Book 2.0 - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2013

Interface design pioneers Douglas Engelbart and Ivan Sutherland strove to include hands, feet, body movements and orientation to the screen as part of the basic computational apparatus. They also relied on the visual aspects of graphical interface as a crucial feature of this embodied experience. Since then, the tactile aspects of interface have intensified, and the structures that organize the graphical user interface remain essential to our use of digital environments. Multiple types of media are now embedded in screen-based environments, posing challenges for reading across very disparate frameworks and modalities (media types). I refer to this process as ‘frame-jumping’, the challenge of moving from one visual and cognitive frame to another, while trying to position ourselves as readers/viewers within the multi-media environment.

As reading formats have become more varied, the moment of encounter between a reader and a text has also shifted. Readers of printed matter might take notes in margins, underline passages, or leave other handwritten traces of their interaction with a text. Electronic devices, however, tend to lend themselves less easily to mark making, and despite options for making digital notations and comments, the visual record of the moment of reading is lost more often than not. The PDF is a form of electronic text that can bear interesting traces and point to a text’s past life as a printed object through visual cues like page dimensions and typographic layout. We often see traces of the life of a text during that period after it has been authored, but before it reaches a reader, as it passed through the hands of designers, computers, printers, scanners, librarians and other ‘file sharers’. This is especially true for texts that were first published in print before the advent of digital publishing, and were scanned in and converted to PDF. This visual essay examines two kinds of marks – those made by readers and those made by the ‘intermediaries’ who handled a text before it was converted to PDF: first, examples of marks made by students reading printed copies of a 1976 essay entitled ‘Notes on the index, part 1’, by art historian Rosalind Krauss; second, traces left on a PDF of the 1970 essay ‘Type design in the computer age’, by graphic designer Wim Crouwel, which was acquired through a university library system.

Through our first repeated interaction with books, we come to recognize recurring elements in these experiences, such as verso and recto pages, covers, spine, etc., and relationships between these elements (front/back, part/whole, etc.). Such interactions enable us to construct abstracted mental representations of the book, which are simpler than any single physical instantiation, but indicative of many other books. This schematization provides the basis for a range of structures and pathways that can be linked, or mapped, onto text and imagery in both conventional and unconventional ways. Through metaphor and metonymy, basic concepts evoked by schematic book-form can link with words and images to make new meaning. Therefore, rather than thinking of the book page as simply a substrate onto which the printed word is inscribed, it can be understood, for example, as a slice of time and/or space, and such an understanding provides opportunities for making associations with text and imagery. Consequently, the book is not necessarily a neutral carrier of meaning but can prompt the reader to think in particular ways about how information is presented. This article will explore the book-form as a source of schematic structure that can be linked and blended with other elements to instantiate texts in diverse and creative ways. Using ideas from conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, it will focus on one metaphorical understanding of the book: book as a tunnel, to highlight possibilities for integrating the physical and visual forms of books with book texts. The tunnel book is a format that has been explored by book artists in which apertures are cut into pages, suggesting movement through, rather than around pages. This article discusses a book that utilizes the notion of cutting through a book, but instead, seeks to evoke this effect through imagery and the conventional codex rather than by piercing the book page and utilizing the tunnel book format. I provide an account of how a sense of moving through a tunnel is projected onto experiences of moving through a book. I also discuss the ways in which these two parallel experiences can be blended with other metaphorical journeys, in this case progression through a course of postgraduate study.

This article explores how material form influences the communication of information in books across technological divides. Using the creative project, Book Unbound, as a starting point, the article explores forms of the book that are not tied uniquely to the codex. Furthermore, by discussing the familiar codex in relation to its digital counterparts, the article examines how materiality continues to be used to communicate, persuade readers and shape the process of meaning-making.

This article discusses the history of the artist book in the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The author will make a case that the artist book, as a genre within contemporary art, is primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked to pre-Internet economics of production and distribution. This article includes relevant discussion of the semantics and rhetoric of artists’ books following Diane Vanderlip’s first use of the phrase ‘Artists Books’ in 1973. In the 1980s, with the advent of desktop publishing and what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) design software, a paradigm shift occurred with respect to independent design and prepress production. Also at this time the on-going innovations in home printer technologies increased access to and awareness of book publishing by graphic designers, and any others with creative ideas and an interest in independent publishing. With the launch of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the genre was further transformed. Through this transformation artist book production moved from a local publishing phenomenon to one that was global and inclusive of independent publishing by artists, designers and others. New modes of production including print-on-demand and virtual bookshops further democratized access to independent publishing by anyone.