“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend,” observed Groucho Marx in 1974. “because inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” He had come to the Junior Art Center of Los Angeles to support the opening of “The Word Show,” an exhibit celebrating the origin, form, strangeness and delight of words. But today, if you were inside of a dog, you <em>could</em> enjoy a book quite easily – thanks to the illuminated screen of an e-reader or the voice of an audio book.
“The story of the book’s changing form is bound up with that of its changing content,” writes poet-scholar Amaranth Borsuk in The Book. “The book, after all, is a portable data storage and distribution method, and it arises as a by-product of the shift from oral to literate culture, a process that take centuries and is informed through cultural exchange, both peaceful and forcible.”
The book has been a protean and resilient idea and thing since cuneiform was incised on clay tablets. Nevertheless, the rise of digital readers has thrown some bookish people into fits of hand-wringing. In 2012, Jonathan Franzen told the Telegraph (U.K.), “Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do … A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around … it’s just not permanent enough.” Staking out the mission of The Book, Borsuk counters, “Rather than bemoaning the death of books or creating a dichotomy between print and digital media, this guide points to continuities.”
The first 100 pages of The Book comprise a briskly illuminating history, beginning with “The Book As Object.” Borsuk looks back to appearance of the clay tablet and stylus around 3500 BCE, devised to record commercial and legal transactions, to state the laws themselves, and to document cultural history and religion. With remarkable economy, she tells of the first scribes – and makes clear that their expressive needs alone did not dictate the form of the first “books.” She writes, “Content does not simply necessitate [the medium’s] form, but rather writing develops alongside, influences, and is influenced by the technological supports that facilitate its distribution.” Along the way, one learns that the first author may have been the Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna who composed poems to her moon goddess. The seventh-century Assyrian King Ashurbanipal boasted a library of 30,000 tablets. The version of Gilgameshdiscovered in Nineveh was inscribed across 12 tablets.
So, let’s look at The Book itself as an object. Turned out at five inches wide by seven inches high by three-quarters of an inch thick, the volume suggests the concentrated, assuring authority of a missal. Yet the contents aren’t cramped; the eye moves at ease across and down the page, and Borsuk’s fluid prose finds its matched form. Individual black pages intermittently cite quotations from her critical sources in reversed-out type. At these places, we pause. Like other titles in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, this is an undersized, ingeniously packed book designed to afford both cerebral lightness and concentrated insight. From outset to conclusion, The Bookpivots nimbly between example and analysis, tale and take-away.
If you’re a writer or inveterate reader, you’re probably curious about the origins of words, your materials. But you may be less informed about the roots of the book, of paper, ink, and type. Borsuk efficiently describes the making of paper from papyrus in Egypt, sheets pasted together to form scrolls. She is particular about where the author’s name appeared on the scroll and how the hieroglyphs were patterned on the page. Progressing through The Book and the adoption of the codex, one follows the evolving display of printed language and envisions the pedigree of our own pages. This is essential knowledge – how the Phoenicians developed an alphabet of 22 consonant-letters during the 10th century BCE – how “the Greeks, in turn, adapted these letters to their own spoken language, swapping consonants they didn’t have for vowels and adding new letters for missing Greek sounds.” How Cai Lun, a eunuch in the Han court, developed paper from “a mash of hemp, mulberry bark, fishing nets, and rags.” How bound wax tablet diptychs morphed into the codex.
The book’s third part, “The Book As Idea,” looks at authors and artists who have produced books in their own studios. These “artists’ books” are often inspired by a wish to evade the hurdles posed by publishing industry, and also to delight their makers. “Such self-referential and self-aware objects have much to teach us about the changing nature of the book,” writes Borsuk, “in part because they highlight the ‘idea’ by paradoxically drawing attention to the ‘object’ we have come to take for granted.” The modern era of this book-making begins with William Blake’s “illuminated printing” (the process for which Borsuk neatly details) and continues through Stéphane Mallarme’s Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (1897) which appeared during the advent of the Linotype. Borsuk goes to consider Ed Ruscha’s hand-made photo books of the 1960’s and 70’s, Ulises Carrión’s manifesto “The New Art of Making Books” (1975), and the themes “that recur throughout artists’ books of the twentieth century: spatiotemporal play, animation, recombinant structures, ephemerality, silence, and interactivity.”
Finally, there is “The Book as Interface” which delivers all of the remediated features that distress Jonathan Franzen. Well, as Borsuk notes, “the codex emulated the narrow columns of the scroll, early typefaces copied manuscript hands, and the design of the Penguin paperback revisited the golden ration of the medieval manuscript page.” And now the digital reader is making its own adaptations. But Borsuk also quotes scholar N. Katherine Hayles who said, “To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading … but to profoundly transform the metaphoric relation of word to world.” The Book is ultimately a paean to our inventiveness and receptivity. As Borsuk concludes, “the book changes us as we change it, letter by letter, page by page.”
[Published by the MIT Press on May 4, 2018, 344 pages, $15.95 paperback]