You can pick up a book but a book can throw you across the room… Books are kinetic, and like all huge forces, need to be handled with care… But they do need to be handled. - Jeanette Winterson Art Objects, 1995
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f a book should throw you across the room, do not blame (or praise) the designer. The only place where a book might harbor that much leverage, strength, and poise is in the invisible realm of what it has to say. From a young age I’ve always considered books art objects like Jeanette Winterson describes here. My dad is some-what of a book hoarder and our house is filled with full stacks and shelves. A family of artists, everyone’s work is hanging throughout the house alongside full bookcases. Growing up, the distinction between framed pastel drawings from Great-Grandfather Archie and the books stuffed in the shelf next to them was nonexistent. We meticulously protected both (with dehumidifiers, the occasional delicate dusting, or plastic sleeves) and were taught how to handle them with care (never turn the page in the middle of the bottom edge to avoid tears, use a bookmark instead of leaving it open face-down on a nightstand and stretching the binding). We were taught to see books as art objects
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because of their design, but looking back I wonder if the distinction between art and book was too fine; as a child my dad’s books were out of reach because of their art object status, and my brother and I never handled them in the way that Winterson calls for. Reading her quote makes me think about the balance between designing easily accessible and functional objects with beauty.
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Design can help to clarify what’s said. It can wash the window of the page. Design can make a printed book more inviting to touch, which can give the hidden muscle of the text an extra edge. Design can even turn the physical book into a kind of sculptural music—a silent accompaniment for the voice or voices lurking in the words. This might make getting thrown across the room seem a little more like waltzing. But design cannot give the words a power, depth, or subtlety they did not already have. The designer can, on the other hand, quite easily cause the reader to throw the book across the room—or if the reader is as gentle as they say, to set the book down with a sigh and never return to it again. I am similarly very affected by the design of the book. I know people who don’t care about the cover or the font inside and can read anything. I have a very hard time toughing through a badly designed book even if the story is good. For me, reading a well-designed book is half the fun of reading. I have old memories of my twelve-year-old self browsing the young adult fiction section at the Durham Public Library and checking out the books with the best design. I used to check out ten to fifteen at a time because I would get so captivated by all the different covers I couldn’t choose what to actually read. Sometimes half of these would go unread, but just looking at them as objects was enough for me. I remember categorizing the types of jacket designs I saw, and guessing what the story was about based on the design. I remember even trying to pick up trends in book design by decade. More often than
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not this technique reminded me, (as Bringhurst says here) “design cannot give the words a power, depth, or subtlety they did not already have.” I read a lot of mediocre books as a tween.
It is an old and venerable rule that the typography of books should be transparent, like a win• dow or a wineglass in which the text is held. No The classic statement printed page or drinking glass is actualof this view is an essay ly invisible, but both can seem to disapby Beatrice Warde, pear in favor of their contents. Both can “The Crystal Goblet,” which began life as a also reappear as things in themselves lecture given in London and as mirrors of their surroundings. in October 1930 under Individual readers and whole societies the title Printing Should Be Invisible. The most can and do see themselves reflected conveniently available in their printing, whether or not they published version are conscious of it as such. The design is included in Beatrice Warde, The Crystal and manufacture of books can tell us Goblet: Sixteen Essays on as much about a people or a culture as Typography, ed. Henry the condition of its grain fields, pasture Jacob (London: Sylvan Press, 1955). lands, and gardens, the social climate of its streets, and the architecture of its buildings. But what is a book? Most of us think of books as physical objects: words and sometimes images written or printed on a thin, flexible surface that has usually been folded, cut, and bound. But if books were merely that, then a telephone directory or mail-order catalog would qualify as much as Don Quixote or the Canterbury Tales. To those who know and love them, books are recognizable, as forests are, and cities, by their structure (branching and rebranching), their complexity (enormous), and their size (big enough to get lost in). A book is usually something we can carry in one hand, yet if it is a real book it is also larger than we are: a city or forest of words that can feed us and ✁ swallow us up and transform us. I love how Bringhurst writes that a real book is bigger than its size. This makes me think about the things I’ve read that have expanded past the last page and influenced how I think or act. Some of my favorite real books are Dostoyevsky short stories. When I was
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yuonger, the “Harry Potter” series were the equivalent. Reading those books was much more like being ‘swallowed up.’
