CODEX CODE X CODEX : CODE X

A Palimpsest Reading of the Book as a Material Object in a New Media Age

P E N E L O P E L E E

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design (Honours)

April 2005

School of Design Studies College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales

i CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis.

I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

Signed To my parents, Patsy and Tony Robinson, my husband John and my children Ben and Cinnamon, who all helped to make this chapter in my life possible

ii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

This thesis was greatly inspired and guided by the generosity, encouragement and support of my supervisor Leong Chan and the magnanimous literary acumen of my Co- Supervisor Carol Longbottom. My gratitude also goes to Allan Walpole for his erudite insight and advice, Joan Blumenberg for her gracious assistance, and the COFA librarians, particularly Margaret Blackmore, Barbara Daley, Jane Knowles and Judy Haywood whose amiable service eased many hours of library research and the management of new media technologies.

I would also like to express my appreciation to the COFA Research Grant Committee for the award of a COFA Student Support Grant, enabling extensive studio investigations through attendance at a series of workshops in papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding techniques, materials and processes. My sincere commendation goes to the tutors of workshops attended in these investigations: papermakers, Katherine Nix: printmakers, Anne Starling and Bernhardine Mueller and bookbinders, Sabine Pierard, Marianne Little and Liz Jeneid. My special thanks go to Julie Bartholemew for her assistance in the development of ‘porcelain pages.’

Furthermore, the writing of this thesis was greatly enriched by the following contributors who bestowed their expert knowledge of books and book design; graphic designers, Charlotte Fish and Mark Gowing; bookbinder Sabine Pierard. Last, but not least, I extend my deepest gratitude to John Lee for his resolute support, and to all my family and friends for their constant and continued patience and understanding.

iii A B S T R A C T

This research investigates the effects of new media technologies on the architecture of the book in the context of a New Media Age. The aim of the project was to develop a Conceptual Framework for the design and production of the contemporary book as a material object. The materiality of the contemporary book is examined by revisiting its historical origins in the Middle Ages, to discover the extent in which the ‘new’ media technology of mechanical printing determined the design and production of the fifteenth century book. Parallels were then drawn between these effects and those of digital technology on the book in this current New Media Age. The results revealed the book as a palimpsest, where remnants of ‘older’ media remain embedded in the design and form of the ‘new.’

While fundamentally situated in the field of graphic design, the study also ventures into the disciplines of architecture and the semiotic theories of Umberto Eco and Gunther Kress. The design of the research includes historical and theoretical analysis, case studies of selected contemporary book objects and a series of studio investigations into the space, form, techniques, processes and materials of traditional and contemporary book construction. The theories and design practices of William Morris, implemented in the studio investigations, included researching the origins of book production in the fifteenth century and the traditional hand technologies of papermaking, printmaking and bookbinding. New media investigations included experimental work with laser etching and the embedding of printed, paper pages in porcelain.

A synthesis of the theoretical and practical research findings, was then interpreted as semiotic conceptual matrices, from which a Conceptual Framework was constructed. Conclusions drawn from the study reveal the design of the book as a palimpsest of past technologies that remain embedded in the design of the contemporary book. As a material demonstration of the thesis, a series of three- dimensional conceptual models were developed as reading sites informing the design of contemporary books as palimpsest readings of the book as a material object for the New Media Age.

iv D E F I N I T I O N O F T E R M S

Architecture The term, architecture, is used as a metaphor for the structure and organization of many things other than buildings (Margolin 1989:108). The idiom ‘architecture of the book’ used in this thesis, refers to the various disciplines involved the book’s construction rationalised in a single object. Thus the book can be read as an analogy of the building.

Book Object In the context of this thesis the term, book object, refers to both the physical form of the ubiquitous book and the book as an object of art and design, unfettered by the economics of mass-manufacture.

The Middle Ages The Middle Ages refers to the period covering about one thousand years from the fifth to the fifteenth century (Diehl 1980). However, in this thesis the term will primarily refer to the period of transition from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century.

New Media Age The designation, New Media Age (Kress 2003), describes the recent emergence of a technologically oriented culture, covering the period since 1990, and the introduction of the personal computer, to the present day.

New Media The term, new media, widely refers to digital technologies. However, in the context of this thesis, new media will also refer to past technologies that were considered new in the context of their time.

Palimpsest Palimpsests, Greek for ‘rubbed over,’ were common in late antiquity, when papyrus became scarce and expensive. Greek scribes often erased the writing on an old sheet and wrote a new script on the refreshed papyrus. The practice was continued by medieval scribes to conserve valuable parchment.

Reading Site The term refers to the architectural affiliations of the book and computer as semiotic sites of reading.

v C O N T E N T S

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Definition of terms vi

Introduction : The Plan Codex : Code x : Thesis Statement 1 The Future of the Book : Background 1 Conceptual Framework : Research Purpose 6 Methodology : Research Design 6 Limitations : Research Scope 7 Graphic Design : Research Significance 8 The Narrative : Thesis Structure 9

PART ONE : Theoretical Analysis An examination of the effect of new media technologies on the architecture of the book.

Chapter 1 Foundations : Architectural Origins Introduction 14 Reading the Cathedral 15 A Peak Experience 15 Illumination 16 Reading Glass Texts 18 Reading Stone Texts 20 Towards an Architecture of the Book 22 Conclusion 24

Chapter 2 Construction : Building the Book Introduction 28 Reading the Manuscript 29 The Total Work 29 Idea of the Book 30 The Aedificium Scriptorae 32 The Art of Illumination 33 A Codex Blueprint 36 Reading the Book 39 A Media Revolution 40 The Gutenberg Bible 41 The Gutenberg Effect 43 Conclusion 46

Chapter 3 Deconstruction : Dismantling the Book Introduction 48 Reading the Screen 50 Reading Multimedia 51 Light-Through Windows 53 Virtual Cathedral 54 Architectural Reading Site 58

iii C O N T E N T S

Reading the iBook 60 Reading Media 60 Remediation 63 Electronic Illumination 65 Conclusion 67

Chapter 4 Reconstruction : Redesigning the Book Introduction 71 Reading Sites 71 Multimodal Discourse 73 The Visual Essay 77 Appealing to the Senses 82 Object of Desire 85 The Art of the Book 87 Reading Material 90 Graphic Illumination 92 Conclusion 94

Chapter 5 Illuminations : On Book Design Introduction 99 The Artists’ Book 100 The Designers’ Book 103 Reading Material 104 Material Matters 105 Books of Vision 109 Graphic Illuminator 112 Designer Book Case Studies 115 Case Study 1 : Codex Aedificium 117 Case Study 2 : Codex Sensus 122 Conclusion 131

PART TWO : Studio investigations A study of space, form, materials, processes, and techniques used in book design and production, towards the exploration and realisation of concept models for the design of the book as a material object.

Chapter 6 Codex : Code X : The Book as Material Object Introduction 134 William Morris 136 Interrogating the Materiality of the Book 137 Paper 137 Papermaking Studies 143 Print 147 Printmaking Studies 150 New Media 153 New Media Studies 155 Bookbinding 162 Bookbinding Studies 165 Conclusion 169

iv C O N T E N T S

PART THREE : A Conceptual Framework The integration of the theoretical and practical studies into a conceptual framework interpreted as a series of book objects

Chapter 7 Palimpsest : Codex : Code X Introduction 172 A Conceptual Framework 173 Interpretation 178 Semiotic Readings 189 An Exhibition 195 Concept Models and Book Objects 202 Conclusion 211

Chapter 8 Conclusion : Palimpsest Readings Introduction 215 A Design Palimpsest : Research Results 216 Books in a New Media Age : Research Implications 217 Electronic Illumination : Future Research 218 Towards a Future of the Book : Conclusions 219

Bibliography 223

Figure References 235

Publications 238

Appendix I CD ROM : Illuminations Back cover

Appendix II CD ROM : Palimpsest Readings Back cover

v I N T R O D U C T I O N

I N T R O D U C T I O N

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N

THE PLAN

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 225

Codex : Code x : Thesis Statement This study is an historical analysis of the effects of new media technologies on the architecture of the book in the context of the present age of electronic computer mediation. It examines the way in which the book has been designed and constructed in relation to the technology of its production and the extent to which changes in technology in the past and the present have had an impact on the idea of the book as a material object.

The Future of the Book : Background

Graphic design is being redefined by new media technology, and the paradigm of print media that previously underpinned the profession, has shifted dramatically to one that is now situated within the digital realm. There can be no doubt most scholars and writers of contemporary cultural studies agree, that the electronic technology of digital media is having a profound effect on society (Graham 2001, Murphie and Potts 2003, Postman 1993). Furthermore, questions about the social and cultural impact of new technologies have not been limited to the critique of academe, but have permeated the day-to-day discourse of public communications (Caldwell 2000). For graphic designers, new media technologies have had a direct impact on the way they work and the products they create. Previously situated in the realm of print media, graphic design now encompasses the electronic media of 3D animation, multimedia design and design for the interactive World Wide Web. Design in these media is no longer only concerned with the layout of the temporal page, but now engages in the architectural construction of information within the spatial dimensions of a virtual web ‘site.’

2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

The motivation for this research arose out of a desire to look beyond the ‘hype’ of what I perceived as a kind of techno mania, to what might happen to the medium of print and the printed book as a result of this new media technology. Cries of “the end of print” and “the death of the book,” accompanied the computer mediation of graphic design and the emergence of the World Wide Web. Many held the belief that electronic information systems would supersede the book. I believed that these implications of were of significance to graphic designers and needed more thorough investigation. The future of the book was not only a topic of interest to designers like myself but also to a number of theorists across diverse disciplines. It seemed to me that design was an area that could be well served by drawing on the experiences, theories and research in these diverse arenas. Literary Critical Theory provided a close relationship to the issues of book design, but cultural and media studies and the social sciences also contribute meaningful data. As books are objects of human consumption, the social and cultural implications of this new technology will bear considerable influence on their design. The form and meaning of the book is deeply embedded in the social psyche and as new media technologies shift the centre of learning from the page to the screen, people’s perceptions of the book are challenging designers to reconsider the book’s value and relevance in a New Media Age.

Throughout the last decade of the twentieth century, the book was seen in an apocalyptic light, as many “computer visionaries” predicted a future where printed books would be superseded by the electronic hypertext and multimedia of the computer screen. Since 1994, a number of writers in a variety of disciplines, including design, have been debating this issue of the old technology versus the new, the printed page versus the electronic screen and the narrative versus the network (Nunberg 1996). The ‘future of the book’ was a topic of intense debate amongst writers and graphic designers alike, as the new media of computer technology was proclaimed the future of information dissemination, and the book as that of the past (Landow 1992, Nunberg 1996, Goines 1999). In order to illustrate the validity of this view, many of these commentators and writers have

3 I N T R O D U C T I O N

made comparisons between this ‘electronic revolution’ and that of the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. However, most enthusiasts of this new technology seemed to have had no genuine interest in citing these historical parallels, other than to demonstrate that the present ‘revolution’ had been unprecedented since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (Landow 1992, Mitchell 1995, Nunberg 1996, Bolter 2001, Man 2004). While few expanded on this analogy enough to discover how related the two events might be or what insights this past event might hold for the present, a closer examination by some historians revealed that the printing press did not end the production of the manuscript, but transformed it into an art form (Tyson 1982, Martin 1976, Harris 1994, Hamel 1997, Manguel 1997). Nonetheless, even though the first printed books relied heavily on the manuscript as a design model, eventually the unique characteristics of the ‘new media technology’ of the printing press changed the hand script conventions of the manuscript into the print machine format of the ubiquitous book we know today. Now similar effects on the printed book can be observed, as the e-books of digital technology seek to emulate the design of the printed book in the illuminated ‘pages’ of the computer screen. For the first time in the last five hundred years, new media technology is once again changing the architecture of the book to such a degree that the design, the very essence of the book, its format, materiality, meaning and function in society, are also being intrinsically challenged.

Towards the end of the century, designers like David Lance Goines, began predicting that digital technologies would see ‘end of print’ and the future as one of “a pre-literate, a-literate, sub-literate or even illiterate society” (Lance Goines 1999: 16), while writers were celebrating their books being rewritten in a new medium of light and pixels (Landow 1992, Levinson 1999, Coover 1999). The technological revolution of electronic media promised the uniting of the world into a global village, but it appeared that the price to be paid was the end of print and the loss of literate culture. We were to see the rise of a second orality (Ong n1995), the freeing of text from the tyranny of the book, (Derrida, Landow, et al) and a world where all knowledge would be freely available at the click of a mouse.

4 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Writing came ‘off the page’ and the former linear structure of the narrative was deconstructed into hypertext. The computer interface was portal through which the reader could enter an electronic library of interconnected texts, and if our concept of the book was that of the printed page, and the electronic screen the new space for text, then the idea of the book as a printed object was no longer a priori. Few were bold enough to state otherwise and to champion the book was to champion the past, and risk being labelled a ‘dinosaur,’ a ‘luddite’ or ‘technophobe.’ But champion the book some brave researchers did, despite the fact that the digital juggernaut was in high gear, by questioning the significance of the physical container of printed texts destined for the computer screen (Birkerts 1994, Bolter 2001, Hayles 2002).

As a confessed bibliophile, I am passionate about the future of the book both as a designed object and as an artefact of cultural knowledge. As a graphic designer and lecturer, I find this debate permeates every aspect of what I currently practice and teach, and believe that this shift in technology is also bringing with it a shift in the way we think about the world and the way we design. Thus my research emerges from a desire to investigate these issues further and to contribute a designer’s point of view to the ongoing discourse about the future of the book. Most research into the future of the book has been focused on the book as a literary medium and therefore addressed more frequently by literary and media theorists, occupied with the writing and reading of the textual content of the book (Derrida 1981, Landow 1992, Levinson 1998, Bolter 2001, Kress 2003). Less attention has been given to the material and structural form of the book, or the way in which the book will remain or evolve as a three-dimensional object and how it might also be changed. While some writers have attended to the importance of the materiality of the book in the reading of texts (Drucker 1995, Smith 1997, Hayles 2002) they remain the exception.

The work of the graphic designer is concerned with this form and structure of the book. They design the cover, the layout of the page, the typographic style to be used, the choice and placement of images, and the paper the book is to be printed

5 I N T R O D U C T I O N

on. They then work closely with a printer who prints and binds the pages into the codex form we know as the book. The final product is a material object that reflects not only the designer’s concepts and aesthetics but also the technology of its production. Therefore, this study will deal more specifically with the meaning and significance of the book as an object, rather than only addressing the book’s future as a disseminator of content. It will show how designers can utilise this form more creatively than was previously possible as a result of recent developments in digital technology, while maintaining the semiotic significance of the original Medieval design of the codex.

Focusing on the materiality of the book, I argue that the archetypal codex design of the book, which originated in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, will continue to have a significant effect on the design paradigms of the book as a material object in this New Media Age. This is because the reading and interpretation of messages is fundamentally connected to the medium in which it is presented (Chartier 1995, Debray 1996, Kress 2000, McLuhan 2001, Hayles 2002). Far from ending the book, this study maintains that new media technologies are providing a means by which the archetypal book is not only being conserved but improved, exploited and desired as a material object. Designers who currently design books for print media work within paradigms established 500 years ago with the first printed books. Until recently this form and function of the book has only undergone superficial improvements that have mostly been concerned with the economic gains of speed, efficiency and the aesthetic addition of colour and photographic imagery. However, with the advent of digital media, the codex, as a carrier or vessel for information and knowledge, is now being augmented by the electronic delivery of information to an increasingly ‘technologicalised’ reader. New media technologies, while initially threatening to replace the book, are in fact enabling the design and production of books to move beyond the constraints of the old media. As the emergence of digital technology influences society, graphic designers need to develop new and innovative approaches to the design of contemporary books. In the future, I believe that in order to think ‘outside the square’ of the conventional book there is a need for a conceptual framework that,

6 I N T R O D U C T I O N

while drawing on the traditions of the past, embraces the new media technological possibilities of the future. It is the intention of this research study to construct such a framework by asking, what effects have new media technologies had on the architecture of the book? How do these effects impact on the future of book design, and how will the book maintain its cultural value as a material object?

Conceptual Framework : Research Purpose The purpose of this study, therefore, is to construct a conceptual framework in order to generate unique and innovative concepts for the design and production of the contemporary book as a material object. To reach this objective the study aims to; acquire a theoretical and historical grounding of book design; acquire knowledge and expertise in the materials and processes of book production; develop a design matrix for the design of books as objects and to curate and produce an exhibition that visually articulates the research outcomes. By achieving these aims, a greater understanding of the structural influences of new technologies on book design will help to determine a range of design strategies in the communication of textual information. The conceptual framework emerging from this research will also contribute to new design knowledge, methods and processes towards innovative design solutions for graphic design practice.

