Amaranth Borsuk’s
The Book traces how the nature of reading changed from an activity practiced by
a small number of scholars to a pastime of the masses.
Megan N. Liberty
The Book by Amaranth
Borsuk (image courtesy MIT Press)
I first discovered
Amaranth Borsuk’s work in Between Page and Screen, a romance story, co-authored
with Brad Bouse, told through printed visual designs that are activated by a
computer webcam. When I learned that Borsuk wrote The Book for MIT Press’s
Essential Knowledge series (which provides “specialized subject matter for
nonspecialists”), I knew I had to read it. Books have a long history as objects
of critical study, to which Borsuk’s 12-page bibliography and seven-page
“Further Reading and Writing” section attest. Spanning disciplines, from
library science to conceptual art to philosophy, the study of books dates back
to early texts like historian and typeface designer Douglas C. McMurtrie’s 1937
The Book: the Story of Printing & Bookmaking, as well as librarian
Frederick Kilgour’s The Evolution of the Book (1998), and, more recently, Leah
Price’s historical study How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
(2012). Borsuk’s book on the book takes on the hefty task of synthesizing this
wide-ranging research into a cross-disciplinary summary text that examines both
historical and contemporary interest in this iconic form.
Broken into four
sections looking at the book as “Object,” “Content,” “Idea,” and “Interface,”
Borsuk begins around 2800 BCE in Southern Mesopotamia, tracing the transition
from oral to written history. She offers a meticulous account of the object’s
predecessors, from cuneiform tablets and scrolls to incunabula (early forms of the
printed codex) and manuscripts. This exhaustive lineage fills the first two
chapters. While a bit overwhelming, it provides a necessary charting of the
relationship between form, content, and reception. As the book changed from
something few people could make, read, carry, or own, to something
mass-produced and easily possessed, the nature of reading changed from an
activity practiced by a small number of scribes and religious scholars, to that
of the affluent and well educated, and then, finally, to a pastime of the
masses.
“This normalization
of reading practices bears remembering,” Borsuk explains, “since from the
vantage point of the twenty-first century, our own codex book has been
normalized to such a degree that we question the ‘bookness’ of anything that
challenges our expected reading experience.” It’s almost hard to imagine that
this reading experience was constructed over hundreds of years. With this
detailed history, the author provides a rubric for what lies ahead: digital
publishing and the current (and future!) landscape of reading, which is equally
determined by a tenuous balance between form, content, and culture.
The second half of
The Book (“As Idea” and “As Interface”) is devoted to technological and
practical advancements made at the hands of artists and designers. Borsuk runs
through an extensive list of achievements that will be well known to most
readers, and the people behind them: for instance, graphic designer Jan Tschild
who, among other things, helped design Penguin’s mass-market paperbacks;
William Blake’s 18th-century illuminated manuscripts; Stéphane Mallarmé’s
19th-century page designs based on the structure of newsprint’s columns and
typeface; the emergence of artists-as-publishers and conceptual art
publications, such as Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) and
Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975), which both use the sequential nature of
photobooks to turn the physical object into a conceptual space; and
performative book-objects such as Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), and
Dieter Roth’s unboxed books from the 1950s and ’60s. These latter works herald
a new wave of writing and critical thinking about the book, as both a
conceptual and physical object.
Since the invention,
in 105 CE, of the codex, which Borsuk defines in her handy glossary as “a block
of pages bound on one side between covers,” the bound book has grown beyond its
physical form into a metaphor; we call a new start “turning over a new leaf”
(an early reference to book pages) and we read people like open books. The
author highlights a number of artists’ projects that play on the metaphor of
the book as an opening into space and people, as in Fluxus artist Alison
Knowles’s The Big Book (1969), a human-sized, freestanding, multipart “book”
that viewers would walk around (and, in some cases, through — some of the
“pages” had holes to enter in). It is this area that is most interesting in the
digital age, as books’ bodies become new forms, yet the metaphors remain at
large in our culture.
Johanna Drucker (both
a theorist and maker of books) defines artists’ books as books that “integrate
the formal means of [their realization] and production with [their] thematic or
aesthetic issues.” Drucker is joined by a number of others interested in
explaining and exploring this wave of artistic creation. Borsuk notes in
particular the writings of art critic and historian Lucy Lippard, who
co-founded Printed Matter in New York; Ulises Carrión, founder of the
artist-book space Other Books and So in Amsterdam and author of the 1975
manifesto The New Art of Making Books; and Dick Higgins, a Fluxus artist and
publisher of Something Else Press. As with the early history, these figures and
their writings are likely familiar to most readers of The Book, who presumably
already have some interest in this subject. But what Borsuk does so masterfully
is create a fluid timeline that connects these narratives and forms. Much has
been written on the history of early European publishing; on graphic design and
how movable type transformed book publishing; and on Fluxus and other
conceptual art publishing. However, the author covers it all, and retains a
relationship between these moments and genres that is always tied to the form
of the book.
In her final
chapter, “Book as Interface,” Borsuk explains that a good interface is a
“transparent vessel through which we access the information we need.” What
makes the book arts so interesting are the ways artists push against this. “As
with artists’ books, when digital books make the interface a visible and
integral part of the narrative, we begin to see the extent to which any book is
a negotiation, a performance, a dynamic event that happens in the moment and is
never the same twice,” she notes as she transitions from artists’ books to
digital publishing. “As the material form of the codex threatens to
disintegrate into the digital, works highly attuned to materiality give us a
chance to think about and savor the physical artifact, precisely by asking us
to reflect on the very immaterial ‘idea’ of the book.” This statement recalls
again the metaphoric quality of the book that remains.
Borsuk traces
electronic literature as well, from Brewster Kahle’s founding of the Internet
Archive in 1996 to the Google Print initiative in 2004 (which became Google
Books) and the iPhone and Amazon Kindle releases in 2007. As with her other
accounts, this evolution is not a straight line, but one that changes as
reading needs, alongside formats and cultural conceptions of a book, change. As
she notes near the end, “All books, I hope this volume suggests, arise in the
moment of reception, in the hands, eyes, ears, and mind of the reader.” Just as
the oral tradition needs an orator, a book needs a reader to be activated. Even
the most conceptual examples of art books play with the performative aspect of
words waiting to be read. Books are physical objects whose properties dictate
these experiences. “Both we and the texts we read have bodies, and it is only
when they come together that a book takes shape.” With many of us today
carrying reading devices in our pockets, and the potential of books to take so
many forms at the click of a button, the real question is not what will the
book become, but what its readers will become.
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