when the loud scrape suddenly changes pitch.

But a nearly unnoticed golden moment occurs at the end. This is when the parchment maker rests at the end of the work and finishes the skin with a quick wipe of a very slightly damp rag. The slight moisture immediately seals remaining dust of powdered gelatin producing a wonderful nappy sheen over the surface. The parchment is self-sizing.

The trimmings of the parchments were not wasted and neither was the observation of the subtle transition of self-sizing. The early papermakers immediately adopted both. In their challenge to mimic parchment from felted rag fiber they immediately grasped the potential of sealing the fuzzy surface with a sheen of parchment. They also understood the need to make a material with the strength and durability of parchment. Paper could only play this tough role after a wicking of gelatin sizing. The rattle of the dry sheet was then a golden moment of medieval papermaking.

an Obermann lesson, #2

Awash in a environment of manufactured stuff and the wasteland if its disposal, we are poorly situated to apply aesthetic to the handmade goods of the medieval world. The first exercise in materialist philology will be to vaporize our inclinations to judge good, better, and best parchment. Instead we should look to a craft skill, labor time and harvest risk valuation.

an Obermann lesson, #3

At first a new medium mimics the established medium. Early parchment had the template of papyrus, paper had the template of parchment, the hand-held screen has the template of the paper book. Early printing simulated manuscript and websites simulate pages.

It is less remarked that an established medium may be so resilient that it can mimic the new. In the 15th century parchment began to mimic paper and editions were printed on both. Today paper mimics the visual screen. Digital print-on-demand, fax and PDF and screen prints are hybrids of reverse transition between media.

an Obermann lesson, #4

Each medieval bookbinding was made for a different reason. Each one looks different and was differently used. Today we assume the commodification of books and assume that they are physically all the same. They are either uncased paperbacks or cased hardbacks.

Such different artifactual ecologies require a special triangulation for study of early books. With the early book a third party, following the voice of the makers and the voice of the living investigators, is the voice of the book itself. Each individual book is self-authenticating and can answer in its own way each query.

an Obermann lesson, #5

There is another discourse relevant to the role of materialist qualities in book studies. Simply put; Will screen delivery supercede print for academic publication?

Screen advocates anticipate a rapture when we will leave bodies of physical media and connect directly to conceptual works. Materialist qualities disappear. An inflected language of dead trees, obsolescence and inconvenience disparages print. There is a rant against tangible library collections. There is an assumption that screen simulation of print is an equivalent, fungible substitute. Generally there is a contention that physical media and their materialist qualities are dispensable.

If such a displacement can happen now, it could happen then or in the future because the discourse is actually positioned around the destiny of the bionic reader. A counter thesis, well supported in reality, is apparent and provoked. But the discourse itself is an
elephant or
gorilla in the room.

an Obermann lesson, #6

An invisible assimilation disturbs our sense of the materiality of a parchment manuscript. This is our presumption that any manuscript, old or new, is a master for its own reproduction. Beginning with photo derived reproduction and advancing with technologies of color printing and copying on paper all extended with electronic transmission we assume that every original is the parent of its own simulation. This assumption could not exist prior to the advent of such means of reproduction.

If the medieval manuscript, in context, could not be imagined as its own photo master then the assumption that it could be an exemplar was materially different and the material status of the exemplar was also safe in a state its own self-reference. A point of reference here is the Donald Jackson St. John’s Bible and the uneasy relation of this manuscript to any eventual bound format.

A further implication is that every THING in the medieval material culture, not just text, acted as an exemplar for its own recreation.

an Obermann lesson, #7

The evolution of the wooden board codex binding era culminated with the gymnastic, elegant anatomy of mid 16th century. This evolution had begun more than eight centuries earlier and had absorbed transitions from papyrus, to parchment, to paper. The wooden board binding technology had also absorbed the transition from manuscript to print.

My point being that no one appears to recognize that the purpose of the contemporary hand-held devices or e-books is not to read them. Everyone is trying to read the things and trying to access books on them. The purpose of the devices is to learn their navigation, or in the idiom of the wooden board anatomy, to learn their book action. Yesterday I had the most interesting Kindle conversation with a librarian from Senegal although we did not share a common text language.