Book 2.0 - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017

This article argues that in the fifteenth century, many manuscripts were physically recycled, and that this recycling is symptomatic of interest in sustaining books. In the case studies explored here, unwanted or old texts became valued for the physical qualities of the parchment on which they were written. Case studies of recycled manuscripts, including flyleaves, pastedowns, limp covers and palimpsests, are presented to argue that many books were made (and re-made) in sustainable ways. Although recycled books, and bits of books, have been mentioned fleetingly by many scholars, and studied as treasures or for the scraps of text they preserve, this article focuses particularly on the practices and processes of medieval book recycling. Research into recycled books thus adds to the history of material culture, to the history of the book, and to debates about the sustainability and durability of media today: we can learn from the practices and processes of the past.

This article explores the material and metaphorical interactions between books and boxes in early modern English print culture. Building on ideas articulated by book historians Walter Ong, Jeffrey Todd Knight and Tessa Watt about the book as a material and metaphorical container, this article uses two case studies to explore some of the ways in which early modern print culture playfully engaged with the resemblances between book and box, as objects that both have the potential to contain and condense. Focusing on a version of scripture for children and a collection of Elizabethan epigrams, two printed texts that aspire to the neatness and the convenience that a box offers, the article considers how the book’s identity as a ‘container’ for ‘content’ was not merely functional but a symptom of the imaginative connections between the textual and material realms embodied in the book.

This article proposes that the early modern book was constituted of numerous forms of stringing, tying and binding. Exploring ligatures at the level of the printed or handwritten letter-form, the stitching, the binding and the clasps or ties that served to open and close the book, I argue that books were not merely bound in to their containing volumes but were also bound outwards to material environments and social networks. The interlaced designs on decorative bookbindings are read as meditations on a connectedness that was actualized in shared ownership or giftgiving. Clasps turned the book into a box, and an apt metaphor for the human heart, while silk ties connected the book into the worlds of clothing and textiles. While our experience of connective communication is now dominated by the Internet, there are some signs that the material book is fighting back.

This article argues that the book as ‘process’ and ‘event’ requires a different understanding of ‘book’: one that acknowledges the impossibility of meaning residing in the final object alone. The finitude of the codex form is made a mockery of by the infinite dimensions of language, interpretation and time: this article extends that notion by exploring the process of making artists books as experience(s) that engage spatial/temporal/sensory attributes of making as being fully involved in their knowledge and meaning. Such books pose knowledge as an ‘event’: foregrounding the making and not the outcome. By example, the bookwork, Skinful (2003), questions the role of the materiality of the bound codex as object and examines how time and process operate in the book as a metaphor for emotional encounters. To complement this, The Cruelty of the Classical Canon (2014), expands the paradox of the material book as a container of knowledge explored through ‘brute’ encounters with making and experiencing such an object. Both books explore the relationship between the body/embodied thought in the book-as-process.

This article focuses on Anne Carson’s Nox, a boxed book published in 2010. What makes it special is the physicality of its format as well as its multi-layered and polymorphous text that due to its fold-out construction invites readers to investigate the missing words and phrases, or the spaces left between its pasted documents so as to confront the experiences narrated and shared through them. This article discusses how Nox’s design allows an examination of the means by which stories can be told and traumatic events can be treated. In this way, the physicality of Carson’s Nox both preserves and enhances the memory of the personal experience it attempts to communicate, due to the various spatial arrangements it proposes of its verbal and visual materials.

The concept of the codex book is deeply imprinted on scholarly and literary traditions. It bears within it assumptions about bounded-ness and stability as defining features of the form. Works conceived in a networked environment are referred to as books, but may not exist within the same structural conditions. This article reviews some of the ways the conceptions of the physical codex are linked to production and poses questions about the identity of artefacts produced by processes and protocols in a networked environment. It argues that these unbounded and contingently configured documents do not merely extend the traditional codex, with its apparatus of footnotes, bibliographical citations, and other paratexts, but that these are substantively different types of textual productions because of their fluid instability.

This article examines the status of the artist’s book genre within the digital media landscape. The genre has the potential for widespread public awareness by embracing new media and small-format, handheld mobile devices. The author highlights the void of artists’ books and uses examples of existing book apps and other interactive artworks to arrive at the conclusion that digital media should be embraced within the artist’s book genre. She also includes reflection on her own artist’s book app creative research project, The Book Worm Tales, to share the process of transitioning her artistic experiments within the genre from print to screen. Inspired by an appreciation and concern for the biodegradation of rare physical books caused by moths and organisms such as mould, the project poetically reflects on rapid changes in book media, while preserving in virtual form experiential aspects of real, rare books in the process. The article includes the premise of that project; discussion of the experimentation involved in exploiting the creative potential of the medium; historical perspective on the materiality of the book; and implications of the digital medium on the artists’ books genre.

Artists’ books have evolved over the last 60 years into a significant, international contemporary arts practice. In the 1960s, the artist’s book grew in popularity as a means of bypassing dealers in high end galleries, taking artists’ works out to a wider public through self-publishing and distribution. The genre has evolved further through access to new technologies and affordable publishing tools in the twenty-first century. Many artists are engaging with the book format today, creating artworks that allow the viewer/reader to engage closely with the subject matter that they are holding in their hands. And in the digital age, handheld books can include works made for viewing on tablets and e-readers, some produced exclusively for digital platforms, and some that play on the instability of such platforms such as books created from images of broken Kindles. Some artists making books conduct the whole editioning process by hand; producing their own papers, using traditional printmaking and binding processes in celebration of the book as a timeless, physical artefact.