Methodology : Research Design While there have been numerous attempts to identify design research methodologies, a recent analysis by Brenda Laurel identifies three key modes of design research: The first is research into design that includes the traditional historical aesthetic studies of art and design. Then, research through design as project-based, including materials research and development. And finally, research for design that is the hardest to characterize, “as its purpose is to create objects and systems that display the results of the research and prove its worth” (Laurel 2003: 11). In this Research Project I have chosen to address these key modes of research by adopting a research methodology proceeding from “a blueprint for future design research strategies," offered by Anthony Dunne, PhD student of RCA's Department of Computer-Related Designs (Dunne 1999: 14). Combining academic research with creative studio-based projects, Dunne

7 I N T R O D U C T I O N

attempts "to map a new conceptual territory… through the development of conceptual products rather than working prototypes or models which attempt to simulate a final product designed for mass production” (Dunne 1999: 14). The idea of using the design process as a “mode of discourse” is the key methodological factor which separates this approach from that of a conventional applied researcher typically involved in the fabrication of working prototypes” (Dunne 1999: 16). By adopting a methodology of developing conceptual models, rather than design prototypes of commercial books, this research aims at developing a critique of existing approaches to the design and production of books, “communicated through highly considered artefacts" (Dunne 1999: 17).

To achieve this aim, the design of this research is divided into three parts: Part One An in depth literature survey, informing a comparative historical analysis and theoretical critique followed by a number of observational case studies of contemporary books and their designers. Part Two Conducted in conjunction with the theoretical study this studio component consists of empirical explorative studies conducted through workshops in papermaking, printmaking, book binding and new media, followed up with individual experimentation and testing of acquired skills and knowledge in the construction of the book as an object. The materials, processes, and technologies of book production are tested through the design and making of book object exemplars and prototypes. Part Three Finally an analysis of these findings is then consolidated into a Conceptual Framework derived through an analysis and synthesis of the theoretical and studio findings. This framework provides the basis of a design matrix aimed at visually articulating the project outcomes in a series of contemporary book objects.

Limitations : Research Scope The original intention of the research was a study of both the printed and electronic forms of the book and much of it still maintains this stance. However, the project was to include the execution of the studio component in both forms. As

8 I N T R O D U C T I O N

the project developed, a decision was made to concentrate on the book in its material, physical form and to leave the development of any electronic design to future researchers. Thus, the focus of this study is the book as an object in the context of the New Media Age. To this end, the study is not intended as an historical survey of the effects of new media technology on book design, but rather as a contemplation and interpretation of the historical significance of these effects. Neither is it a study of the history of new media products such as DVD’s, e-books or the Internet, though these are considered in regard to the book object and may lead to new thinking about their role in the future.

The timeframe of the study is limited to two historical centres, one, the late Middle Ages, and the other, the present New Media Age. Between the “Gutenberg” revolution1 that ended the Middle Ages and the “Gates” revolution2 that began the New Media Age, the mechanisation of printing had a fairly superficial effect on the architecture of the book. Therefore, the study is focused on the effects of technological innovations that had significant effect on the book as a material object, and so leaves aside any study of the book between the close of the Middle Ages and the opening of the New Media Age.

Graphic Design : Research Significance The technological transition from the dominance of a print media environment to one that is digital, as previously stated, has significant implications for the practice of graphic design. The book, and its future value and relevance in a New Media Age, is a current subject of interest among designers, publishers, paper and print manufacturers, conservators, museums, libraries and contemporary artists working with print. If, as Sven Birkerts believes, “the processes that we created to serve our evolving needs have not only begun to redefine our experience, but they are fast becoming our new cognitive paradigm” (Birkerts 1994: 153), then graphic designers need to be involved in and informed by this discussion to be able to track current and future design trends, predict possible design challenges and

1 So called by many authors including John Man (2002) and George Landow (1992). 2 A reference to the part Bill Gates played in facilitating the access of the general public to the personal computer.

9 I N T R O D U C T I O N

produce informed design outcomes. By moving away from "mere styling" of graphic design, in this case, page layout design and book illustration, and into what Brenda Laurel describes as “the interlocking systems that manifest, support, constrain and envelop” the book, I hope to achieve a “farther-reaching” contribution to graphic design research (Laurel 2003: 11). In addition, while fundamentally located in the field of Graphic Design, the significance of this research may also be of interest to artists and designermakers of artists’ books, practitioners in the book arts, and printmakers, as well as critical theorists considering the issue of the book’s materiality in the reading of literary texts.

The Narrative : Thesis Structure The thesis is written in the narrative style modelled on Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, “a dialogue between the past and the present” in which “the pursuit of learning and the love of books bring about change” (Colletti 1988:30,32). Divided into three parts, it is presented as eight chapters, each represented by a canonical hour of the day, reflecting the palimpsest nature of this contemporary analysis of past and present histories. Each chapter can be read as an entity as well as in the context of the thesis, making its structure ‘hypertextual’ in nature and reflective of electronic media. The thesis is nonetheless written as a scholarly work and as such maintains academic writing convention and responsible research practice.

PART I : Theoretical Framework Two propositions form the theoretical framework of the research. Proposition I : The book as an architectural space. A conceptual analogy of architectural space is used to demonstrate the differences between the environment of the computer screen and that of the printed page by drawing parallels between the old space of the cathedral and the new space of the computer. This thesis argues that information today, presented in a virtual, architectural environment of the 3D and 4D spatiality of cyberspace accessed through the illuminated windows of the computer screen, can be compared to the architectural space that could also be read as a ‘text,’ the medieval cathedral. The idea of an architectural space being experienced as an information site is further

10 I N T R O D U C T I O N

realised in the codex manuscripts of the Bible, referred to as the Aedificium Scripturae (building of scriptures). The idea of the book in the Middle Ages as a space containing information, eventually came to be represented in the form of the encyclopaedia or summa in which “all knowledge” could be contained. Today the Internet is perceived as an encyclopaedic space where “all information” is contained, and as such is shifting knowledge from the pages of the codex book and onto the screen of the ‘code x’ computer. It is therefore proposed that this shift of the reading experience will change cultural perceptions of the book as an object.

Proposition 2 : The book as a object In order to determine the effect of technological changes on the design of the book today, a study of the effects of the printing press on the design of the book in the Middle Ages reveals that a number of parallels can be drawn between the fifteenth century and the present. Thus an analysis of the impact of the printing press on the book at the end of the Middle Ages provides insight into the possible effects of computer mediation on the book at the end of the Modern Age. In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg’s Bible was an example of a transitional design form between the illuminated manuscript and the printed book. Today’s ‘iBook’ computer is proposed as an example of this transition of technologies. It is perceived as an electronic ‘Gutenberg Bible’ where traces the old print medium are integrated present in the new digital medium. The electronic medium of the screen simulates the mechanical print of the page in the same way that Gutenberg’s Bible printed pages simulated the illuminated manuscript. The printing press caused an information explosion at the beginning of the Renaissance, and today the personal computer is creating an even more profound expansion and access to information. It is the proposition of this thesis that as people turn to the computer as the prime disseminator of information, the book, as a material object, will become more desirable as a design artefact than a mere disseminator of knowledge.

PART 2 : Studio Investigations This study consists of a series of graphic investigations into the techniques, processes and materials of book production aimed at providing an empirical testing of the effects of technology on the book’s form. Drawing on the theories of

11 I N T R O D U C T I O N

William Morris, these studio investigations include the study of traditional materials and processes, along with contemporary methods and new technologies of book production. Firstly, the techniques of Papermaking, Printmaking, and Bookbinding, as the means of production that formed ‘new media technology’ of fifteenth century printing, are discussed. Then the way methods of new media technologies, such as laser printing onto unconventional substrates, were tested and incorporated into developmental models are assessed. The study concludes with an analysis of how these techniques can inform new design methods for design and making of contemporary books.

PART 3 : Conceptual Framework Part One and Part Two of the study are synthesised in a Conceptual Framework that sees new media technologies enabling the design of future books as the illuminated manuscripts of the twenty first century, with traces of medieval book design remaining embedded in the books of the New Media Age. Conclusions drawn from this synthesis reveal that the codex form of the book is a palimpsest of technological change and that far from causing an end to the book, is rather, enabling the book to become valued as much for its intrinsic art, craft and design qualities as for the information it contains. From these conclusions elemental features are extracted to express the idea of the book as a symbolic objects. That is, the object we know as a book is presented as an object that is read, not in the conventional way by turning pages, reading from cover to cover, or using the alphabet as code, but the book as an object that signifies meaning as an architectonic metaphorical construct. This conceptual framework forms the basis for the design of a series of book objects aimed at visually articulating the project outcomes. Along with a selection the studio investigations into space and form, these book objects are ultimately presented in the final research outcome, an exhibition held in the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, titled Palimpsest Readings.3

This study concludes that, far from heralding the end of the book, new media technology is making the book easier and cheaper to design and produce, and thus

3 See Appendix 2

12 I N T R O D U C T I O N

more available than ever before in history.4 But the design of the book as a contemporary object is anchored in the past technologies of its production and, as with all other arts, excellence in the present practice of book design is based on conventions that evolved over past centuries (McMurtrie 1989). Douglas McMurtrie, well-respected author of The Book, advises us that the intelligent book designer will carefully study the historical origins of his art and familiarizes himself with the masterpieces of the past: Any appreciation of modern book design is therefore based, to a considerable degree at least, on an acquaintance with and understanding of the historical development of the book… These will be of value not only in the development of his own taste, but in affording him sound models from which to work. If his work is to be more than routine, however, he must introduce some new note that will make it his own, that will make it a creation rather than a reproduction. (Mc Murtrie 1989: xxix-xxx)

Heeding this advice I begin this thesis by making an acquaintance with the origins of the book in the Middle Ages as the basis for the development of a new conceptual framework for the design of present and future books.

We who believe in the book must come to its defence. We must reiterate its power, capabilities, and bonds to life. Nostalgic laments for a dying form are false and deserve ridicule. We must make new formulations that simply out perform the competition.

Bruce Mau 2000: 110

4 As recently as 2004 a leading article in Print 21 announced, “No other printing technology has had such an impact on the way we relate to printed material. It is the most visible, the most democratic and the most rapidly developing imaging system method. In its applications, inks, substrates, sizes, speeds of production, operating capacity and flexibility as an imaging system, it is without compare… It behoves anyone seriously considering the commercial and the technology directions of the industry, and their own place in its future, to be aware of the current state of play” (Howard 2004: 10).

13 F O U N D A T I O N S

P A R T O NP E a l i m p s e s t A parchment which has been written on twice, the first writing being erased to make room for a second writing. Traces of the old text remain.

Theoretical Analysis

An examination of the effect of new media technologies on the architecture of the book

I have sought tranquillity in everything, but found it nowhere except in a corner with a book (trans White, 1999:97).

Image: Thomas à Kempis 1380-1471 Copyright 2002 S.G.P. http://prayerfoundation.org/books/book_review_imitation_of_christ.htm

14 F O U N D A T I O N S

Chapter 1

F O U N D A T I O N S

M A T I N S The hours between 2.30 and 3.00 in the morning

15 F O U N D A T I O N S

ARCHITECTURAL ORIGINS

The Middle Ages were the civilization of vision, and the cathedral was the great book in stone.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 81

Introduction Throughout history, Western religion, philosophy, literature and our very conception of the world have been inextricably connected to the idea of the book, as a model of our desire for unity and completeness (Keep 2000). Indeed, Jacques Derrida and Roger Chartier have both referred to Western culture as “the civilization of the book” (Derrida 1976, Chartier 1992). However, the metaphoric use of the ‘Book’ or ‘Text’ took on quite literal proportions in the Middle Ages, when, as Jesse Gellrich writes, “knowledge was collected and stored in great books or as the transcendental world was replicated in the sacred space of the religious architecture” (Gellrich 1986:249). This chapter introduces the book as a graphic artefact with architectonic affiliations grounded in the Middle Ages, when reading and writing of texts was a means of communication for the privileged few, while pictorial imagery provided the texts for the masses.

The Gothic cathedral was the ‘book’ where the greater population read these texts, the ‘great book in stone’ that was, as Umberto Eco asserts, not an inferior form of the written word, but rather, the mass communication of the time. For Eco, the cathedral was the equivalent of present day television, with only the difference being that the directors of these cathedral programmes, “read good books, had lots of imagination, and worked for the public benefit (or at least what they thought to be the public benefit)” (Nunberg 1995:298). The books these ‘directors’ read were the illuminated manuscripts adorning the lecterns of the Gothic cathedrals. Gloriously embellished, they reflected the spirit of the narratives and images represented in the stone and stained glass depictions of the Bible, the saints and patrons of the church, the texts of ‘the great book in stone.’ The cathedral is a book “we must first know how to read” (Binding 2002:10).

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READING THE CATHEDRAL

When our eyes had finally grown accustomed to the gloom, the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it is immediately to the gaze and the imagination of everyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 41

A Peak Experience The experience of entering a Gothic cathedral is one with which those of us who have had the privilege of doing so, would also find difficult to describe. There is a sense of awe of wonder, of having entered a world removed from the everyday, and of being humbled by a building that overwhelms our sense of human scale. Awe, wonder, and reverence, are feelings worshippers centuries before us would also have experienced. Visiting a cathedral like Chartres in this modern era, our experience is naturally coloured by a world-view unlike that of a medieval worshipper, but the way in which the architecture of the cathedral can still elicit levels of emotional and esoteric response, is a testament to the intentions of the architects of the Middle Ages. Gothic cathedrals are buildings that have the effect of transporting us to a state where we are “pulled out of ourselves and our daily preoccupations and into something much larger” (Wind 2002:1). The reason for this, according to architect Christian Norberg-Schulz, is that these buildings are concerned with making our existence meaningful and existential meanings are derived from “natural, human and spiritual phenomena” (Norberg-Schulz 1975:5). He takes the view that architecture is as symbolic as it is functional, and that buildings ought to be understood in terms of their symbolic forms. Thus a building of significance, such as the cathedral, functions as the centre of a meaningful, spatial organization that represents an “existential image” rather than merely addressing the practical function of housing a congregation (ibid). In a time when God was represented as Architect of the Universe, (fig 1) a building was as metaphysical as it was material, and that meaning and symbolism were at the heart of medieval architecture (Coldstream 2002). In the interior of the Gothic cathedral, the fact that we can experience a sense of immersion in another world

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is due to the architectural intention in the design of the cathedral. As the clergy of the Middle Ages knew, “the material church on earth signifies the spiritual church in heaven” and the Gothic cathedral represents “the ultimate achievement of those spiritual aspirations” (Snyder 1988:344). The cathedral was, the “concretisation” of a heavenly image, where the spatial elements of nave, aisles, transept, ambulatory, and chapels are absorbed in a continuous flowing space, primarily determined by the interaction of light and stone (Norberg-Schultz 1975).

If the medieval cathedral was built to represent an image of heaven, where the visible entities of light and stone simulated the ultimate harmony of another world, then the effect might well be one experienced by Adso (the young apprentice to William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose) of being “carried away by that concert of terrestrial beauty and majestic supernatural signals, and was about to burst forth in a psalm of joy” (Eco 1996:43). This ecstatic response to beauty is one that today we call, a “peak experience,” and it was this type of experience that motivated Abbot Suger, based on his own awareness of how art and beauty shifted his consciousness, to instruct his masons in the design of Saint Denis (Hicks 2004). It is a widely held opinion among medieval historians, that Abbot Suger’s Saint Denis was the conceptual model for the New Style aesthetic of the Gothic cathedral (fig 2) (Norberg-Schultz 1975, Stokstad 1988, Duby 1995, Strachan 2003). Therefore, that the architectural space could exert such a profound effect on those who enter it, even when the visitor is of a scholarly or secular nature, can be better understood by examining the aesthetic theories of Abbot Suger.

Illumination In 1140, Abbot Suger rebuilt the abbey church Saint Denis near Paris. This church was to become the prototype of the Gothic church, “a sermon in stone” based on the theology of St Denis (St Paul’s disciple, Dionysius the Areopagite), the abbey’s patron saint (Duby 1995:14). Dionysius was the reputed author of several treatises on medieval ideology including the Theologia Mystica, the mystical theology believed to have been closely studied by the Abbot. The fundamental principle in the texts of Dionysius was, “God is Light,” and that, “born of the vera lux of Godhead, the universe is one vast field of light, streaming down from the

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Source” (Duby 1995:14). This credo clearly served as the source of his concepts for the redesign of St Denis. It was the key to the “new art,” an art of progressive illumination expressed in the paradigm of Suger’s church, and the illumination of the interior with lux nova, or “new light” was the driving force behind his design (Snyder 1988). In the fulfillment of Suger’s desire for a building that would, in his words, “shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows,” his architects achieved, through the technological innovation of the stained glass window, (fig 3) a new lightness, transparency and thinness of structure that had the effect of allowing light into the interior in a way that was not previously possible (Snyder 1988). Norberg- Shultz writes that Suger talked explicitly about how the lux continua and the lux miribalis should determine the character of a new technique of construction, and that, To gain this end, the wall was designed as a thin shell of stone and glass. Any feeling of mass has disappeared, and the extraordinarily transparent double ambulatory appears as a luminous foil around the skeletal apse. The large windows fitted with stained glass produced an unreal, heavenly light which illustrate the words of the hymn sung on the day of consecration: "Your walls are made of gems” Norberg-Schultz 1975:199).

In Suger’s building, architects denied the weight of stone, creating a “ fantasy of light and space,” using architectural structure as a means of producing spatial and lighting effects in the re-creation of the celestial light of Heaven (Stokstad 1988). The aim of Suger’s stylistically innovative and aesthetically brilliant New Style, was to “brighten the minds” of all who entered and lead them to a mystical experience “through the visible to the invisible, via the material to the immaterial” (Strachan 2003:39). So it was that light shining down through stained glass windows, became a fundamental philosophical principle in the design of the Gothic cathedral.

