BO KO BO KO ABOUT
What is a BOOK ? It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books and a whole series of ongoing attempts to reimagine the entire industry of writing and selling books.
Brief History
The history of writing records the development of expressing language by letters or other marks . In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing , systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbol. It is generally agreed that true writing of language (not only numbers) was invented independently in at least two places: Mesopotamia (specifically, ancient Sumer) around 3200 BC and Mesoamerica around 600 BC. Twelve Mesoamerican scripts are known, the oldest from the Olmec or Zapotec of Mexico. It is debated whether writing was developed completely independently in Egypt around 3200 BC and China around 1200 BC, or whether the appearance of writing in either or both places was due to cultural diffusion Chinese characters are most probably an independent invention, because there is no evidence of contact between China and the literate civilizations of the Near East, and because of the distinct differences between the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to logography and phonetic representation. Egyptian script is dissimilar from Mesopotamian cuneiform, but similarities in concepts and in earliest attestation suggest that the idea of writing may have come to Egypt from Mesopotamia. Various other known cases of cultural diffusion of writing exist, where the general concept of writing was transmitted from one culture to another but the specifics of the system were independently developed. Recent examples are the Cherokee syllabary, invented by Sequoyah, and the Pahawh Hmong system for writing the Hmong language.
The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. The boustrophedon writing hguolp xo‘ eht dellac si elyts method’ because the lines of ni daer dna nettirw era txet eht opposite directions. The text morf egap eht ssorca sevom left to right, drops down a line thgir morf kcab semoc neht dna to left and so on down the age yam ti sa elpmis sa ton si sihT seem as there are three methods ,esrever senil eht :siht gniod fo the lines and the words reverse dna sdrow ,senil eht ro letters all reverse.
Arabs also produced and bound books in the medieval Islamic world and developing advanced techniques in (Arabic calligraphy). This period also used a method of reproducing reliable copies of a book in large quantities, known as check reading. In the check reading method, only authors could authorize copies, and this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author, who then certified it as accurate. With this check-reading system, an author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading, and with two or more readings, more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be produced. Ch in es el it er at ur ee xt en ds th ou sa n
nd e ur so dd ef fy yn ic ea as ti rs, ti on fr cc al om ou no th rt ve ee ar ls ar ch th li iv at es es ar tr to os ec th ed or em ur dai
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The book, as object is intimate, it insists on one to one confrontation:
The Bookmaker & Viewer
Books are the most dynamic things in history. Nations have gone to war over them. Civilizations have been decimated to extirpate a single text. And yet always something escapes and goes forward, something elusive that is indigenous to the book, that vanishes, and surfaces again after the storms have passed, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Once you’ve touched them you can never escape because, and especially since the invention of printing, because printing is really the reproduction of a given text. Basically that is what it is. The writer writes it, a scribe can transcribe it, and that is all that needs to be done. The author’s work is finished at that point. From the point of view of the printer, that is just the beginning. Part of the terror of it, too, is that whatever you write and have published you can never escape; it follows you wherever you live. That is also the problem of the printer: every book that he has spoiled by putting his hand to it will also hound him down through the ages.You chance to go into a bookshop or into a library and see one of your books on the shelf, and it is almost shocking. There is a confrontation with it, thus. Sometimes the allure triumphs and you are seduced anew, and made proud. But sometimes the allure is too great, and instead of perfection you find you erred through excess, and botched it all.
Printing is a strange and bastard art. It derives from calligraphy, but calligraphy has far more allure. It is much more beautiful. In the library of Congress there exists the manuscript that they think Gutenberg used as a model for his Bible. It is infinitely superior to the Gutenberg Bible in sheer beauty, and yet the Gutenberg is probably the noblest piece of printing of no other art in which the central archetype was the first work ever done, something that no one has ever been able to equal. In this detail or that a lot of books have been able to equal it, but as an archetype it stands there as the fountainhead of the craft and everything breaks back from it.Everything is measured against it.
One of the great things about an inception point in any field, reflection or endeavor, is that once you get to the fountainhead, it has a way of defining everything that follows. The great thing about any kind of book, especially the book of a master, is that no matter how much his ideas might disperse through society, you can always go back to that fountainhead for a reinvigoration and a re-clarification of what that whole process meant. This is part of the tremendous pressure of books. By that it means the latent consequence, the sense of awe in that nuclear entity, that sense a book has a full potentiality that makes it so risky and dangerous and beautiful.
“The press is not only free; it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.� - Benjamin Disraeli
“What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.� -Wendell Phillips
“A book, being a physical object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because of all these things, a book is a friend. It’s not just the content, but the physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally.” ~Mo Willems
S P A C
VOLUME B J E C T
The book is a physical object.The hand-held book demands touching. Effort must be taken to view it . A print on the wall under glass has no volume, no shadows, little or no texture. It is not tangible. It is almost non-physical. To the extent it can be seen, it is physical, but it is closer to a conceptual idea, a vision. Whereas a book is three dimensional.It has volume (space), it is a volume (object), and some books emit volume (sound).
Books
have both power and allure.
The archetype of the book works two ways: it is both conservative in the sense that it carries the sum of the past within it, but it also carries implications for the future, because that is the way ideas are transmuted and possessed. It is this double range that is the awesome thing about it. I mean, the invincible thing about the book is its capacity to reach backwards and forwards; in a sense it’s out of your hands-before you get it, and after you are finished with it. Whatever you do to it, it will remain spoiled in some way by your own contribution to it. Some small part of what you put into it might survive in an effective way, but the book generally goes on, following the momentum of its own history.
You approach a book rather blindly at the beginning, because books are both masculine and feminine. In the way they strike they are male, they have that power, but they also have a feminine allure, which is much more glamorous and much more seductive. The two sides of the archetype, the power and the allure, the active and the passive, are all there working within the symbol itself, so that both as a writer and as a printer you find yourself over your head when you enter that domain. It takes a long time to be acclimatized. You have to write many books before you gain any sense of equipoise at all. Kenneth* would agree that the book itself remains in the end a mystery, no matter how many you write, and you will shift in your own relation to it between the power and the allure, between the masculine and the feminine aspects of it.
“A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.” ~Edward P. Morgan
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled:
This could
change your life�
-Helen Exley
Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better. Thus, books influence us in many ways, of that there is no doubt, be they fiction or non-fiction. They can inspire and/or enrage us, leave us warm and cosy or thoughtful and melancholic. They can, and will, evoke a range of emotions in us that, often unknowingly, will echo down through the rest of our lives, influencing and colouring our thinking and the decisions made.
In conceiving any book it is worth repeating,‘A book is more than the sum of its parts.’
References: • Rothernberg,Clay,ed. A book of the book. Granary Books; 1st edition (2000) • Price,Leah. Interviewed by Alexandra Perloff-Giles. ‘What books mean as objects’. Harward: May, 10, 2011 • Ingram, Mathew . What Is a Book? The Definition Continues to Blur < http://gigaom.com/2011/04/22/what-is-a-book-the-definitioncontinues-to-blur/>