futureofthebook.com

manuscript era

Peter Stallybrass, Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, is a renowned scholar of early modern culture, with a particularly alert eye to the history of printing, reading, knowledge, and cultural transformation.

Peter Stallybrass clarified that the term manuscript was first coined a century and a half after the advent of printing. The new mode defined the previous and their following interplay gave rise to bureaucracies of print annotation, forms, inventories and dispatchings; hybrid print and manuscript transaction.

Now paper and screen play out a similar dynamic, defining each other. They are instigating new interdependencies and hybrid transactions. But now the manuscript mode emerging on the screen is defining the previous tradition of paper. Perhaps the paper – screen interplay happened before with book annotation where the blank margins provided the screen like commentary for the fixed print text.

Let’s take this a step further. Why do we print out screen display? Why do we fix manuscript in this transaction to paper? Think about it….the decision to print is a decision to read copy in a different state. So it was Walter Ong that correctly watched the reading mode, not the production mode.

“In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsulated versions of news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next.” Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid, Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

kilgarlin update

The Kilgarlin Center site has been revised October 29th. Shown are the new facilities.

new booknotes book

More than a dozen insightful essays in one convenient, easily shelvable volume; BookNotes: Episodes in the Nature Preservation and Future of the Book. Included is an annotated bibliography on the strategic future of print collections in research libraries. This elegant work on the destiny of physical books is available now, post-paid for $10. Request your copy from iowa.book.works@mchsi.com or from Gary Frost, 615 6th Ave, Coralville, IA, 52241. Smart move…

academic futurists

Ted Striphas (The Late Age of Print) and Robert Darnton (The Case for Books) both exhibit little trepidation over being labeled futurists. It Turns out that the destiny of the iconic paper book is riding on an emergent future. Not just a concern with Google culture, but also a strong advocacy for future print and screen interdependence is motivating these book studies scholars.

the day it all changed

(link) The libraries need to hang on to their print particularly the 70% of all books in orphan status. if:book is watching the advent of the Internet Archive BookServer infrastructure as well, but not a peep from TeleRead.

homing

The Barnes & Noble Nook receives streaming content while in the store. This is similar to in-store access to paper books. Once a title is purchased it can also be loaned to another device. This is also a metaphor for physical loaning.

There is a whole line of reading device critique based on the logic of simulation of physical books. Many see an adverse influence on fulfillment of functionalities of connected reading devices and electronic communications. But the metaphor is a very rich source for template and retailers would like to move to screen reading without undue economic disruption of physical book purchase and ownership.

The question is will the paper book template increase or diminish prospects for dedicated book devices? There are still many moves to further lend paper materiality to screen reading. The very proliferation of devices is a mirror of a diversity in paper book production. Content browsing in the store (library) is another. Screen sampling resulting in paper copy purchase is another. Even the Kindle can be used to discover paper books.

displays

Looking closely it is possible to tell a difference of contrast between Kindles one and two. That recalls the thousands of differences in grades of paper. Those differences, subtle and blatant, adverse and optimal, are overt and we assimilate them, but they also express a difference between screen and paper display. Both are experienced in an analog reality where paper display is physically embedded and the screen display is an instrumentation or read-out.

screading

Reading applies to interpretation of gesture, weather, music, pictorial, video, wines, and a great variety of kinetic and sensory experience. Nothing wrong with the generic meaning or its wide application. In my view, the useful topic here is taxonomy of distinctive kinds of reading. And, perhaps, different kinds of reading are interdependent and tend to augment each other. The careful and expressive textual descriptions of the experience of wines or cheeses comes to mind.

A distinction of screen reading is a delivery format that differs from street signs, printed paper or movie captions. The delivery is transient as the screen is quickly redrawn and re-access is compromised by changing and expanding search results and keyboard error. Screen navigation is also devoid of place or time ques or kinetic manipulations that assist orientation in larger works. The screen reader is also separated from content by encoding, software and electrical and radio transmission. Screen reading is highly mediated.

So the needed descriptor has actually been realized when the format is used as an adjective; screen reading, print reading, musical recital or recitation reading, palm reading and so on.

nook

The quantities and varieties of electronic reading devices are expanding rapidly. Soon there will be as many different devices as there are different paper books. When this happens equivalences of paper and screen will be more easily evaluated since a page turned here will be another there.

legacy printers

Sara Sauers offered a magnificent review of the legacy of fine letterpress printing in Iowa City. Carroll Coleman, Harry Duncan, Kim Merker and Kay Amert and their achievements over the last half century.

As interesting is the odyssey of the typographic lab as a departmental orphan. First expelled from English and then expelled from Journalism each time extinguishing the position of the printer. Now the remnant typography lab is adopted by another orphan; the Center for the Book. This time, at least, the stakeholders range across department lines.

The future of the typographic lab is being configured as we speak and there is some talk of a book project following a quiet of over a decade. Even more interesting the lab could go forward with a larger mandate to advocate for the future of print, legacy and prospective, in a context of screen reading.

These transactions are closely followed in the Historical Printing Seminar.
After Sara’s lecture we went out into the Library to view the newly installed Columbian Press. A lovely ugly of the first flowering of Yankee ingenuity that found its success in the Mother Country.

flair

Susan Share landed in Iowa City and presented a two hour performance of visuals, video, demonstration, history, natural history and flair of the book as artistic expression. This is an intricate and dramatic topic.

Perhaps what tantalized and surprised most of all was how deliberately her performance revealed a proof of the nature of reading. Near this revelation, Susan was configuring full stage-sized book scenery of folding and blazing panels. She was reversing and inducing up-rightness and flipping backsides and front sides. “I am looking for stabilities in a folding and unfolding movement of panels.” So she was demonstrating the performance space of the book. As an author she was reading her own visually mobile text.

Her argument hinged together everywhere and insights flickered and stunned the viewer. She stood up, reversed and collapsed the baffles. So we saw what reading does; not what it is, but what it does. We learned of the labor, anxiety, and rehearsal of authorship and then we saw the author, disguising that, recite momentary stabilities for the audience, then fold up the book tent and move on to the next town.

lc

This session will provide analysis and evaluation of the functional mobility of the codex binding. Basic design issues of materials selection, mobility inhibitions, and the nature of analog access will be discussed. A taxonomy of prototypes, spanning mechanical structures and historical contexts, will be defined and studied. Attributes of each type will be considered in context of exhibition, imaging, reading, portability, durability and kinetic appeal.

My last workshop at the Library of Congress, a three month internship, was from July 22 to September 21, 1974. On July 26 Nixon resigned. Runners in the halls of the Library gathered lottery bets for the hour and minute of the resignation. Meanwhile we continued our work in book conservation with instructors Don Etherington, Chris Clarkson and Peter Waters.

That was thirty-five years ago. It feels like yesterday, but now we will be in the Madison, not Jefferson, Building.