By using stained glass, the effect of filling the interior with light was made all the more extraordinary. It is this colour, with an intensity rarely achieved in other materials, which provides an element of magic and mystery in the space of the cathedral. Colours were not chosen as a faithful reproduction of nature but rather in virtue of harmonious relations with each other with the effect of, transforming the visible by creating a world of enchantment “so potent is the magic of these

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richly glowing colours, so strong is their grip on our emotions” (Duby 1995:162). White light shining through clear glass exposes all it falls upon and denies any sense of mystery, but the stained glass windows of a cathedral like Chartres, alter our perceptions and delight the senses. Snyder reports his impression of one of Chartres windows as “a transparent oriental carpet hanging on the wall, a web of confetti like patches of sparkling colours” (fig 4). And Henry Adams, a 19th century visitor to the cathedral, experienced the interior of Chartres as “a diaphanous, shimmering, structural web wrapped in veils of colour that seem to float in layers with a "delirium of coloured light” (Snyder 1988:372). A ‘delirium of coloured lights’ brings to mind Suger’s contemporary account of the effects of the pure colour of stained glass on the beholder, when he says, “I have a feeling that I am really dwelling in some strange region of the universe which neither exists in entirely in the slime of the earth, nor entirely in the purity of heaven” (Duby 1995: 16). The combination of light and colour completely transforms the Gothic interior and evokes Suger’s anagogical experience of being “transported from the material to the immaterial, from the earthly sphere to another worldly one” (Snyder 1988:371). However, the generation of this mystical, immersive experience of the cathedral was not only aimed at lifting the soul but also educating the mind. The cathedral was also a Text.

Reading Glass Texts While light, bathing the interior in an iridescent glow and creating “an atmosphere of ecstatic awe,” was implicit in Suger’s aesthetic theory, the function of the stained glass window also had a didactic purpose (Duby 1995:26). According to George Duby in his analysis of the “message of the windows,” Suger transposed the message of edification onto the windows of his choir so the congregation could “read” a visual equivalent of the monastic sermons and narratives. The windows now carried the homiletics of the monastic schools, interpreting the Scriptures, revealing their hidden meanings and demonstrating the intimations or antitypes of the Old Testament in the New. What Suger did was to give expression to this notion, not in writing, but in the windows of his church, revealing the concordances and analogies between the narratives of the

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Old Testament and Gospels of the New. This was a practice reiterated in the thirteenth century where the Saint Chapelle in Paris encompassed a religious and political programme that drew on the Old and New Testament parallels (Coldstream 2002). Nicola Coldstream attributes the Saint Chapelle with being the most influential building of the thirteenth century due to the fact that so many buildings adopted its design paradigm. The programmes of the Saint Chapelle reinterpret the written texts of the theologian cannon by means of a pictorial dialogue as George Duby explains, The lower stained-glass windows narrate; they supply the data of a doctrinal thesis on the lines of a professional lecture. The seminal text, the message, is located in the central medallion; beside and around it are subsidiary figurations culled from the Bible, which by an interplay of complementary allusions help the beholder to comprehend its purport, and to proceed from its literal to its mystical significance. And since this demonstration follows the rules of scholastic logic, the imagery proves, in visual terms, the strict coherence of the Christian dogma (Duby 1995:162).

Marion Stokstad’s description of the rose window of Chartres, gives us yet a further insight into the way these complex narratives, presented as glass images, could be interpreted. In the design of the rose window, she describes how the iconography of the many small scenes arranged in its geometric panels, represents a well-considered statement on the palimpsest nature of both the Old and the New Testaments, The Virgin and Child surrounded by four doves (the Gospels) and eight angels in the heart of the rose replace the image of Christ in majesty as the focus of the heavenly host. Old Testament kings and prophets float in a red-and-blue diapered (checkered) ground. In the lancets St Anne holding the infant Virgin Mary stands in the centre over the royal coat of arms. Artists and patrons gave St Anne the place of honour in the iconographical program of the north transept because the Count of Blois had presented a precious relic, her head, to the cathedral when he returned from the Fourth Crusade in 1204... All these vivid figures emerge as glowing panels in the dark mass of the wall (Stokstad 1988:312).

In this way the stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedral integrated the imagery of Biblical texts with the structural fabric of the building itself. However, the images that served the illiterate as a text, had to be interpreted and Alberto Manguel suggests that, for the early Christians symbols had a double quality, standing not only for the subjects they depicted (the lamb for Christ, the dove for the Holy Spirit) but also for specific aspects of the subject; the lamb as the

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sacrificial Christ, the Dove as the Holy Spirit's promise of deliverance, for instance. Symbols were not intended as synonyms of the concepts or as simply duplicates of the deities, they were meant to graphically expand certain qualities of the central image, comment on them, underline them, and turn them into subjects in there own right (Manguel 1996). In this way the building could function as a reading site, where worshippers interpreted the images surrounding them and ‘read’ them like a book.

The development of a new structural technique by the Gothic “architects of genius” that enabled the creation of pictorial narratives in glass also inspired sculptors to be equally innovative, as they too attempted to capture the essence of the material and spiritual worlds in images of stone (Stokstad 1988: 266). Many historians refer to the Gothic cathedral, as a “great book in stone” (Eco 1998, Icher 1998, Man 2002, Stokstad 1988), and complementing the themes presented in the stained glass windows is the iconography of the stone sculptures carved into the portals and columns of the cathedral walls. Sculpture, like the windows, served a greater role than the mere decoration of the cathedral façade and the structural columns of the interior.

Reading Stone Texts Apart from some ornamental patterns on subsidiary colonettes and moldings, sculpture in the Gothic cathedral was “clearly intended to convey a message” (Snyder 1988:279). The message of the windows could be read as ‘pages’ inside the cathedral. They could also be read in the walls of its stone ‘cover.’ Even though the architectural structure of the cathedral walls was reduced to support the all important stained glass windows, the master masons of buildings like Chartres, designed sculpture programmes to function as “sermons in stone” (Joiner 1998:134). The master sculptors organized Christian doctrine in a logical, convincing, and architectonic composition on the cathedral walls, as one might construct a text on a page.

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Cathedral porches were designed as stage settings for the liturgical narratives where pictorial narratives now appear in three-dimensional carvings surrounding the cathedral doors. In the architectural organization of the portal, the physical relationship of the statues, situated in the jambs of the portal, create a sense of the figures of the kings literally leading the worshipper into the inner sanctum (Stokstad 1988:279). Because these statues take on the proportions of the columns from which they are carved, their erect and elongated forms contribute to an imposing image of piety and wisdom, serving as an example of the reverence and dignity required of one entering the cathedral (fig 5). Their three-dimensionality also intensifies the meaning of these images, being more realistic than the more magical coloured two-dimensional images of the windows. Certainly they would have made an impression in the Middle Ages, particularly as the typical tympanum depicted the story of the Last Judgment, which would explain why Adso, would have found the scene carved into the tympanum so daunting, I saw a throne set in the sky and a figure seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of its story (Eco 1996:41).

As a text, the stone images of the Last Judgment visually articulated what words could not convey, focused as the images are on death and visions of hell. In the Middle Ages death was an ever-present reality and the lifelike stone images no doubt had much more meaning than they might for us today. Playing on the medieval imagination, the stone imagery over the portals was a reminder that the blessed would be received into Paradise while the wicked languished in Hell. Stone renditions of the Last Judgment appear above the portals of many cathedrals including Conques, Laon, Saint Denis, Chartres, Bourges and Notre Dame, and although they were built at different times, by different architects and stone masons, the message and iconography remain principally the same (Evans 1998). This meant that Christians could go into a church anywhere in Medieval Western Europe and read the message of these texts in stone.

A much quoted statement from the Middle Ages, demonstrating how this phenomenon of reading the stone imagery was accepted, is that of St Bernard who laments that stone carvings distract the monks from their study, saying,

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Indeed there are so many things, and everywhere such an extraordinary variety of hybrid forms, that it is more diverting to read in the marble than the texts before you (Camille 1992:62).

It is this reference to ‘reading’ in images rather than in writing that is most striking, since it invests stone imagery “with the time and space of meaning” (Camille 1992:62). From these observations, it is clear that reading the imagery of the cathedral, whether in stone or glass, was not necessarily an inferior form of interpretation, but rather, a visual mode of literacy, rich with meaning. The cathedral was then, a “mirror of the world” and its iconographical programmes were designed to bring the heavenly and the earthly worlds together in one highly complex but unified narrative (Norberg-Schultz 1997:221). Within the cathedral, rich, dense layers of meaning were achieved through the imagery of the sculptures and stained glass windows, in a pictorial language, decipherable by both the literate elite and the layman alike.

Towards an Architecture of the Book Beyond the windows and the statues, the stone framework of the cathedral also represents a manifestation of the order of the cosmos, through the combination of the pointed arch, groin and buttress in a logical and rational system (Eco & Zorozoli 1961). Unified in a Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work’ the design of the cathedral was based on a philosophy in which “the structure of the cosmos is made clear through the application of systematic articulation” (Norberg-Schultz 1975). This philosophy was Scholasticism, and manifestatio, or elucidation and clarification, was its first controlling principle, formalized in the form of the Summa, with its three requirements of, totality, arrangement according to a system of homologous parts and parts of parts, and distinctness and deductive cogency (Panofsky 1968). A correlation between Gothic architecture and this medieval logic of literacy is convincingly argued by Erwin Panofsky, in his seminal work, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. In it Panofsky asserts that the distinctive features of High Gothic Scholasticism are “remarkably analogous” to those which characterize High Gothic art which, he proposes, is due to the fact that the architects, painters and sculptors of the period were “exposed to the Scholastic point of view” or modus operandi, in their education. Through their education,

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architects and theologians became familiar with the way treatises were organized according to an overall plan, so that “the reader is led, step by step, from one proposition to another and always kept informed as to the progress of this process” (Panofsky 1968: 33). The whole was divided into partes, which were then divided into smaller partes; partes into membra, questions or distinctions, and these divided once more into articuli. The articuli can be broken down into further subdivisions with every concept being split into two or more meanings. The Scholastics were compelled to make the “orderliness and logic” of their thought “palpably explicit,” a passion that infiltrated virtually every mind engaged in cultural undertakings, and according to Panofsky, “achieved its greatest triumph” in architecture1 (Panofsky 1968:43)

In Panofksy’s analysis of the supporting framework of the cathedral we have an example of how architectural structure provides a visual manifestation of a literal system of order and form of thought. Panofsky is not alone in connecting architecture to scholarly systems of organization (fig 6). James Snyder parallels “the vast, encyclopedic coverage” in the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas with the “completeness and complexity” of the iconographic programmes of portal sculptures (Snyder 1988:344). C.S. Lewis also supports Panofsky’s concept of

1 Panofsky explains the relationship between Scholastic literary structure, in the form of the Summa, and the architecture of the Gothic cathedral: “Like the High Scholastic Summa, the High Gothic cathedral aimed, first of all, at “totality” [the first requirement of Scholastic writing] and therefore tended to approximate, by synthesis as well as elimination, one perfect and final solution… In its imagery, the High Gothic cathedral sought to embody the whole of Christian knowledge, theological, moral, natural, and historical, with everything in its place and that which no longer found its place, suppressed. In structural design, it similarly sought to synthesize all major motifs handed down by separate channels and finally achieved an unparalleled balance between the basilica and the central plan type, suppressing all elements that might endanger this balance, such as the crypt, the galleries, and towers, other than the two in the front. The second requirement of Scholastic writing, “arrangement according to a system of homologous parts and parts of parts,” is most graphically expressed in the uniform divisions and subdivisions of the whole structure…At the height of the development supports were divided and subdivided into main piers, major shafts, minor shafts, and still minor shafts; the tracery of windows, triforia, and blind arcades into primary, secondary, and tertiary mullions and profiles; ribs and arches into a series of moldings… The theoretically illimited fractionization of the edifice is limited by what corresponds to the third requirement of Scholastic writing: “distinctness and deductive cogency.” According to classic High Gothic standards the individual elements, while forming an indiscerptible whole, must proclaim their identity by remaining clearly separated from each other – the shafts from the wall or the core of the pier, the ribs from their neighbours, all vertical members from their arches; and there must be an unequivocal correlation between them” (Panofsky 1968: 45,48).

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scholastic mindset when he argues that, at his most characteristic, Medieval man was a “codifier, a builder of systems” who wanted everything in its right place (Lewis 1964:0:10). The perfect examples, he believed, are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante's Divine Comedy. But he adds a third work, which he felt can be set beside these two. This is the medieval synthesis itself, “the whole organization of their theology, science, and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental Model of the Universe” (Lewis 1964:0:11).

For the Medieval architect, the cosmic Book was the ideal “sine qua non,” and when they designed cathedrals they were attempting to represent the cosmos as a vast encyclopaedia in stone (Gellrich 1986, Man 2002, Stokstad 1988 et al). Thus, to speak of the cathedral as a “great book in stone,” is, in light of this argument, more than merely a metaphorical convenience. For the Medieval architects the cathedral was the physical manifestation of an ideology that sought to represent all knowledge in one total work. It was a medieval worldview that would come to be epitomized in the ‘idea of the book.’

For among all the arts, architecture is the one that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe, which the ancients called ‘kosmos.’

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 26

Conclusion Hailed as one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind (Norberg- Schultz 1975, Bronowski 1981), the Gothic cathedral was an innovation in building technology that enabled a structuring of space never experienced before in history (Eco & Zorzoli 1961). The glowing coloured windows of the Gothic cathedral and the architectural ingenuity that made them possible, were facilitated by the development of a “new constructional technique” (ibid:98) motivated by Suger’s religious desire for an illuminated space that had the power to shift perceptions. In the Gothic cathedral, we witness an integration of art and

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technology in an effort to create a communication system that clearly articulated the meaning of medieval religious and cultural doctrines. The Middle Ages was a period of great change and the cathedral epitomizes the extent to which an ideology can drive the technological innovation of architecture and design.

Through the innovative integration of stone and glass, the Gothic architects, inspired by Abbot Suger, built spaces that were able to stimulate the human imagination and resonate with the preferences of the human mind.2 The Gothic cathedral was a reading site where the text surrounding the reader was represented in multiple modes; soaring spaces filled with coloured light, the echo of voices, the sound of music, the spectacle of ritual, and the sight of images glowing in glass and carved in stone, all contributed to the representation and interpretation of the cathedral as a Text. All of the human senses were engaged in the immersive reading experience of the Gothic cathedral, but it was above all the presence of light, representing the idea of divine illumination drawn from the writings of Dionysius, that was the fundamental philosophical and theological principle dominating its design. The “new light” of the Gothic cathedral was of paramount importance in the mystical experience Suger strove to achieve in his design. The key to this illumination of the walls was the technological innovation of stone tracery, the optical skeleton construction that enabled a new space-defining structural framework not seen before (Binding 2002). The result was the creation of an alternate world where the immaterial is experienced through the material.

2 They built buildings that were visually rich, but well organized and clear in design, to stimulate the centre for spatial awareness in the right half of the brain; they built buildings that were colourful, powerful and complex, to satisfy the preferences of the deep limbic centre of the brain, they built buildings that were enclosed with lines rather than solid masses, active buildings to wake us up; they built buildings that seemed to defy gravity, great masses of stone that soar upward, giving us a psychological and spiritual lift, from earth-like mind to heaven-like mind; they built buildings that were composed as a hierarchy from human scale to the great scale of the building, a ladder reaching upward; they built buildings that employed the visual harmonies most comfortable to the mind, such as the Golden Proportion, buildings that conform to the natural structure of the mind and body that were rich and complex, and all these methods come together to produce an exciting and stimulating architecture accessible to people well outside the Christian culture. (Hicks 2004 ).

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One of the fundamental functions of the cathedral was to “explain” the meaningful organization of the medieval world, and so it is that its architecture, Sculpture, and stained glass windows were unified like a great book in a ‘total work’ of design that encompassed new innovations in the technologies of architecture, art and craft. Abbot Suger envisioned the church as a site of mystic transcendence, to be experienced as ‘another world’. Panofsky saw it as the scholastic logic of the Summa, compelled to make order and logic visibly explicit, the psychic framework of the medieval architects was aimed at the totality and unity of disparate parts. Durandus of Mende, writing his extensive work on the liturgy in 1286, invested more than the stone and glass of the cathedral architecture with meaning. He maintained that various objects and ornaments within the church, “the splendid artefacts such as altars, reliquaries, robes, instruments, and books,” were also sites of “divine signs and secrets (Binding 2002:48). Leaving textiles, reliquaries, furnishing and other sacred objects aside, the next chapter will consider the significance of Durandus’ last ‘splendid artefact’ – the illuminated manuscript.

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Chapter 2

C O N S T R U C T I O N

L A U D S The hours between 5.00 and 6.00 in the morning in order to end at dawn

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BUILDING THE BOOK

Naturally, a manuscript.