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A book is not a catalog or list; it has to make more sense than that. It is not a stack of cordwood but a tree: a branching, leafing, flowering structure, unfolding in the mind, where it can find the space it needs. The design of books has meaning because it gives visible form to those invisible realities. The book designer is an interpreter, drawing meaning to the surface where its shape can be revealed. The idea of design as a method of physicalizing “invisible realities” is a nice description. Reading, especially for me, has always created a safe space. Whenever I read after school in middle school I felt like I was creating a force field between me and the rest of the house. Reading created a comfortable isolation that was real to me, even though nobody else could see it. Book design can form these invisible worlds. The
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reader ultimately tailors their experience, but the right mindset is a crucial step through the design and layout of the book.
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That, however, is not all a book designer does. The printed page is a surface where things inside the book and things outside it intersect and interact with one another. The book designer deals with both of these, revealing in the process something about the text that has been written and something about the conditions in which it may be read. Books exist because we want and need them. Many people want them nearly as much as they want children, and for closely related reasons. Humans, like all mammals, bequeath what they can to their offspring in two forms: natural and cultural, or genetic and nongenetic. Neither is sufficient on its own. Books, whether oral or written, are among the most powerful means we have for transmitting nongenetic heredity.
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I know that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the hours of nightly stories my dad read aloud; “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” to “Harry Potter.” My dad used to make up a different voice for each of the main characters, and his theatricality made the words form an even realer alternate world around me. Calling these childhood rituals, “among the most powerful means we have for transmitting nongenetic heredity” is a really interesting way of looking at something like story telling. It’s a pretty universal early childhood rite, and as the book says, the driving tool that teaches children how to use their imagination. Knowing how to create your own world from a young age is crucial. As an adult, many of the ways I cope with stress or anxiety relate back to the way I formed invisible worlds as a child. By immersing myself in a story, I can focus and calm down my mind. Nowadays, the stories I immerse myself in exist in other forms of media besides books, but my dad’s storytelling was the way I learned how to take myself out of one world and into another.
Idolizing them brings with it certain problems. Societies that worship particular books have a worrisome record of aggravated self-righteousness. But worshipping a book is incompatible with genuinely reading it. And books, for all their failings—and their writers’ and readers’ failings too—seem to be crucial to human culture. Books—not writing or printing, but books in the deeper sense—may be part of our basic identity as a species: as basic as nests to birds. Most of what we write and print, like most of what we say, has no such grand importance. What makes a book a book, in the fullest sense of the word, is its plausible claim to be a fairly self-contained component of the essential human legacy. We test words for that quality every time we read. In the middle of Boris Pasternak’s great novel, Yuri Zhivago sits in an upcountry library watching Larissa, the woman he loves, as she immerses herself in a book. He thinks to himself, “She reads as if that were not the highest human activity
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but something very simple, within the powers of a draft animal. As if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.” Not long afterward, he sees her bringing water from the well and thinks to himself, “It’s the other way too: she carries water as if she were reading, lightly, without effort.” I’m envious that Larissa is able to read books, “‘as if she were carrying water or peeling potatoes.’” This description to me illustrates a seamless connection between the invisible realities created by the story and real life. I think that once a book can bridge that gap and integrate itself completely into your reality, it has expanded beyond its size and becomes a ‘real book’ like Bringhurst described earlier. I’m not sure if the strength of the story or the individual’s reading ability have more influence on this phenomenon. Pasternak’s description of Larissa makes it seem like her ‘light’ reading is independent from the book, but an amazing novel can settle into someone’s real life without much
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effort from the reader. There’s only one time in my life (so far) where I felt like reading was effortless and fit into my life seamlessly. Everyday after middle school I spent the first hour home locked up in my room reading a young adult fiction novel (chosen for its cover of course). It was the only time in my life so far where I’ve procrastinated on schoolwork because of a book and not a technology-related thing. I wasn’t reading a lot of ‘real books’ as Bringhurst might categorize them, but I felt the same way that Larissa probably felt: part of a literary world that extended through the book and into the world around her. Now that I’ve been in college and my reading time has been taken up by other commitments and assigned books, there is a disconnect between my world and the ‘invisible realty’ of the words I read.