UMBERTO ECO 1996

Introduction While the cathedral was the book of the illiterate masses, the illuminated manuscript was the book of the ruling elite. The quest for the knowledge of ancient writers and interpretation of the scriptures meant that for scholars, nobility and the clergy, the most important site of reading was, ‘naturally, a manuscript.’ As a reading site, the Gothic cathedral was one of performance, participation in ritual and ceremony, and the interpretation of highly symbolic imagery, in one total work. The idea of the book as a total work, however, not only permeated Gothic architecture, but naturally was also a dominating theory of manuscript design. The idea of a ‘total work’ embracing a unifying principle as a signifier was a medieval concept that has been reconsidered in recent history by a number of contemporary theorists including Jacques Derrida. The “idea of the Book” is explained in terms of its abstract meaning, but is also discussed as a literal idea in the form of the codex format of the book. Along with a theory of semiotics and Scholasticism, designers of the illuminated manuscript strove to emulate the peak spiritual experience of the cathedral in the two dimensional architecture of the codex. This chapter establishes the origins of the manuscript as an integral part of the medieval culture of the Cathedral and one of two inter-related reading sites of the Middle Ages.

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READING THE MANUSCRIPT

I know that many of the monks living in your midst come from other abbeys scattered all over the world. Some stay here a short time, to copy manuscripts to be found nowhere else and to carry them back to their own house, not without having brought you in exchange some other unavailable manuscript you will copy and add to your treasure.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 35

The Total Work The totalising system of signification permeating the medieval psychic framework was nowhere more evident than in the great books of the Middle Ages, the summae and encyclopaedia. Metaphorically demonstrated in the ‘great book in stone’ the totalising organization of the cosmos is now represented in the great books of the monastic scriptorium. The copying of texts was the primary concern of the monastic scriptorium. Before the invention of the printing press, the only way to build a body of written knowledge was to copy existing texts by hand, hence the term manuscript meaning, ‘written by hand.’ The treasure of any monastery was its library and the books they contained were lent, borrowed and exchanged in order to obtain an edition of any text they wished to add to their collection. The production of these texts was a labour intensive and time- consuming task, involving the preparation of the parchment and inks, the work of copying in script and often the illustrating and embellishing of each page ready for binding. A scribal monk could spend his whole life producing a single edition. They were therefore extremely valuable and so were treasured as precious possessions and treated as such. This explains why more books survive the Middle Ages than any other medieval artefact (Hamel 1994). Lasting twice as long as the history of the printed book, medieval manuscripts represent a period of over a thousand years acting as a great museum of modern knowledge.

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The Idea of the Book As a medieval scholar and historian, Umberto Eco centres much of his novel The Name of the Rose, around the medieval idea of the book in many implicit and explicit references to the actual books that articulate the medieval “totalizing impulse” (the encyclopaedia, bestiaries, lapidaries and herbals of the fictitious monastery) and in his use of the medieval technique of “ordering the universe” (the inventory, the list and the catalogue) (Coletti 1990:60). Even the affiliation of the library with the medieval idea of the book is, as Theresa Coletti suggests, inspired by “the medieval comparison of the totality of Scripture to the unity of a building” in Eco’ Aedificium (ibid). The relationship of the book and the building is taken up again in this chapter drawing heavily on the work of Jesse Gellrich who acknowledges that the summa and the cathedral have some of the most elemental ideas about the structure of space in common when he writes, What Durandas of Mende attempted in his massive thirteenth century commentary on the liturgy and architecture of the church was an extrapolation of patterns and meanings already immanent in the structure of the building; for it embodied the great design of the universe as a system of divine truth to instruct moral conduct and reveal the eschatological pains of hell and glories of heaven. As Durandus’ book attempts to mirror the subdivision and inclusiveness the design of the church, certain items in his book, or in other summae for that matter, reflect the whole in which they are included (Gellrich 1986:42).

In this instance however, the structure of the book is extrapolated from the design of the building, unlike Panofsky’s analysis, where the design of the building was based on the organizational structure of the book. Either way, these, and other parallels to medieval forms, show that medieval systems of signification, aimed at the totalization of complex forms, expressed a common perspective that interpreted existing phenomena as being connected by a preexistent design (Gellrich 1986). In the view of both Gellrich and Coletti, this Medieval concept corresponds to the writing of Derrida, who asserts that, “the idea of the book is the idea of totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality” (Derrida 1976:18). This indicates the “inevitability of the “idea of the Book in the middle ages” for as soon as a signifying system, such as words in Scripture, became a metaphor for

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divinity, “the entire preexistent "totality” of God's plan was potential in the signifying means” (Gellrich 1986:35).1

According to Gellrich, this principle idea in the Middle Ages was the "commonplace attempt to gather all strands of learning together into an enormous Text, an encyclopaedia or summa, that would mirror the historical and transcendental order just as the Book of God's Word (the Bible) was a speculum of the Book of his Work (nature)" (Gellrich 1986:18). While acknowledging that readings prescribed by faith in an ordered cosmos are not unique to the Middle Ages, and the metaphorics of the book occurs in other world literature, Theresa Coletti also turns to Derrida’s “idea of the book” as a model for the totalizing structures exhibited in the Medieval ideas of the encyclopaedia and summa (Coletti 1990:160). But of all of these, she cites the Bible as the epitome of the idea of the book, Christianity gave the book its highest consecration: its belief in the Bible's absolute totality and divinely inspired meaning sanctioned the use of the book as a metaphor for signifying systems. Medieval theologians and philosophers distinguished between the book of God's word and the book of his works, employing book metaphors to talk about the nature and meaning in epistemological, religious, and literary contexts (Coletti 1990:26)

As a “container of the divine plan” and a sign of “the totality of that plan in the world,” the idea of the book originated in the Medieval readings of the Bible where any book of the Bible, or all of them together, constituted a totality, “not a loose collection of texts, but a book bound by a single purpose” (Gellrich 1986:32). More manuscripts of the Bible have survived since the Middle Ages than any other tangible artefact, other than coins and the cathedrals (Hamel 2001b), and so represent the archetypal model of the book, for it was the Bible that provided the “magic combination of parchment and codex” (Avrin 1991:174). Originally a Roman invention, the codex was adopted almost exclusively for recording biblical texts, and like the cathedral, was a structure designed to bring many texts together in a single entity.

1 While Gellrich cautions that the Medieval "the idea of the book" can limit analysis of the broader idea of the Book as a reflection of cultural tradition, he stresses that the topic has received extensive and diverse attention by other modern theorists (Ferdinand Sassure, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) and as such is a structuring principle with far-reaching potential (Derrida 1976).

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The Aedificium Scripturae The cathedral was arguably the clearest and most complete physical expression of the underlying medieval worldview (Korzilius 2005). Thus the use of metaphor to describe the cathedral as the great book in stone, is more than a mere linguistic device, it clearly defines the close affiliation of book and building: The metaphor of the Book or Text... takes on quite literal proportion in the Medieval centuries, as knowledge was collected and stored in great books or as the transcendental world was replicated in the sacred space of the religious architecture (Gellrich 1986:249).

It is therefore perfectly understandable that, in the Middle Ages, the word for book and that for building were associated in the medieval Bible known as, the Aedificium Scripturae - the Building of Scripture. Manifested in the medieval summae and encyclopaedia, the Book becomes a sign of the medieval preoccupation with oneness, totality, and “the presence of meaning absolute” and the Bible was a supreme example (Gellrich 1986:41). While indeed there were many books written on many subjects, the Bible was the dominant text of the period and as such, provided much of the content for the numerous and diverse manuscripts used by the clergy and the literate nobility. By way of its codex form, the idea of the book, as a collection of many unconnected texts brought together into one unified whole, was literally demonstrated in the physical form of a Bible.2 In his essay, The Book as a Symbolic Object, Regis Debray describes the book as an architectonic object, and clearly shows this relationship between buildings and books, seeing them both as ordered, demarcated rectangles that serve as “a shelter against the ravages of time,” The primordial book is taken to be edifying because it is an edifice. Illuminated, gilded, carved, locked shut, with its clasp, its hard back, its coppered corners, its intersecting architectonic edges – that archetype issuing from the monastic scriptoria duplicates the closure of the cloister. With its own interpreters as entryway guards, and its pages laid out like the blueprint of a basilica… One passes through it like a worshipper in a church (Nunberg 1996:143-44).

2“In theology the basic book was the Bible, around which grew a vast apparatus. The standard commentary, which came to be known as the common or ordinary gloss, was the work of the masters of the twelfth century, beginning with Anselem of Laon. The same masters began to make collections of ‘sentences’ on the chief topics of theology. By the middle of the century Perter Lombard was able to compose his Libre sententiarum which superseded all earlier collections and was used as a text-book throughout the rest of the Middle Ages” (Evans 1998:160).

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An illuminated Bible in the Middle Ages encompassed all the philosophies, aspirations and artistic design elements of the cathedral, in the smaller, though no less monumental, form of the codex book. In the monastic scriptoria, the cathedral schools and eventually ateliers of Paris, the idea of the book, the narratives in stone and glass, and the totalizing system of signification, are reproduced in the illustrated images, calligraphic texts, and ornamentation created in parchment, paint and leather. The narrative of the Cathedral is rewritten in the narrative of the illuminated manuscript and the idea of the book provides the intellectual basis to the foundational structure of the book as a material object.

The Art of Illumination In the Gothic cathedrals, thousands of people “read” the images of the walls, windows, columns, pulpits, and even the back of the priests Chasuble, and saw in those images both multiple messages and a “single, never-ending story” (Manguel 1997:107). These same biblical narratives, illuminated as they were in the metaphorical, great book of stone, would also appear in the metaphorical architecture of those great books in parchment. Now the religious ideologies of Abbot Suger, evidenced in the design of the Gothic cathedral, were celebrated in the two-dimensional codex form of the illuminated manuscript.

In a picture of the stone statues in the Sainte-Chapelle, painted as they were originally intended, a demonstration of the rich layering of images, colour, pattern and design found in the illuminated manuscript can also be observed (fig 7). The colours, use of gold gilding and the patterns decorating the surface of this image, reveal the close relationship of the painting of manuscript to that of the cathedral, one that extended to the depiction of architecture in the miniatures themselves. In a masterpiece of the thirteenth century, the Psalter of Saint Louis, James Snyder observed how a series of Old Testament narratives were placed “like stained glass panels within elaborate frames that culminate in petite cathedrals complete with pinnacles, fretted galleries, and rose windows” (Snyder 1988:439). While it is one

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thing to depict the cathedral in a painting it is quite another to evoke the ‘atmosphere of ecstatic awe’ implicit in Suger’s aesthetic theory.

Observing the working place of one of the monastery’s illuminators in the scriptorium depicted in The Name of the Rose, Adso, the young apprentice to William of Baskerville, describes the unfinished pages of an illuminated Psalter, They were folios of the finest vellum – that queen of parchments – and the last was still fixed to the desk. Just scraped with pumice stone and softened with chalk, it had to be smoothed with a plane, and, from the tiny holes made on the sides with a fine stylus, all the lines that were to have guided the artist’s hand had been traced. The first half had already been covered with writing, and the monk had begun to sketch the illustrations in the margins. The other pages, on the contrary, were already finished, and as we looked at them, neither I nor William could suppress a cry of wonder (Eco 1996:77).

Adso’s sense of wonderment was no doubt attributed to the skill and artistry of the artist’s work, but the attempt to capture a sense of the reverence, awe and wonder at the word of God now illuminated on parchment, bore the same significance for the designers of a manuscript as it did for the architects of the cathedral. The illuminators of manuscripts attempted to create the ‘atmosphere of ecstatic awe’ implicit in Suger’s aesthetic theory of the power of meditative reflection on the beauty of colour and light. Light transmitted through stained glass windows was both a philosophical and fundamental principle of cathedral design. This same principle also underpinned the design of the illuminated manuscript. The manuscript was designed to capture the essence of the Dionysian idea of ‘God is Light,’ by illuminating the interior of the book with the lux miribalis to ‘brighten the mind’ and lead the reader “through the visible to the invisible, via the material to the immaterial” (Stachan 2003:39). Reflective meditation on the beauty of the stained glass window was also designed into the structural fabric of the illuminated manuscript.

In its narrowest sense, illumination was a term that referred to the application of bright coloured pigments, gold and silver gilding, and marginal decoration, and in the miniature paintings themselves. The dazzling luminosity of bright colours and metallic surfaces held the light and reflected it from the page, a quality particularly appropriate for books of the scriptures, “for the divine light of the Word of God

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was made physically bright through the use of colour and gold” (Calkins 1979:201). No embellishment was too luxurious. Bindings were made with gold and precious stones to provide fitting containers for the Word of God (fig 8). Some Byzantine and Carolingian manuscripts were written in gold on purple parchment, elevating the material text by virtue of costly dyes and precious materials, “into a symbolic, immaterial realm” (ibid). Again this is an example of the anagogical representation that Suger held so dear in his design for St Denis.

In the pages of the manuscript we find a rich source of visual information related to murals and mosaics, as well as to the cloister crafts of the second half of the twelfth century. Light shining through the windows of the cathedral now shines from the pages of manuscripts like the Wenceslaus Psalter, made in Paris in 1250, and described here by Susan L’Engle of the Pierpont Morgan Library, The crowded design of this initial is not unlike that of a stained glass window, constructed of a pattern of lozenges and roundels, each with an individual scene, usually narrated with only a few figures. Whereas the luminosity of stained glass derives from external light transmitted through the coloured glass, in Gothic books the highly burnished and reflective backgrounds of gold leaf next to saturated colours strive for a similarly brilliant effect (L’Engle 1998:41).

Throughout the Gothic period, illuminators did in fact find exciting new models for their graphic imagery in the stained-glass windows evolving in cathedrals of the thirteenth century (Snyder 1988). According to Marilyn Stokstad, artists often used a repertoire of models available to painters of stained glass as well as manuscripts, in their work (fig 9). For example, she observed that in the Bible made for the Abbot of St Augustine’s in Canterbury, the artist contains the vast panorama of the creation with overlapping rondels “in a composition that, enlarged many times, could easily have served as a cartoon for a stained-glass window” (Stokstad 1988:365). The imagery of the windows and those in the manuscript, were inextricably linked and the reading of images was as important and intellectual a pursuit as reading of texts.

Alberto Manguel notes that the eighteenth century writer, Gotthold Lessing, drew attention to the similarities between the iconography of the stained glass windows

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and that of the Biblia Pauporum,3 suggesting that reading from a stained glass window or the fifteenth century woodcuts in the Biblia Pauporum, were essentially the same act. He then went on to conclude that reading images was not the same as reading words on a page (Manguel 1997). Reading an image required interpretation, often given by others, in extracting any added meaning but for the literate of the fourteenth century, the reading of texts also involved the interpretation of a multiplicity of meanings through which “the reader could progress according to the guiding glosses, or comments, of the author or reader’s own knowledge” (Manguel 1997:104). Reading form the codex was not the same as reading from a stained glass window.

A Codex Blueprint Medieval manuscripts can be placed in a neatly defined historical era determined by two crucial changes in methods of book production. The first was the invention of the codex;4 the second was the invention of the printing press, which coincided with the Renaissance. The first makers of books found reading from a too limiting and cumbersome and developed a system with separate pages bound so that they could be turned one after another known as, the codex. The Romans invented the codex but it was the Christian Church that provided the unique combination of parchment and codex in the medieval manuscript, as a carrier of knowledge and object of beauty.

Parchment codices were more robust and portable than the fragile papyrus scroll, they were easier to search for a particular text and both sides of the sheet could be written on without difficulty, while a scroll written on both sides was impractical,

3 Biblia Pauporum, or Bible of the Poor, is misnomer of the eighteenth century given to the large “picture book” Bibles of the 14th century which were created entirely out of woodcut images of juxtaposed scenes echoing those of the cathedral on parchment and paper “reduced and collected in the shape of a book” Biblia Pauporum, chained to a lectern and opened to an appropriate page, would display its images, day after day, month after month. A majority of people would be able to “read” in those images simply because of their juxtaposition” (ibid). The Biblia Pauporum provided a mode of reading that bridged the gap for the illiterate between, the stained glass windows and the printed pages of the book. 4 Roger Chartier, makes the astute observation that the while printed book was similar to the manuscript in its organization, hierarchy of formats and aids to reading, the substitution of the codex for the scroll was in his opinion, a far more profound innovation of design, in that it radically altered the form of the book as a material object (Chartier1995).

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so far more text could fit on a codex than a scroll of the same size (Avrin 1991). The nature of the materials, whether papyrus or parchment, also had a significant effect on the form of the book. Gluing suited papyrus but not parchment, and sewing suited parchment but not papyrus. The finished codex was a strong, durable, and practical “writing machine.”5

The centre of culture, education, and intellectual work was the Christian monastery where the preserver of knowledge was the illuminated manuscript produced with exceptional care and design sensitivity (Meggs 2000). The production of illuminated manuscripts began with the preparation of a rectangular parchment sheet about 25cm high by 46cm wide folded in half to make two folios or four pages. Four sheets of parchment, folded down the centre, placed inside each other, formed a quaternion (set of four) also known as quarto. These sizes are still maintained as book and paper sizes to this day. Medieval scribes wrote with a quill pen and ink onto the parchment surface in paints made from minerals like lapis lazuli (ultramarine blue) and plants like Brazilwood (red) and fixed with the white of an egg. The finishing application was the gold leaf that endowed “majesty and brilliance” to the final design (Avrin 1991:214). This was burnished to a mirror-like finish (fig 10) so the pages shone with light, representing the mystic aura so essential to its meaning.

What was highly significant in the design of the illuminated manuscript was the fact that it was painted and written on translucent parchment and therefore had a slightly ethereal appearance. Light not only shone from the burnished gold of the illuminations but also showed through the page so that the traces of the next page could be seen behind the text being read (fig 11). Marshall McLuhan would later make the observation that electronic media shared the same ‘light-through’ quality of stained glass windows and the illuminated manuscript (McLuhan 2001). This translucence kept the manuscript in the realm of the cathedral, situated in between the light filled book in stone and yet to be born opaque book in print.

5 Coined from the title of Katherine Hayle’s book, Writing Machines, to describe the book in an age of electronic texts (Hayles 2002).

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The rectangular shape and vertical format of the manuscript are two of its most basic characteristics. A common explanation for this is that these were determined by the dimensions of the sheepskins used in the production of parchment. When trimmed and folded the resulting parchment was a size similar to that of the modern page: rectangular in shape and ‘portrait’ in format (Stoicheff 2005). This vertical orientation of the page, also helped to strengthen the book when bound on the long side, as a ‘landscape’ format, if bound on the shorter side, was less capable of supporting the weight of the book. Thus the page was developed as an indirect result of the folding procedure of the parchment codex. The arrangement of texts and its illumination on these parchment pages, were also carefully calculated to enhance not only the visual aesthetic but also to assist the reader in understanding and interpreting the text. The late medieval grid6 of the illuminated manuscript featured horizontal and vertical rules to guide the scribe when writing the text and to control the placement of pictorial and decorative elements (Margolin 1989). This formed the compositional basis of the page that produced the aesthetic balance of the text columns and margins for decoration. The proportions of the grid were based on the Golden Section, a system of proportional measurement used in antiquity, which specified a crucial relationship between long and short sides of a rectangle (Mann 2002). The text was positioned off centre with broad margins on the top and left measuring half that of those on the right and the base of the page, and this design provided the structural framework for of the traditional book (fig 12) (West 1990).

This vast vocabulary of graphic design forms, page layouts, illustrations, lettering styles and techniques, can be ranked as major innovations in both graphic design (Meggs 2000), and the history of the book. By the end of the thirteenth century, the manuscript had become the blueprint for the construction of the modern book. Gutenberg would use it when he invented a new media technology of the fifteenth century printed book, and in the nineteenth century, William Morris would use it as a model for his designs for books of the Kelmscott Press. 7

6 A proportional system used as a compositional design matrix to control the placement of typographic text and images in the layout of the page. 7 Morris’s Kelmscott Press would have a profound influence on future book design, as the design

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The rural monastic abbey was replaced with the urban cathedral as the progressive building type in architecture, and the illuminated manuscripts produced in the secular city workshops replaced the service books of monastic scriptoria. The opaque pages of the printed book now blocked out the once light- through ethereal message of the cathedral and the manuscript by replacing them with the two-dimensional page of print. The printed book now condensed the two light filled reading sites of the cathedral and the manuscript into one small single reading site where the colourful Word of God would now be become the black and white Words of Man.

READING THE BOOK

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 38

To be able to freely handle a codex, as the last chapter disclosed, was the privilege of a medieval elite, so when the abbot in Eco’s novel reasons for the protection of these masterpieces, he is in effect explaining why so many of these exquisite wonders of human endeavour, remain with us today. However, if the population was to become a literate one, something had to free the manuscript from the hands of the privileged and place these texts of knowledge into the hands of the philosophy and methodologies espoused by Morris were taken up by Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus design school in the 1919. Jan Tschichold, one of the premier book designers of the twentieth century, was a seminal figure in the development of the asymmetric typographic design aesthetic of the Bauhaus. However, in 1940 he rejected this aesthetic and returned to the traditional model of typography in his designs for Penguin Books. Like Morris before him, he too spent many years examining Medieval manuscripts to discover the underlying design ‘canon’ that dictated the harmonious placement of text. He measured countless books, and discovered that many of them used the extended proportions 2: 3: 4: 6 for the size of their margins and that if a page height to page width ratio of 2: 3 was used, the text block was designed so that its height was the same as the width of the page (Tschihold 1995). His canon of book design was closely related to that used by both Gutenberg and Morris.

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masses. It would take a revolution to do so, and the invention that would end the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and introduce the culture of the book in the Renaissance, was Gutenberg’s printing press.

A Media Revolution It is misleading to imagine that computer technology introduced the age of information, for Neil Postman makes the point that the it was the printing press began the information age in the early sixteenth century (Postman1993). Indeed, Bill Gates, champion of the current electronic revolution, acknowledges the role of the printing press proclaiming that, “the information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did in the Middle Ages” (Gates 1995: 9). Throughout the literature on the history of printing, Johannes Gutenberg is accredited with the invention of moveable type and the printing press (Butler 1940, De Vinne 1969, Eisenstien 1979, Chappell 1980, Stienberg 1996, Meggs 2000, Mann 2002). However, since his death there has been much debate about his legitimacy as the ‘father’ of print. Equally as many scholars argue this mantle should go to Peter Schoeffer and John Fust even to this day (Ortoll 2002). Nevertheless, Gutenberg is almost universally regarded as the originator of the printing press as a new media technology, and so for the convenience of this discussion will be treated as such.

The hand-operated printing press of Johannes Gutenberg was the new media of the 16th century. It spread through Europe like wild fire, setting light to a knowledge explosion fuelled by the cheaper, more plentiful and portable book (Mann 2002). This innovation enabled books to be reproduced in numerous multiple copies, heralding a system of repeatability that would see the mass- production, mass-consumption and mass-dissemination of information that revolutionized not only the way books were produced, by whom and how.8 Gutenberg’s invention was a new foundation upon which modern history, science,

8 What was “epoch-making” about Gutenberg’s process, was the ability to edit and correct a text before printing and then to reproduce multiple copies, using identical mass production of freely combinable letter-units made up in an infinite variety of compositions (Steinberg 1996). Fifteen to twenty million books were produced between the invention of Gutenbergs’ press and the end of the 14th century (Man 2002).

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popular literature, and according to Elizabeth Eisenstein, the emergence of the nation–state and modernity were built (Eisenstein 1997). The icon of this extraordinary event was Gutenberg’s fifteenth century 42-Line Bible, which remains today as both an historical artefact and one of the most beautiful and valuable books ever printed. It is a medial monument standing between the new media the printing press with the old media technology of the scribe.

The Gutenberg Bible Gutenberg printed his famous 42-Line Bible with a new media technology, moveable metal type, set on the new media technology of the hand operated printing press, and eventually printed onto the new medium of hand formed paper. Together these innovations formed the revolutionary technology of print media. When Gutenberg set out to invent the printing press, he was seeking to reproduce the illuminated manuscripts for an ecclesiastical elite. As the manuscript codex was the familiar form of texts, the Bible was designed to look like a manuscript and so was a form of printed ‘writing,’ not type as we know it today. A printed manuscript was simply quicker and cheaper to produce mechanically, and so eventually accuracy and cost won over hand script and illumination and books have been printed ever since.9

The Gutenberg Bible (fig 13) is the first western printed book of substantial length that is still known by name to the general public as both harbinger and exemplar of the 550 years of an age dominated by the consequences of the printing press (Davies 1996). Made in 1455, and commonly known as ‘The Gutenberg Bible’ it is also one of the most extraordinary books ever made, a cannon of book craft that has seldom been surpassed (Davies 1996, Meggs 2000, Hamel 2001, Mann 2002). One of the reasons for this was that Gutenberg by producing his new media Bible to emulate a manuscript he took the content of the older medium as the content of newer book. The design of the book followed scribal practice; a parchment

9 “One year, it took a month or two to produce a single copy of a book; the next you could have 500 copies in a week (500 was an average print run in the early days)” (Mann 2002: 2).

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codex,10 two text columns of Gothic script (set in type) surrounded by coloured hand illustration for, as John Mann observed, “Gutenberg would have changed all this at his peril” (Mann 2000). His moveable metal type replaced the script of the pen, but by leaving blank spaces for capital letters and marginal decoration of the manuscript to be applied by hand (fig 14). Gutenberg’s Bible was demonstrating Bolter and Grusin’s remediation theory in which his new media innovation refashioned the old familiar one. Thus Gutenberg’s Bible was new media innovation that integrated the manuscript and the book, the sacred and the secular, the past and the future.

The ensuing rapid increase in book production brought about by the “art of multiplying books”11 emphasized the relationship between the book’s contents and its physical form (Manguel 1997). As printing became the most effective means of reproducing the book, a larger market for the more affordable and secular texts than the large folios of manuscript culture and so 16th century printers began printing smaller, pocketable, portable volumes12 (ibid). Eventually early printed books left their affiliations with hand illumination behind and print media declared its presence as a revolutionary new media technology with a number of design innovations (fig 15). Title pages,13 roman and italic type, printed page numbers, wood and cast metal ornaments, and innovative approaches to the layout of images and type (Meggs 2000), became the design legacy of the Renaissance printers who created the basic form of the ubiquitous book for the next five hundred years. If the present revolution in electronic new media is

10 There are twelve surviving copies printed on vellum, but it is thought that thirty-five were produced, demanding 5,000 calf skins (Mann 2000). He later printed the remainder of the bibles on Italian handmade paper the technology that enabled the spread of printing and the emergence of modern printed book. 11 An early term for used to describe printing in the fifteenth century (Davies 1996). 12 In 1501 Aldus Manutius published the smaller octavo sized “pocket -book,” in which he employed the “new” italic typeface resulting in a plainer book than those of the Middle Ages. “What counted above all, for the owner of an Aldine pocket-book was the text, clearly and eruditely printed- not a preciously decorated object” (Manguel 1997). 13 The first known ornamental title appeared in the “calendar” of Regiomontas, printed in Venice by Pictor, Loeslein and Ratdolt in 1476 in folio. The title page did not did not attract an immediate or general popularity. In beauty and design the title page attained its highest point of artistic excellence in the early 16th century. This can be attributed to the fact that in the first twenty years artists like Durer, Holbien, Wetchlin, Urse Graff Schaufelein and Cranach designed title pages (Johnson 1991).

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causing the demise of print as many have suggested, it may prove useful to observe what happened when print caused the demise of the illuminated manuscript.

The Gutenberg Effect The fact that Gutenberg’s invention had such a revolutionary effect was that typographical book production differed quite dramatically from that of the manuscript in a number of ways. While writing a manuscript was slow and laborious work, print was relatively easy and rapid. In his summary of events Butler calculated that a typesetter would take as long as a scribe to set a page of type, but once set could print more pages in a day than the scribe could write in a fortnight. He further observed that while the scribe’s work required continuous attention, the printer’s did not, as type purged of errors in beginning of the setting meant thousand of copies could be made without further textual adjustment. Unlike the scribe the printer could reproduce each copy exactly the same as the last. Neither the design nor the accuracy of the copied work depended on the individual taste or manual dexterity of the printer, as it had with the scribe, so a book could be produced by different operators, without any visible discrepancies in the end result (Butler1940: 21). These changes in production methods brought about significant ramifications for the design of the book.

As the new media of the printing press became more and more accepted the demand for scribal reproduction of the book also took on new forms. The advent of printing did not replace any major style of handwriting, save the book-letter, and in fact, the cursive style flourished (Tyson 1982). For example, Alberto Manguel, in his book, A History of the Printed Word, writes, While books were becoming more easily available and more people were learning to read, more were also learning to write, often stylishly and with great distinction, and the sixteenth century became not only the age of the printed word but also the century of the great manuals of handwriting. It is interesting to note how often a technological development - such as Gutenberg’s - promotes rather than eliminates that which it supposed to supersede, making us aware of old- fashioned virtues we might otherwise have overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance (Manguel 1997:135).

Handwriting did not end with the printing press but with the typewriter (Tyson 1982). The vast spectrum of public life in Western Europe, from town councils

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and municipal courts to the central agencies of national monarchies, ran primarily through the labours of clerks and scriveners… In the nineteenth century all of this would have been too obvious to mention… printing was limited because it made no economic sense to print anything that could not recover the cost of printing and paper very quickly (Tyson 1982). Texts needed in fewer quantities than printers found economical continued as manuscripts for generations: commemorative addresses, presentation certificates, petitions, university degrees, wedding presents, and journals were preferred in manuscript form (Hamel 1997). Outmoded technologies, invisible when in peak use, often become art forms as if “pushed onto centre stage” when new technologies rakes over their role (Levinson 1999:13). As printed books became smaller and plainer than the ornate manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and since they were cheaper and easily replaced, they became less symbols of wealth and more utilitarian tools of study, their owners valuing clear and eruditely printed texts (ibid). In The Story of Writing, Donald Jackson relates that, after the invention of printing, “for a time the sumptuous books in the Renaissance style, and even editions de luxe from the Low Countries, reached new heights of technical perfection and artistry” (Jackson 1981: 108). There was still money to be made in the illumination of manuscripts and in Florence, bookseller and agent for the humanist librarians, Vespasiano de Bisticci, employed forty-five scribes to produce 200 books for Cosimo de Medici’s library in the 1460’s in 22 months (Hamel 1997). As printing grew, the hand illumination of the book was turned into an art form.

Aided by one of the finest illuminators, the Boucicaut Master, Paris experienced one of its greatest flowerings as a centre of manuscript illumination, resulting in an explosion in demand for richly decorated books of hours (Kren 1997). The printed book was replacing the illuminated manuscript as a carrier of knowledge, but those who collected these as much for their artistic content as for the dissemination of their text, became art collectors and bibliophiles as Thomas Kren reveals when he writes, Since the Renaissance some collectors have prized older illuminated manuscripts more for their decoration than for their texts. Thus at a time when bibliophiles still actively commissioned new illuminated manuscripts, other collectors would

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cut the miniatures and other painted decoration from older books. The practice continued for centuries (Kren 1997:54).

This increased perfection and artistry of manuscript is a case of the old media refashioning itself in answer to the new and the remediation of the book caused yet another response from the old media. When printing with moveable type onto paper made it possible to assemble more pages than ever before, it became necessary to invent systems to keep the information manageable. Conventions of the typographic book began to discriminate the printed book from the manuscript with a series of design innovations including the title page, roman and italic type, printed page numbers, woodblock and cast metal ornaments, and innovative approaches to layout of illustration and text (Meggs 2000). While these innovations departed from the past practice of manuscript production, Neil Gershenfeld makes the observation that “there was an interesting transitional period during which illuminators of manuscripts added page numbers to keep up with the fashion” (Gershenfeld 1999:25). Despite the advent of the printed book, the illuminator did not become obsolete for many generations, and some were even commissioned to copy printed books. Cardinal Abrecht of Brandenberg for example had a hand written manuscript of the Passion of Christ, coped from an edition printed on vellum and illustrated with woodcuts14 Competition with the printed illustration generated an unrivalled period of creativity and originality that characterized illumination after 1450 as the manuscript became the forerunner of the twentieth century artists’ book. The new technology of the printing press placed the old technology centre stage.

Under the general impulsion of the Renaissance, one of the last effects of the new print technology was the transformation of bookbinding. Previously, owners

14 Christopher de Hamel tells how, “Some illuminators decorated printed books to make them resemble manuscripts…Especially in Venice, artists who had worked on manuscripts transferred their skills to illuminating printed books, and the quality is sometimes breathtaking” (Hamel 1997). Lucien Febvre & Henri-Jean Martin also make this claim when he describes how, “At Venice they tried an intermediate process using printed borders which could serve as a picture frame for the painter, and in Germany complete illustration were later finished in colour and only the outline printed… publishers like Verard lavished great care on their printed books' illustrations, so that they acquired the sumptuous look of a manuscript. In France, Books of Hours, which were in such great vogue, were decorated with masses of small wood-cuts assembled as borders” (Martin 1976:97)

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fortunate enough to own a manuscript in the Middle Ages, had them bound in covers often adorned with rich ornament and metal bosses, stored flat so their covers could be displayed (Johnson 1991). However, printing compelled the elimination of the precious stones and metals of raised decorations, when books were arranged vertically in shelves where these covers might be damaged. In the sixteenth century leather binding came into general use with gold tooling replacing the precious metals, and the transformation to the modern book was complete. Printed books would continue to be printed and bound in this style until well into the twentieth century, until the advent of digital technology when electronic texts returned to the unbound scroll. With the coming of print came the closing of the manuscripts and as Frollo predicted, the civilisation of the cathedral became the “civilisation of the book” (Derrida 1976:3).

Conclusion The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages were monumental achievements. Large in size, breathtaking in their artistry, they are in effect a micro version of the great cathedral. Illuminators of the medieval manuscript attempted to emulate, as closely as they possibly could, the ‘peak experience’ of the cathedral by glorifying God’s Word, into another unified total work - the book. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the previously hand illuminated parchments and the close association of the cathedral to the book, began to fade. As the book changed from the of radiant illuminated manuscript to the black and white printed book and Suger’s ‘peak experience’ of reading the vera lux, as the ‘wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows,’ was lost. A culture of the cathedral became a culture of the book, as the book object itself became separated from the cathedral and secular in its reach. The printed book condensed the architecture of colour, light, sound and experience of the senses into a small compact ‘ and portable ‘building,’ and a society of science and logic.