Real books encourage that kind of relationship between reading and the rest of life, and it is just that kind of reading—or so it seems to me— that allows us to recognize real books and to make use of them.
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Prose, I think, is originally blind: a voice in the darkness hauled in like fishline and coiled onto the • page, with very little implicit design. But prose is the essential genre of writing, the specialty of scribes, and as scribal cultures develop, This is not the place to argue the merits and prose becomes something to see, to adscope of this opinion, mire, to scrutinize. It is annotated and but it is based on close labeled, segmented and rearranged. In study of hundreds of manuscripts, ancient other words, it is edited. Some writers, and recent, in languages in fact (though by no means all), learn ranging from Latin and to edit themselves. It is then that, for Greek to Inuktitut and Cree. better or worse, prose opens its eyes and looks in the mirror. Writers in scribal cultures tend to be accomplished scribes and can give their work a benchmark material form, but when printing takes hold, typography intervenes. Over time, what the reader reads comes to look quite unlike what the writer produces. With the spread of personal computers in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, typographers and writers found themselves using similar tools, and their practice began to reconverge. Printing could once again look something like writing, and writing could now look just like printing, good or bad. Any writer who wished to was free to learn the typographer’s trade. Many writers, of course, had no more desire to start designing and setting their books than they had to start building their own houses, grow✁ ing their own food, and making their own clothes. I can’t relate to this feeling at all. If I ever wrote something (which, besides this assignment, is highly unlikely) I would want complete control over the final design. I would even prefer to print and bind the book myself rather than send it to somebody else. This is probably because I study art and I consider the finished, bound book as important as the content inside.
Others leapt at the chance—though it was a dangerous moment to leap, because typography itself was undergoing tumultuous change. A thousand
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years of accumulated knowledge and expertise was in danger of being lost or broken in the move. Such upheavals have been frequent in the bookmaking crafts in the past hundred years. Between 1900 and 1920, books were caught in a major industrial shift from handset to machine-set type. Both Monotype and Linotype machines imposed some new restrictions on the proportions and fitting of letters. New faces, and new adaptations of old ones, were urgently required. Given the sorry state of typography toward the end of the nineteenth century, this could easily have proven a disaster. It did not, because the redesign campaign encountered two rich sources of fertilization: the revival of humanist scribal practice, led by Edward Johnston, and an intensified study of typographic history, led in large part by Daniel Berkeley Updike in the United States and • Stanley Morison in England. Many typefaces In the fields where they born in those days are still in steady and made their mark, Johnfruitful use for making books, in both ston, Updike, and Morimetal and digital form. son were all entirely self-taught. Johnston, In the 1960’s, as commercial printwho was born in Uruing became photographic, typography guay to Scottish parents, was forced to change again. More new began to teach scribal practice at the Central faces were designed, and old ones again School of Arts & Crafts, redrawn. This went less well, especially London, in 1899. His in North America. Machines and fonts manual, with its oddly but deliberately punctuwere built with scant regard for the traated title, Writing and Ilditions of typography, then marketed luminating, and Lettering, as devices that could be operated by was published in 1906 and has never since been anyone able to use a typewriter keyout of print. Between board. Good typographers did what 1911 and 1916, Updike they could to dodge and deflect this gave the first college courses on typography perversion of the craft, but overall, the ever offered in North era of phototype (roughly 1960 to 1985) America. These were at was, like most of the nineteenth centuHarvard—not in Fine Arts but in the Graduate ry, a period of prolonged typographic School of Business Addepression. (It was also, and in the same ministration. His major countries, a time of enormous literary work, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, productivity: a sobering reminder of and Use, first appeared how separable typographic art and the in 1922. It is the second art of literature can be.) edition (2 vols., Harvard University Press, 1937) that most of us now
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use. The most important of Morison’s books, in my opinion, is the posthumous Politics and Script: Aspects of Authority and Freedom in the Development of Graeco-Latin Script from the Sixth Century B.C. to the Twelfth Century A.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Morison also founded and edited a valuable journal called The Fleuron (1923-30) and from 1923 directed the Monotype Corporation’s program of typeface revivals.