No longer a peak experience, brought on by the reading of a sensuous environment, the book now provided the inner experience of the individual mind. Print media saw the end of the reading sites of the Middle Ages, the cathedral and

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the illuminated manuscript, into the single dominant reading site of the printed book. The advent of digital technology sees a reversal of the book’s domination and the return of the multimodal reading site. The Medieval idea of the book as the great book in stone resonates at the very heart of the book in the New Media Age. In the new medium of the computer, moveable type has become moveable everything and the next chapter looks at how this new culture of the screen might effect the book as a material object.

Some fragments of parchment had faded, others permitted the glimpse of an image’s shadow, or the ghost of one or more words.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 500

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Chapter 3

D E C O N S T R U C T I O N

P R I M E Around 7.30, shortly before daybreak

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DISMANTLING THE BOOK

If you write with a goose quill you scratch the sweaty pages and keep stopping to dip for ink. Your thoughts go too fast for your aching wrist. If you type, the letters cluster together, and again you must go at the poky pace of the mechanism, not the speed of your synapses. But with him (it? her?) your fingers dream, your mind brushes the keyboard, you are born on golden pinions, at least you confront the light of critical reason with the happiness of a first encounter.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 25

Introduction Faster than a goose quill or typewriter, no longer held back by the ‘poky pace’ of mechanisation, digital technology now delivers information at the ‘speed of our synapses’ and like the printing press before it, once more changes the design and our perceptions of the book. Since the mid-eighties, the term “deconstruction” has served as a label for the practice of “chopped-up, layered, and fragmented forms, often imbued with ambiguous futuristic overtones,” in architecture and graphic design (Lupton & Miller 1996:3). Located within the work of Jacques Derrida, who initiated the theory of deconstruction, a critical theory of typography was practiced in United States art programmes, exerting considerable influence on graphic design (Lupton & Miller1963). However, while academics debated the theories of deconstruction, David Carson’s studio became the “epicentre of a new graphic ant-aesthetic” that fuelled a debate over the boundaries of typographic convention and legibility. Carson’s work, which deconstructed modernist typographic convention, prompted Neville Brody to coin the much-quoted phrase, “the end of print,” expressing his view that Carson’s work ended the typographic design paradigms of print media. (Krayna 1996:162). Like McLuhan’s “global village,” subsequent commentators used “the end of print” to describe, not only the philosophical issues of typographic design, but also the effects of digital technology on print media as a whole, including the book. The book was being deconstructed, along with radio, film, television and newspapers and reconstituted

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in a multimedia machine, the world of cyberspace1. It seems we were now leaving the global village and entering a “city of bits” (Mitchell 1995:24).2

The consequences of this shift to the electronic, was evidenced in 2001 when the Powerhouse Museum held an exhibition of Leonardo de Vinci’s famous notebook, The Codex Leicester. A year before at the National Art Gallery another rare and beautiful artefact, The Book of Kells had been exhibited, displaying one spread of the book on each day of the exhibition’s duration. The Codex Leicester on the other hand had been deconstructed, unbound, and dislocated from its book context, its pages separated into single sheets and displayed behind acrylic panels suspended so both sides of the page were accessible as texts but Da Vinci’s ‘codex’ no longer exists. While the contents can be viewed as manuscript documents in a museum they are no longer, as they were intended, in the form of a book. The Codex Leicester, as the name suggests, was originally created as a book; a physical object with all its unique attributes. Now it can now only be viewed on display or via a Microsoft CD ROM, where it is reconstructed in bits and bytes on the screen of a personal computer. Da Vinci’s The Codex Leicester now resides in cyberspace.

In this chapter, the idea of the book as an architectural space, a concept that has its origins in the Middle Ages, is proposed as a new ‘reading site’ in the present age of computer mediation. As people have become more aware of the power of digital communication, regarding the effects of the personal computer as profound as Gutenberg’s moveable type has already become a commonplace analogy (Landow 1992, Wozencroft 1994, Bolter 2001, Man 2002). The effects of new media technologies on the design of the book are considered in this chapter by drawing parallels between the cathedral and the computer, and the introduction of print media technology in the fifteenth century and the digital media technology of the present day.

1 The term, cyberspace, was coined by William Gibson in his science fiction novel, Neuromancer. The book is historically significant as the first ‘cyberpunk’ novel and caught the imagination of a computer culture. The proliferation of references to Gibson’s terminology ead to the concept of cyberspace to describe the ‘space’ one occupies when using a computer (Brians 2003).

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READING THE SCREEN

The screen is a galaxy of thousands of asteroids, all in a row, white or green, and you have created them for yourself. Fiat, Lux, Big Bang, seven days, seven minutes, seven seconds, and a universe is born before your eyes, a universe in constant flux, where sharp lines in space and time do not exist.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 26

The Gothic cathedral was a reading site where the text surrounding the reader was represented in multiple modes; soaring spaces filled with coloured light, the echo of voices, the sound of music, the spectacle of ritual, and the sight of images glowing in glass and carved in stone, all contributed to the interpretation of the cathedral as a Text. All of the human senses were engaged in the immersive reading experience of the Gothic cathedral, but it was above all the presence of light, Suger’s lux nova, or “new light.” The “new light” of the Gothic cathedral was of paramount importance in attaining the mystical experience Suger strove to achieve in his design. The result was the creation of an alternate world where the immaterial could be experienced in the world of the material.

Human senses are once more engaged in the immersive reading experience of the new media space of the computer, where the presence of light is a dominating principle in its design. “New light” is one of the unique characteristics of today’s electronic media and means that computer mediation is not only changing the way books are produced and distributed, but also our idea about what a book is. We now read the electronic ‘page’ of the computer with light projected through the screen, whereas the printed page is read in light reflected from it. Electronic ‘books’ are multimedial environments, combining light, sound, action, image and text, whereas the medium of the printed book is monomodal. The electronic book exists in a virtual space, while printed books exist in the physical world. These unique characteristics of electronic media mean that graphic designers will need to consider the design of the physical form of the book itself. E-books, as they exist

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today, are merely digital simulations of the ‘old’ print pages presented on new electronic screens. However, if the idea of the book as a printed object was not our only point of reference, there may be other ways to conceive the design of books with a new, electronic, digital medium. For example, if that reference point was not the two-dimensional form of the printed page but the three-dimensional form of a cathedral, the idea of the book as an architectural space might be considered feasible. An electronic book that simulates an architectural space might offer a unique reading experience where the text is one of images, sounds, and action, as well as words.

Reading Multimedia Multi media is a unique feature of computer mediation. It was also a feature of the great cathedrals during the Middle Ages. The computer employs a range of diverse media, converged into a multimedia environment. In contrast, the printed book employs a single medium, that of print. Books electronically generated on a computer screen presently reproduce a simulation of the print medium. The multimedia capacity of the electronic media, however, offers an opportunity for book designers to exploit the potential of those multimedia qualities more fully.3 This requires a shift in the concept of the two dimensional page as the space where texts are read to a three-dimensional textual environment. As it happens, history provides us with an example of a multimedia environment that functioned as a book, from which we can draw an analogy. Having examined the way the cathedral was used to instruct, educate and tell a story, the correlation between the structure of the cathedral and the construction of a multimedia interface becomes apparent.

A significant aspect of computer mediation is the emphasis increasingly placed on the image, with many theorists predicting a future of reading pictures (Wertheim

3 In a roundtable discussion with Jennifer Ley, Johanna Drucker advises that designers who a re directly involved in production have a different relation to the potential of the medium than those who merely use it reproductively. This is true of print designers and no less so in an electronic environment. The time-based and navigation-intensive features of user interfaces are “simply different from those of print media.” She believes changes will come “when expectations are retailored to meet the medium” (Ley 2000:4). Drucker points out, there are significant features that shift user expectations and these need to be “codified into forms, and also, into behaviours” (ibid).

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1999, 27, Kress 2003). Text messages become video messages as researchers strive to turn an increasing expanse of information into visually comprehensible forms. The convergence of multiple media in the environment of the computer has ushered in a reading of texts that shares many of the attributes of the Medieval reading experience, where the cathedral served to educate the populace in the dominant worldview. Like a Medieval congregation, players of computer games and surfers of the web read allegorical and metaphorical signs to make their way through a space where the narrative is experienced in a multimedia, four dimensional, virtual world of ‘walls’, ‘windows’, scripts, music, and active participation.4 New kinds of immersive narrative are emerging in which the “reader” interacts in new ways with a fictional environment that George Landow believes has already taken us beyond the printed book (Nunberg 1996:209). He argues that the printed book is no longer the central technology of cultural memory, as sales of print media fall behind those of the digital technologies of video, television computer games and the Internet. These are environments that use electric light, sound, action, and image, as well as computerised text, to tell a story. In the future, a generation familiar with the multimedia environment of the Internet and computer games, will find narratives presented in computer generated environments provide an experience that, in the words of Michael Benedikt “can be seen as an extension…of our age-old capacity and need to dwell in fiction, to dwell enlightened and empowered on other, mythic planes” (Nunberg 1996:233).

The multimedia capacity of the computer has a number of implications for the designers of the electronic books of the future, challenging them to desist in emulating the medium of print and to fully realise the potential of this new media technology. While the printed book engages the reader through the medium of the two-dimensional page, the multimedia nature of the computer provides designers

4 Stephen Johnson compares the cathedral and the computer when he argues, “the medieval mind couldn't take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartre or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disappearing act. It makes information sensible to you by keeping most of it from view- for the simple reason that "most of it" is far too multitudinous to imagine in a single thought” (Johnson 1997:239).

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with new opportunities to create books that exploit the third-dimension, and the use of light, sound, movement and reader interactivity. In other words, the multimedia nature of the computer provides designers with a means of taking the reading experience into the architectural dimensions of cyberspace.5

Light-through Windows The transmission of light through illuminated screen ‘windows’ is a feature of computer mediation. It was also an integral part of the reading experience during the Middle Ages. Digital technology delivers the ultimate experience in graphic illumination as we read texts through ‘windows’ where light shines through the screen instead of on the page. Images are viewed on the screen with the vibrancy of light; vivid and saturated in colour like stained glass windows in a medieval cathedral (fig 1). Media theorist, Paul Levinson, in his study of Marshall McLuhan’s work, expands his theories of “light-through,” to include the computer, arguing that McLuhan came to an astonishing conclusion about television (Levinson 1999). McLuhan believed that television draws and commands our attention with “an almost hypnotic, religious intensity” because of the way our senses and brains respond to a "light -through" invitation. Stained glass windows partake of this sensory appeal. Books do not. However, McLuhan made an exception of the illuminated manuscript, which he saw as “the medieval simulation of light-through” (ibid). This ‘light-through’ invitation is an observation that Levinson extends to the computer where, he explains, …light not only flows to us through our computers from a myriad of different hypertexted places, but we reach back into the computer and out to real and virtual worlds… the common ingredient in both light through experiences is something beyond, something we do not already fully know, in a word: the future (Levinson 1999:103).

The illuminated characteristic of computer technology is one that defines the use of electronic media. The electronic light of digital media enables a reading of text that moves away from the confines of the printed page and into the realms of a hypermediated light filled space. All texts are virtual texts when encountered on

5 The striving for logical order that drove the design of the cathedral is also a factor in the paradigm of cyberspace. Cyberspace is not just a physical space, it is, according to Margaret Werthiem, “above all a logical network” (Wertheim 1999:303)

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the screen (Landow 1992:18-19). Unlike physical print on physical paper, computer-generated texts are a form of ‘double coding’6 where texts are a combination of the old and the new, a kind of reverse palimpsest, the new digital code ‘hidden beneath’ the old print code. In her research into electronic texts, Katherine Hayles distinguishes the screen code from the printed code as being deeply layered rather than two-dimensional: When signifiers appear on the computer screen, however, they are only the top layer of a complex system of interrelated processes. Marks on screen may manifest themselves as simple inscriptions to a user, but properly understood they are the visible, tangible results of coding instructions executed by the machine in a series of interrelated processes, from a high-level programming language like Java all the way down to assembly language and binary code (Hayles 2005:1).

This also means that texts and images exist in an electronic, virtual state, are able to be constantly and instantly manipulated in a way that a printed book cannot. Not only can the reader of electronic texts, index, annotate, copy, disassemble, recompose and move texts, they can create new texts from fragments that have been ‘cut-and-pasted’ modify them, rewrite them and make them their own (Chartier 1995). In an electronic palimpsest, the new media scribe ‘rewrites’ the medieval scribes whose diverse works were bound together in a single book where copies were made and commentaries, interpretations and combinations of fragmented texts, made the work their own. The qualities of electronic, highly mutable processes, like animation, affect what and how the marks we read signify (Hayles 2005). The immediacy of light, colour, sound, movement and the capacity for instant communication is separating the new media from the old and reflecting the semiotic the complexities of a medieval cathedral.

Virtual Cathedral Computer mediation provides a virtual experience of physical space. The architecture of the medieval cathedral strove to provide an experience of a metaphysical world. Throughout history our concepts of space have been endlessly changing and as Margaret Wertheim in her book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, argues there is a sense in which we have manifested an electronic space of mind,

6 The term ‘double coding’ was coined by Charles Jencks to mean “…the combination of Modern techniques combined with something else (usually a traditional building)” (Jencks 1989:19).

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When I go into cyberspace, my body remains at rest in my chair, but some aspect of me “travels” into another realm. I do not mean to imply here that I leave my body behind…What I am suggesting is that when I am interacting in cyberspace my “location” can no longer be fixed purely by co-ordinates in physical space…As with the medievals, we in the technologically charged West on the eve of the twenty first century increasingly contend with two phase reality. (Wertheim 1999:41:230).

Wertheim is speaking here of the importance of recognising the genuinely spatial nature of this domain. She points out that if contemporary scientists can envisage a whole range of non physical spaces; evolutionary spaces, topological spaces, algebraic spaces, metric spaces, even viral spaces, then cyberspace can also be seen as a legitimate space. Despite its lack of physicality, for many, cyberspace is a real place and that whatever its content may be, “a new ‘space’ is evolving” (Wertheim 1999:230-231). The perception of another space beyond the physical was also a medieval concept.

In the Middle Ages a vision of reality accommodated other kinds of space and philosophers of the time insisted on the reality of an immaterial, non-physical domain. Theirs was a dualistic cosmology consisting of both a physical order and a metaphysical order and these mirrored each other7 (Wertheim 1999). The architecture of the Gothic cathedral was designed to enhance this experience creating a space that gave a sense of leaving one world for another. Upon entering a cathedral like Chartres there is an immediate sense of the space bring ‘not quite of this world’.8 The stone construction and scale of the space causes sounds to be amplified as light streams through colour saturated, stained glass windows. The rich imagery of these windows and the stone statuary, intricately carved panels and soaring stone columns, all contribute to a sense of having been transported to

7 One of the effects of the scientific revolution that followed Gutenberg, was to erase the dualistic cosmology of the Middle Ages and to replace it with the monistic worldview of the Enlightenment, (Wertheim 1999: 37). However, Wertheim argues that cyberspace, while “not a religious construct per se,” is an attempt to construct “a technological substitute for the Christian space of heaven, and “cybernautic imagination” creates a sense of a dualistic cosmology, which Wertheim suggests is in essence a “repackaging” of a Medieval vision in a technological format (ibid: 21). 8 The concept of the computer interface being analogous with the medieval cathedral is noted by Stephen Johnson who observes that “where flying buttresses of Chartre rendered the kingdom of heaven in stone, the information-space on the monitor embodies… the otherwise invisible cotillion of zeros and ones whirling though our microchips” (Johnson 1997:43).

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another place, another space. The experience is one that affects worshipers and secular visitors alike. Given this experience of an architectural space that can inspire a transcendence of reality, it is not surprising that a Medieval scholar would stare out into this great book of stone and lament that the printed word would bring an end to this powerful “reading” experience. The architectural space of the cathedral immersed its readers within the architectural fabric of its text. The simulation of a virtual architectural space in the computer could also immerse the reader in an architectural fabric of digitalised image, symbols and sculptured texts (Saarenen 1994, Johnson 1997, Meadows 2002).

This ability to think of the computer-mediated environment as architecturally spatial will become increasingly significant as the technology evolves. In 1995 William Mitchell predicted, “…you will be able to immerse yourself in a simulated environment instead of just looking at them through a small rectangular window” (Mitchell 1995: 20). Seven years later Dianne Gromala, multimedia designer, has realised a ‘book’ environment in which you are indeed able to ‘immerse yourself’. Her interactive, virtual book, The Living Book of Senses, is “a new media form that extends the traditional book into a radically new sensorially interactive experience” (Gromala 2002:1). In developing this ‘living book,’ Gromala has shattered the rectangular window of the computer screen and replaced it with a virtual, multi-dimensional environment.

Each reader can view AR scenes from their own visual perspective. Users can fly into the immersive world and see each other represented as avatars in the same virtual scene. Readers remaining in the AR scene have a bird’s eye view of the other readers as miniature avatars in the virtual scene displayed on their headset. User-controlled dialogue with the book elicits responses/answers from the book (expressed in digital data: visual, textual, auditory). As users simultaneously interact with the book in the physical and virtual realms, the book responds to individual and multiple physical states (via biofeedback) to express resulting changes in narrative. This virtual narrative is described by Gromala as a “cultural history of the senses” (Gromala 2002:1).

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Furthermore, an attempt to create a “peak experience” in The Living Book of Senses is clearly evident in Gromala’s description of her ‘book’ where the reader becomes “aware of their sensorial experience and bodily states.” Gromala explains how users, wearing a headset/head-tracker/colour camera system, … are able to see their physical surroundings while dynamically engaging with three-dimensional mixed realities which appear on their headsets. Users can interact with the book in dynamic ways that go beyond mere clicking and pointing. They can ask the book questions (via voice recognition), and can influence the book through their sensory (bio) feedback. Thus the book becomes a powerful new sensory experience (Gromala 2002:1).

A sensory experience that takes them ‘out of this world.’ Designers like Gromala transcend beliefs of what has been, to what is and what might soon be. They constantly deal with unknown futures where the products they design exist in their imagination long before they are manifested in reality. The technology that is taking us into the future has potential we have not yet begun to comprehend. So is the consideration of a future book as a conceptually architectural space we can enter too far a stretch of the imagination? Perhaps, but as James O’Donnell says, It takes several generations to get past the point of depending on the old medium for a way to think about the new and to get to the point of exploiting the new medium artfully in its own right (O’Donnell 2000:42).

Today an encyclopaedia is more likely to be found in a CD ROM, where knowledge is viewed through the ‘stained glass window’ of a computer (fig 2), than in a medieval cathedral, or a printed book. However, when congregations meet on the Internet, they enter an environment that echoes the light-through architectural experience of the Middle Ages.9 New media technologies delivering

9 Umberto Eco in his 2003 lecture on the future of the book, describes how for the Medieval congregation, moral principles, deeds of national history, and elementary notions of geography and natural sciences, were provided by the images of a cathedral. “ A Medieval cathedral” he explained, “was a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV programme that was supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday life, as well as for their eternal salvation” (Eco 2003: 3). Moreover, Stephen Johnson, writing in Interface Culture, extends this idea further when he adds, “The process of imagining the world through spatial organization is hardly limited to the sacred text of the Gothic cathedral... All works of architecture imply a worldview, which means that all architecture is in some deeper sense political... The way we choose to organize our space says more than any other component of our cultural habits… In an age of information, the metaphors we use to comprehend all those zeros and ones are as central, and as meaningful, as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The social life of that time revolved around the spires and buttresses of “infinity imagined.” Our own lives now revolve around a more prosaic text: the computer

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computer mediated environments, by new spaces for writing and reading information, are challenging our perceptions of what constitutes a text and the idea of the book. Like the medieval cathedral, an emphasis on the third dimension, images and symbols used in the interpretation of narrative, might well bring a new form of ‘reading’ in the virtual ‘architectural space’ of the computer.

Architectural Reading Site Graphic designers have traditionally worked with the two dimensional space of print media, but if they must now work with the third and fourth dimensions of this evolving multimedia environment, the process of design must incorporate an appreciation for these new spatial understandings. Unlike the sequential ordering that serves print media, multimedia offers multiple avenues through the interactive narrative, and although these are digital rather than physical, the process of orientation has parallels to three-dimensional space. By accepting this concept of new media space as essentially architectural, the book becomes a new space to enter and occupy. Karen Wenz refers to a multimedia interface as a new “architectural entrance” that allows us to overstep the borderline between the real and the virtual (Wenz 2003).

Wenz argues that spatial concepts are applied as metaphorical extensions to other fields of experience and that when players navigate their way around a computer game for example, they use the spatial metaphor of physical space by creating a mental model of the game’s architecture (Wenz 2003). While acknowledging that there is a difference between computer games and a written narrative, a significant overlap between them means that the cybertextual nature of computer games suggests a potential for multimedia books. Whereas good novels create believable worlds in our minds though the printed word, computer games can also present rich believable narratives as interactive, three dimensional digital worlds in which the reader is immersed. Unlike film, television or printed books, players can ‘move about’ within a ‘text’ of images, symbols, music, light and sound, choosing any desktop.” (Johnson 1997:43-45) Television and the Internet, as the cultural disseminators of moral principles, deeds of national history, elementary geography and natural science programmes do seem to offer ‘everything indispensable for their everyday life, as well as for their eternal salvation.’

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360° point of view at every location, and being actively engaged in how the story unfolds. Rather than being a passive reader, they engage in a form of co- authorship.

Designer, researcher and writer, Mark Meadows, has also researched the reading and interactivity of these multi media spaces where storytelling, visual imagery and reader interaction meet, in his book, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. Here he maintains that designers of these new emerging book forms must consider the use of narrative and architecture, 3D and 4D imagery and principles of interaction with “place and space,” as they bring new design forms into existence, saying, An interactive narrative could provide multiple perspectives and different ways to look at the world of that narrative…This is the primary benefit to three- dimensional, interactivity imagery (such as architectural drive-throughs), but it’s also a nifty means of building suspense, thickening the plot… The architect’s role, like the narrator’s is to frame the beginnings, middles and endings of passages through a building in such a way that the building serves its function first… the architects role-especially when presenting multiple options to a visitor- becomes almost identical to the role of an author of interactive narrative. (Meadows 2003:170).

Virtual reality narrative forms are becoming commonplace in computer games and interactive narratives like The Living Book, and as Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen discovered, the medium does affect the reading. Comparing a pilgrim who experiences the stations of the cross in a cathedral, and the viewer of a Hollywood epic of the life of Jesus, they conclude that, “each experiences the narrative in deeply different ways, in a deeply different manner, as an effect of the physical and semiotic work of the narrator” (Kress & Leeuwen 2001:132). This is not a question of the profundity of the experience, but of the differences of that experience “as a result of its modal realisation” (ibid). While the potential of virtual reality narrative is not fully known, what is known is that reading a screen is not the same as reading a book.

Between the Age of Cathedrals with illuminated windows and the Age of Computers with illuminated screens, Gutenberg’s printing press enabled knowledge to be disseminated in the form of the printed book for over 500 years.

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It is the form of the book we are most familiar with today, but Gutenberg’s invention took the dissemination of text out of the cathedral and into the hands of the masses. Today the computer, in the hands of the masses, is delivering a multimedia environment where the reader is immersed in a text where coloured light, sound, images, words, and active participation are all, once more, part of the reading experience. Emerging with this new media technology, one that has stepped beyond the ‘old room’ of print into a digital wonderland, is a an new way of thinking about the book, as the computer creates a multimodal reading site for a New Media Age.

READING THE IBOOK

The letters bubble indolently to the surface, they emerge from nothingness and obediently return to nothingness, dissolving like ectoplasm. It’s an underwater symphony of soft linkings and unlinkings, a gelatinous dance of self-devouring moons, like the big fish in the Yellow Submarine.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 26

New media demands a reconsideration of form that reflects a post-modern ideology, a visual style that privileges fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity, and that unlike the book, offers no physical beginning, middle or end (Bolter & Grusin 2000). Released from the rigid dictates of a structural system conceived in terms of the typographic unit of print media, the once familiar portrait format of the two-dimensional printed page is now reoriented into the landscape format of the multi-dimensional digital screen (fig 3). Previous innovations in the production of printed text altered the structure of the book in fairly superficial ways but the technological possibilities of multiple screens, pop- up boxes, hypertext and being able to jump from one page on the Web to any of the other fifty million, means that this new medium “is more like theatre than print” (McMillan 1998: 166). With the advent of electronic media, new readings

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of photography, film, and television have infiltrated perceptions of what defines a text or what defines a book. The design paradigms of print and typographic text are no longer the principle directives for delivering the message in the digital world of the twenty first century.

Reading Media In Johnny Mnemonic the film based on William Gibson’s story, a priest is observed reading from a large lectern Bible, but on closer inspection we see that he is actually reading from a computer screen embedded in its pages delivering the message, and the book itself is merely an historical artefact (Gibson 1995). The book is no longer a site of knowledge, for in this futuristic fiction, information is implanted into the brain. However, it is a good illustration of the ides of a new media being embedded in the old. Gutenberg’s Bible, a book without parallel today, was a transitional medium, a new media product embedded in an old media shell, the illuminated manuscript. An analogy can be drawn between Gutenberg’s Bible and today’s Macintosh ‘iBook’, for both are examples of a transitional medium that takes the form of an older medium and refashions it in the medium of a new technology.

The iBook laptop looks like more like a book than a computer (fig 4). Like the small versions of illuminated manuscripts made for travelling monks, this computer is human body size, fits in the hand, is portable and illuminated. The book-like design of the iBook is a requisition of the book’s familiar form, a metaphor for a respected carrier of knowledge. This is no surprise, for the book is an icon that in art, films, university heraldry and television documentaries, is an image of a traditional book which adds authority and conveys mastery of content (Frost 2002a). The use of the book as a symbolic authority is also noted by Alberto Manguel when he writes, When an authority figure is interviewed in a documentary or news broadcast (a politician, doctor or lawyer for example), they are more often than not placed in front of a bookcase or shelf lined with books. Books denote knowledge and a great number of books in the presence of the interviewee, infers a great deal of knowledge. Thus they are perceived as an authority on the subject of the interview. Possession of books implies a certain social position and an intellectual richness, so much so that interior decorators often line a wall with yards of books,

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creating the illusion of a library that lends the owner the impression of intellectual power (Manguel 1997:214).

Its A4 format is thin enough to fit on a bookshelf, carry under the arm (fig 5), and be read on your lap as comfortably as any book. It feels like a book, (its as heavy as a Bible) is aimed at students, and like Aldus’ books of the fifteenth century, is designed for a portability of capacity and freedom from the desk.10 These observations suggest the book represents a symbolism of the transmission of knowledge has been invested in the design of the iBook.

In fact, the design of the iBook resembles the original codex prototype, invented by the Romans before the full codex contained pages. In Greece and Rome, where scrolls were used for reading and writing texts, private missives were unusually written “on small, hand-held reusable wax tablets, protected by raised edges and decorated covers” (Manguel 1997: 128). These were considered by many to be the first form of the codex, the two rectangular covers being ‘hinged’ on one side with leather thongs so when the covers were folded closed, the wax inside was protected. The laptop computer is simply an electronic version of these; in the Roman codices the wax written on with a stylus, erased and used again in just the same way the screen of the laptop is erased and reused. Perhaps then we should not be surprised that inside the laptop we also find the scroll.

The Mackintosh iBook is a new media technology, refashioning the contents of an older book media. Digital ‘type’ appears on the ‘paper’ of the iBook screen, the old media of print media in the new media of the computer. Like Gutenberg’s Bible, where hand illumination and printed texts existed simultaneously, printed image and text are now read in digitalised codes. The iBook is the metaphorical ‘book of light’ designed to be read in a New Media Age.

10 In the Middle Ages, it was common to chain valuable manuscripts to long wide lecterns situated in a special room, so that books could be read but not removed. A Medieval library set up with these chained book lecterns could, as Henry Petroski says, “easily be mistaken by a modern visitor as a chapel fitted with pews”(Petroski 2000:65). Perhaps a more fitting analogy might be that they be mistaken for a university classroom or library set out with rows of computers anchored to the desk via electronic cabling.

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Remediation It was media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who first drew attention to the fact that, the content of any medium is always another medium so that, just as the content of writing is speech, the written word is the content of print (McLuhan 2001). It seems that each new medium takes an older one as its content, for when faced with a totally new situation, “we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past.11 We look at the present through a rear-view mirror” (McLuhan & Fiore 1996). In their book, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define this phenomenon as remediation, “the specific way in which a new innovation reinterprets the old and familiar one” (Bolter&Grusin 2000:45). By identifying evidence of this process throughout the history of western visual representation, they have observed how a new media emerging from within a cultural context, refashions other media embedded in the same or similar context. They argue that visual technologies, such as digital graphics, are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: “presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media” (ibid:5). When Gutenberg reproduced the Gothic script of the scribe, he wanted to make a new technology seem ‘old’ and familiar, and so was in fact remediating the manuscript by refashioning and improving a version the ‘old media.’

By making reference to the older media of print and using the metaphor of the book in its design, the iBook is also a remediation of the book, still connected to the technology of its most recent media form, by emulating ‘pages’ on the screen. But there were further reverberations of the intentions of the fifteenth century printers, when, in 1971 Michael Hart set out to make books available to the public

11 Umberto Eco has another view of McLuhan’s “rear-view-mirror” in his theory of interpretation. “Often, when faced with an unknown phenomenon, we react by approximation: we seek that scrap of content, already present in our encyclopaedia, which for better or worse seems to account for the new fact” (Eco 2000:57). Eco explains this process with a story of Marco Polo describing an unknown object, a rhinoceroses, by drawing an analogy with another known animal, a unicorn, “rather than resegment the content by adding a new animal to the universe of the living, he has corrected the contemporary description of unicorns, so that, if they existed, they would be as they saw them and not as the legend described them. He has modified the intension and left the extension unchanged” (ibid).

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in forms a vast majority of people could easily read, reproduced indefinitely in any number of copies (Project Gutenberg 2002). Project Gutenberg reproduces the great classics from Gutenberg’s Bible to Alice in Wonderland, rather than creating newly authored texts, more suited to the medium (fig 6).12 This endeavour echoes the aspirations of early printers,13 and these books seem less a new technological innovation than a palimpsest, where the old media print books have been erased and rewritten in new media documents. Perhaps this approach to the new technology could be exhibiting the legacy of ordanatio, the system of reasoning and long-standing principles of textual presentation, established in the Middle Ages, as Andrew Taylor reasons, After all, modern academic buildings (with their lecture halls and, for the more privileged, monastic quadrangles), corporate structures (with their largely self- licensing and self-governing professoriate), hierarchies of degrees, and traditions of textural commentary are all based on Medieval models. Modern web-sites, with their elaborate hierarchy of information and their privileging of visual over the acoustic data are a continuation of this tradition (Taylor 2005).

Nonetheless, printed books are still the central artefacts for the containment of memory in a literate culture (Margolin 1989:157). So even though digital imaging has won the media crown, it has also freed print to become the pride and glory of the publishing kingdom. As we have seen, superseded technologies often become appreciated not merely for their information but “for the sheer pleasure of experiencing them” (Levison1999:103). As medium after medium becomes content on the Internet, Paul Levinson expects we will see a commensurate increase in an appreciation of those older media as art, and temporal anchors in an ever increasingly ephemeral world, …the difference between the words in books and on computer screens, is more than aesthetic... the book... serves as a reliable, enduring “centre” of the information on its pages in comparison to the continuous change of letters on the computer screen. Indeed our continuing need for centres-for knowing that the

12 In the fifteenth century, print inspired new forms of writing like Montaigne’s ‘essays’ and the first true novel of the medium, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, 1554 (Man 2002). Today there are also an increasing number of ‘electronic authors’ who are writing works specifically for the new medium of the screen (see Katherine Hayles discussion of Lexia Perplexia in her book Writing Machines 2002). 13 With the Renaissance came a rising interest in ancient knowledge and printed books, such as the Ten Books of Vitruvius, were providing reproductions of past histories previously held in a few rare manuscripts. “What sold fast” according to John Man, was “good old-fashioned dross: astrology, alchemy and esoteric lore” catering to a belief that “the past was a treasury of ancient wisdom” (Man 2002:253).

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words we expect will be on a given page whenever we look at it - is the likely reason that books will continue as an important medium in the 21st century and after (Levinson 1999:103).

Communication of the spoken word, transformed by the alphabet, translated by the scribe, transfixed by the printer, now transcends the confines of the physical limitations of the page and is embraced in a new media world of ‘divine light.’

Electronic Illumination Digital technology is delivering the ultimate experience in graphic illumination, the awe-inspiring magic of a ‘stained glass’ window view into the World Wide Web (fig 7). This is a brave new media world of an electronically mediated, totally spatial environment, envisioned in William Mitchell’s book, City of Bits, (1995) as a place where information is delivered in increasingly multimodal forms, and devices such as data gloves, data suits and intelligent second skins, sense gestures and serve as touch output systems (Mitchell 1995:19). In reviewing the shift from book space to cyberspace he makes the comment, Gutenberg’s revolution created places where printed information was concentrated and controlled. But electronic, digital information has a radically different logic. It is immaterial; rather than bonded to paper or plastic sheets, it is almost instantaneously transferable to any place that has a network connection... (ibid).

Here type no longer resides in the book, it travels in cyberspace. The boundary traditionally drawn by the edges of the computer screen are eroding as the reader becomes immersed in a simulated virtual environment where interior walls form electronically activated windows open into a new media world. The monastic scribes who created the medieval illuminated manuscripts, were seeking to capture the sacredness of light on their parchment pages. We can now do what they could only dream of. The ‘light-through’ experience of the computer takes us closer to the awe inspiring magic of cathedral space as we light up the ‘illuminated ‘compuscripts’ of our digital screens and receive the multimodal messages of a new virtual ‘cathedral’

Cyberspace is beaconing designers into the future towards a multimediated, environment where the book expands into light. Digitally mediated delivery of

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information may eventually claim a media space of its own leaving print media behind, just as print media left the old technology before it. The iBook may appear to be a substitute for the book, but it is in fact a ‘Gutenberg’s Bible’14 and a new medium yet to develop to its fullest potential. Surviving over five centuries, the printed book is a integral part of our cultural heritage and as Neil Gershenfeld notes, … the pleasure in seeing a Gutenberg Bible is knowing that Gutenberg held the same object that you are looking at, drawing a connection across centuries between you and him and everyone else who has come in between. Electronic books will be able to do everything that printed books can do, but one. They can’t replace the primacy of an historical artefact (Gershenfeld, 1999:29).