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Digital type, when it first appeared (in Germany at the end of the 1960’s), had all the faults of phototype and some of its own besides. Its only benefit was speed. A much more promising approach to digital rendering was developed in the United States in the mid-1980’s, and by the end of that decade it was possible to set digital type with all the subtlety of the finest work in metal. This is what made it possible for the two faces of literature—writing and typography—to reconverge. Electronic books are still in their infancy. They come now in a number of different forms, nearly all of which turn out to be crude and slippery digital imitations of the printed book. None of these, in my opinion, has much future. I agree and disagree with Bringhurst’s prophecy. There are certain types of books that I never want to read online, but I’m usually very positive about ebooks. I don’t think online material can ever replace the physical connection that occurs with a printed book, but ebooks serve a function that is becoming more important. I known a lot of young writers and artists who use electronic publications to circulate their work, since they are significantly less expensive than the production of a monthly magazine. Its great that we can produce cheap books, send them to hundreds of people for free using the internet, and give visibility to work that was rejected by publishing houses before. Yes, they lack, “a satisfying sensuous dimension,” but their purpose is different. Plus, I believe there is still opportunity to connect to an online book without its physicality.
I suspect that electronic books, when they mature, will prove just as different from manuscript and printed books as printed books are from oral books. The forms in which books have thrived— oral poetry, the manuscript, letterpress, and the lithographic illustrated book—have a satisfying
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sensuous dimension. This is something electronic books still lack, and it is crucial to making literature real in the lives of creatures like ourselves, whose minds are made in part of flesh and blood. Electronic texts have the advantage of easy searchability, but searching a text is quite different from reading it—and there is no sign that reading texts on screen will ever be as invigorating and restful as reading good letterpress. Electronic texts can also be laden with hyperlinks, but there is nothing inherently sensuous in these; moreover, hyperlinks always lead elsewhere and so interrupt the essentially riverine business of reading. But electronic texts can also be threaded with sound files, making it possible, for example, to publish editions of Cree or Inuktitut texts with facing translation in which the original text can be heard as well as read. This supplements reading instead of pulling it apart. The reason most typographers, most of the time, try to make their pages transparent is that printing, most of the time, is understood as part of the tissue of metaphor by which we know, or try to know, the world. The letter, to the typographer as to the writer, is not an end in itself. Letters, like violins and violinists, may be lovely in themselves, but where they really shine is in giving what they are to something larger than themselves: to literature, to music, and to everything that literature and music are about. This is done through a tiny orifice: the needle’s eye, the letterform, the note. Words, like the camera, leave many things out. And our methods of putting words on the page leave out many things that we tend to put in when we speak. Reading is always an imaginative act: a filling in of hints, a conversation of a kind. Books, in their silent way, have to listen, not just talk. If a text can tell us something, and if we can read the text, then any legible version will do. But a book that can throw you across the room is a book to be treated with some respect. And a book that has something of lasting value to say—as real books do by definition—is a book to be read more
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than once and kept for as long as there might be others to read it. A musician will say that her instrument speaks, that it has a voice. We say the same of a writer’s hand and of the letterforms that a master typecutter cuts. We do not say it of a typewriter, a printing press, a computer, or of any other machine. They may clatter and hum, but they do not speak. A violin can speak because it can listen, because it has ears as well as a voice. A letterform listens too, in the moment in which it is made. When it is replicated and printed, it listens no more. But the book in which that letterform is printed does have to go on listening in order to be read. That is why the book has to open, and why the pages have to flow, like a river in dappled light: like the voice of a world where things are still growing, where creatures still live.
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This book was designed, printed, and bound by Emily Belshaw in Philadelphia for FNAR 569 – Typography at the University of Pennsylvania. Why There Are Pages and Why They Must Turn by Robert Bringhurst. Originally published in 2008. Essay text set in Dante size 11 / 14 pt. font. Annotations by Emily Belshaw. Written in 2015. Text set in Cholla Slab size 9 / 14 pt. font.
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