Books will always provide an aesthetic pleasure of the senses that electronic books deny but if we consider the implications of the new media technology of print in the 16th century, then the trends or tendencies that were dominant in that period of extraordinary change, might give some insight into possible developments ahead. William Mitchell reminds us that for us, as they were for Gutenberg, “massive and unstoppable changes are underway…If we understand what is happening, and if we can conceive and explore alternative futures, we can find opportunities to intervene, sometimes to resist, to organise, to legislate, and to design” (Mitchell 2000:5). Throughout history, the basic architecture of the book and the design of the printed page conformed to a structural style, a style that has changed little since its inception in the Middle Ages.

The designer of today works with resources that did not exist a mere decade ago as the digital age transforms the tools available and the processes by which creative ideas are realised (Blackwell 1995). The book form we are so familiar with today will continue to hold its position of primacy as an historical link with the

14Alan Kay, a Xerox researcher in the early 1970s, like Gutenberg, came up with a way of reproducing texts that revolutionized information technology by imagining a computer as an environment, “a virtual world” (Johnson 1997:47). Technicians had used the computer for decades but the release of this technology into the hands of "the ordinary man" revolutionized information dissemination. Gutenberg had imitated the familiar when he printed his Bible, and familiarity was the key factor in making the computer easy enough for anyone to use. “The solution of the original designers could be one of the most significant design decisions in information history, altering not only our perceptions of computer mediation but of our real-world environment” (ibid).

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past while growing ever more desirable as an object in its own right, but reflecting on historical analogies of technological change, may help to illuminate new media concepts of what constitutes a book so that we take ‘opportunities to intervene,’ and become graphic illuminators of a brave New Media Age.

Conclusion The computer, as an architectural space, attempts in its vastness, storage capacity, and immersive experience, to fulfill the medieval idea of the book, a space to contain all knowledge. The encyclopaedia in stone is now an encyclopaedia in light. Although many new media enthusiasts have suggested, “nothing like cyberspace has existed before” there is an important historical parallel with the “spatial dualism of the Middle Ages” (Wertheim 1999:229). Today we are entering a new dualism as the Internet reveals a new architectural reading site of the virtual world “of heaven” and the printed book a second reading site of the material world “on earth.” Speed, colour, light, sound, movement and instant communication may eventually separate the new from the old media, the book remaining as a residual art form while the screen takes information towards new forms of information delivery we are only just beginning to realise, Today, light not only flows to us through our computers from a myriad of different hypertexted places, but we reach back into the computer and out to real and virtual worlds…(to) something beyond, something we do not already fully know, in a word: the future (Levinson 1999:103).

The aim of the medievalists’ ‘total work’, and the Renaissance aspiration to create a library containing all books remains an obsession, perhaps one only now to be fully realized, as texts shed the physical limitation of books and are relocated in cyberspace. Fragments, quotations and amputated stumps of books can be found in the library of the Internet where, like the librarian in Eco’s Name of the Rose, Google holds the key to this labyrinthine library. To access the books in this library, “he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give to the [researcher] who requests it” (Eco 1996:37).

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In a search for the word labyrinth in this electronic library, among the thousands of possible titles listed, is Christopher Keep’s Electronic Labyrinth. A website dedicated to critical writing about the future of the book, the nomenclature of the site acknowledges the maze15 like complexity and architectural nature of this virtual space. Here texts on screen are presented as hypertexts, fragments, pieces, lexis or ‘bits’ of texts connected to other ‘bits’ of texts, and meaning is made by whoever ‘binds’ them together. Eco’s description of Adso searching through the ruins of the once great library lamenting that, “mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disecta membra of the library a message might reach me” could equally describe a search through the labyrinth of the ‘Google library.’ In December 2004, the dominant Internet search engine “Google,” announced its intention to make offline information available online in its Print Library Project. Their goal was to “maintain the pre-eminence of books and libraries in our increasingly Internet-centric culture by making these information resources an integral part of the online experience” (Googleprint 2005). Specifically they are working with Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and the University of Oxford who is offering the collections of the Bodleian Library so beloved by William Morris. Director of Oxford University Library Services said, Making the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the Bodleian Library’s historic collections accessible to as many people as possible is at the heart of Oxford University’s commitment to lifelong learning (Research Buzz 2005).

An expansion of this programme into university libraries, sees the vision of the Middle Age ‘idea of the book’ and the encyclopedia, like Project Gutenberg, being revisited in the electronic space of the World Wide Web of a New Media Age. This new electronic book space must now be set aside for future researchers to consider, for the next chapter focuses on the effects of new media on the printed book and reveals that the ‘end of print’ has turned out to be a “false text” (Eco

15 The word, labyrinth, is often used when describing a maze. A maze is a structure with choices of pathways and hidden goals, whereas a labyrinth has just one pathway leading to the centre and back to the entrance albeit on a circuitous course (Saward 2003). The labyrinth represents a narrative structure of the book while the maze seems to describe the nature of the Internet. So perhaps Christopher Keep’s website might be better named, Electonic Maze.

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2001:459). Far from the end of print or the death of the book, in the twenty first century, reading from a screen is not the same as reading from a book.

At the end of my reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.

UMBERTO ECO 1989: 500

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Chapter 4

R E C O N S T R U C T I O N

T E R C E The hour around 9.00am

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REDESIGNING THE BOOK

To read a computer screen is not the same as to read a book.

UMBERTO ECO in NUNBERG 1996: 300

Introduction Gunther Kress insists that a theory of reading relating to the alphabet alone is no longer tenable and that reading as a process needs to extend beyond alphabetic writing to include other modes. He takes the position that “the increasingly and insistently more multimodal forms of contemporary texts make it essential to rethink our notions of what reading is” (Kress 2003:141). We can therefore expect this domination of the screen to have profound effects on the way we engage with the world, and therefore on the forms and shapes of knowledge (Kress 2003).

Clearly then, new approaches to book design are required. As much of the textual content, previously delivered in the codex format of the book, makes its way into cyberspace, the book as a physical object, is being liberated as an object of desire, an aesthetic artefact, and work of art. This aesthetic status of the book accompanied the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, for although these magnificent volumes were certainly valued and desired at the time of their making, they became even more valuable as printing took hold. Even after the advent of printing, Renaissance princes still commissioned the artists of the illuminated manuscript to produce the Humanist codices collected by galleries, museums, and private devotees of beautiful books and fine art ever since.

New media is changing the design of the book as a material object. This chapter begins by considering the way in which new media is refashioning print media. Then the effects on the book by the new media shift towards the dominance of the image are examined. A third discussion then considers the intensification of the print media attributes in book design as an effect of the cultural repositioning of information from the page to the screen.

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READING SITE

To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 459

The way we read text will be inextricably altered for, as Roger Chartier writes, the historical and distinct significations of a text “are inseparable from the material conditions and physical forms that make the text available to the reader” and “to read on the screen is not to read in a codex”(Chartier1995:18). The argument that digital technology would see the end of the book has proven to be a “false text,” for the text represented on a computer monitor is no longer the same when represented in a book, anymore than a text carved on the cathedral wall is the same as that written in a Medieval manuscript, as Roger Chartier argues, When the “same “text is apprehended through very different mechanisms of representation, it is no longer the same. Each of its forms obeys specific conventions that mould and shape the work according to the laws of that form and connect it, in differing ways, with other arts, other genres, and other texts (Chartier 1995:2)

Reading from a screen, where words appear and disappear until fixed into place with a keystroke, has a different status and affects us differently from the permanency of words on the printed page (Birkerts 1994:154). The semiotic environment has begun to alter moving away from fixity toward fluidity, from stability toward flux, as a direct consequence of technological transformation (Finemore 1997: 195). The specific conventions of new media technology are moulding and shaping texts according to the laws of the screen and connecting them, in differing ways, with other arts and other texts in a multimodal discourse1 of a New Media Age.

1 Multimodal Discourse is the term used by Gunter Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen to describe their semiotic theory of communication ‘for the age of interactive multimedia.” They explain their multimodal theory of communication as focusing on the semiotic resources of communication, the modes and media used, and the communicative practices in which these resources are used (Kress 2001).

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Multimodal Discourse The book is refashioned as the design of print media is modified to reflect the multimodal reading experience of the electronic screen. After 500 years of the medium of the book as the main site for written texts, the medium of the screen offers an alternative reading experience. In one way this sees the return of the multimodal experience of the dual reading sites in the Middle Ages. As we have seen, the cathedral was the reading site of popular culture, while the illuminated manuscript was a reading site of the literate elite. Since the arrival of the printing press, Western culture has shown a distinct preference for monomodality, favouring the highly valued genre of writing in “dense pages of print” a dominance that more recently has begun to reverse (Kress & Leeuwen 2001). In the New Media Age, the multimodal screen becoming the reading site of popular culture, the place where many congregate and receive the cultural narratives of this age within the often mysterious space of the computer screen: Some of the most intelligent and articulate preachers of the electronic gospel proclaim a New Age in which not only omniscience and omnipotence but, more important, omnipresence becomes possible. In cyberspace, the limitations of temporality and spatiality seem to be overcome in an out-of-body experience that realizes the most ancient dreams of religion. Fleeting electronic images carry the hope of immortality (Saarinen 1994).

Perhaps this ‘out-of-body experience that realizes the most ancient dreams of religion’ can now be realised in cyberspace where, like the cathedral before it, the illuminated widows of the architecture of the computer display music, written texts, and moving images, with the image as the dominating reading mode. If, as has been said, “the cathedral was arguably the clearest and most complete physical expression of the underlying medieval worldview’ (Korzilius 2005) then could the space we ‘occupy’ on the Internet, not also becomes a physical expression of an underlying worldview?

The dominating cultural influence in the lives of the medieval was the ideology of religion dictating the design paradigm across all the arts, “paintings and sculpture submitted to the overall control of a greater entity, be it the page of the

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manuscript, the tracery of a window, or the overall architecture of the church” (Stokstad 1998:365). The religion we now serve as a cultural community is that of a capitalist society rapidly being centred on the Internet, cyberspace, and the World Wide Web promising a “Heavenly Jerusalem” (Wertheim 1999). The significance of a new electronic site of communication as a cultural influence is made by Kress and Leeuwen who state, From the moment that a culture has made the decision to draw a particular material into its communicative processes, that material has become a part of the semiotic resources of that culture and is available for use in the making of signs (Kress 2001: 111).

This means that the overall ‘control of a greater entity,’ be it the page of a book, the design of a newspaper, or the overall architecture of a city, might be profoundly effected by the ideology of electronic multi-mediation, as media theorist Errik Huhtamo believes when he says that “technology is becoming second nature, a territory both external and internalised, and an object of desire” (Huhtamo 1995: 159). Thus, could not the following description of the medieval cathedral equally apply to the ‘architecture’ of a computer game and the idea of cyberspace? Dramatic visual effects were also achieved in architecture through the manipulation of light and space… As subjectivity rather than rationality became an ideal, worshipers hoped to transcend the senses by means of the senses. (Stokstad 1988: 392)

While the issues discussed here are not those of religion but of the effects of technology on the book, the point being made is that this technology does appear to have a significant influence on the way we view the world and, on the way we read. In his book, Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress attributes this multimodal experience to a change in the way people read and order information. He draws particular attention to fact that computer games are becoming increasingly sophisticated, so that forms of reading needed to play many of the games are more subtle and demanding2 (Kress 2003). The linear logic of sequence

2 Emma Westcott in her research "Game Forms for New Outcomes," reports that computer games are, “a form of activity present in human life at least since the beginning of recorded history, the game is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Contemporary digital games do not even begin to scratch the surface of how the game might influence every aspect of human culture and behavior… Games are too powerful to be regarded as merely entertainment. Games have the potential to change society. (Laurel 2003:128)

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inhibit the reading of the multimedia, for it is the visual clues of salience, colour, texturings, spatial configurations and the meanings of specific elements, which enable the player to track the path of the narrative. The strategies used to construct a reading path are every bit, if not more complex as those of the pre-established reading path of the page, and Kress therefore concludes that, readers of multimodal screens are used to a different strategy to readers of the printed page (Kress 2003).

The layout of a video game magazine advertisement is used by Kress as an example of how these reading conventions of the screen are shaping print media design. In the layout of this page, graphic information is organised as if it were designed for the screen. The images overlap each other with text overlaying the images and represented in a variety of type styles and sizes. The text is segmented and broken into small units with a number of computer-generated images dominating the space of the page. The reading path is not linear but random and the viewer of the advertisement need not read all the text to comprehend the information. Readers who experience this new media mode, are accustomed to alternate readings of texts, and many print pages are being designed to meet their expectations. While the design of a video game magazine may seem to address a specific reader, Kress is nonetheless convinced that these new arrangements of the screen are also effecting mainstream publications, observing how “these new arrangements” have spread from the screen well beyond the pages of video game magazines to mainstream readers.

Bolter and Grusin present an example of this flow over of design conventions from the screen to the page, when they cite the newspaper, USA Today, (fig 1) as having a layout that bears a resemblance to the presentation of their web site on the computer screen3 (Bolter & Grusin 2000). By arranging information in a similar format, the design attempts to imitate, in print, the multimedia design of a web

3 This ‘flow over” is reminiscent of the design of the illumination of manuscripts, where the design attempts to imitate on parchment, the multimodal design of the cathedral in the images of the stained glass windows. The design of an illuminated manuscript was also not unlike a web page today, where image and text share equal weight in the reading of the texts.

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site interface. David J. Bolter explains this is because today, “print is continuing to remake itself in order to maintain its claim to represent reality as effectively as digital and other visual technologies” (Bolter 2001:47). A more local example of screen conventions being taken up by print media, appeared on the cover page of a1996 edition of The Weekend Australian in a section called ‘Syte’ when these interfaces first began to appear. A small column of type in the top right hand corner of the layout was headed, “HyperText.” Underneath this heading was the name ‘Alvin Tofler’ printed in cyan ink, with the rest of the text following on in black ink. Below this short column of text is another name, ‘Marshall McLuhan,’ treated in the same ‘on screen’ way, complete with a photograph of McLuhan placed within the text block. The practice of highlighting these links the colour blue, is a recognisable reading cue of the screen, and the placement of the segment, mimics web page layouts, where small columns to the left or right of the main body of information, provide hyperlinks to other information. However, although the printed version references the graphic hypertext conventions of the computer screen, the function of the ‘hyperlink’ is, of course, unavailable.

It is significant that McLuhan would be presented as a ‘hyperlink’ in a supplement on new media. After intense criticism of his theories and books in the sixties, there has been renewed interest in his ideas since the advent of personal computers. Marshal McLuhan’s book “Medium is the Massage” was reprinted in 1997 bearing a promotional wrap that announced that this seminal bestseller has been “digitally remastered.” Referred to as the “digitalized edition,” it exhibits the way an old media affiliates itself with a new media. In 1967, McLuhan made his observations about the effects of electronic media, in reference to the emergence of television, the latest electronic media of his time. His observations appear to be born out in the theories of Kress, who argues that the effects of the move to the screen will produce far reaching social and cultural effects. New media will, as McLuhan puts it, … works us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. (McLuhan 1997:26).

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The design of the book by Quentin Fiore, was conceived as a visual essay of McLuhan's theories and defied the prevailing conventions of book design by using images as the dominant reading mode. It took its cue from film and television, with black and white photographic images more in line with electronic representation than the typographic conventions of print media. Hence, the book was highly criticised by the publishing world when it was originally released, for having too few words and lacking a preface, or table of contents (Lupton and Miller 1996). In other words, it did not read like a book, it did not follow the logic of the word, but the logic of the image. Furthermore, it is also possible that Fiore knew how to appeal to his audience by acknowledging electronic media’s presence in their lives. Kress has noted designers of print media for young readers, for example, often take the appeal of the screen into account when making design decisions. Although printed books can and do combine images with text, David J. Bolter, in his book, Writing Space, acknowledges how new digital media favours graphics at the expense of text when he writes, If in the 1980’s the personal computer was a word processor, it has now become an image processor which can manipulate and deliver static graphics, animation and video (as well as audio)… The question is whether alphabetic texts can compete successfully with the visual and aural sensorium that surrounds us. (Bolter 2001:257)

This is because, as Kress argues, “the screen is the site of the image, and the logic of the image dominates the semiotic organization of the screen… on the screen the textual entity is treated as a visual entity in ways in which the page never was” (Kress 2003: 65). Text is being more and more dominated by image and this is having a significant effect on the design of the book.

The Visual Essay The book becomes more pictorial as new media changes the book object from a text dominant to an image dominant, semiotic reading site. Design researchers, Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, see in Fiore’s, The Medium is the Massage, an exploration of the book’s space as part of its content, as its most striking aspect, noting that its structure encourages the images to be “read differently according to their scale and juxtaposition to other images and words” (Lupton 1996: 93) Fiore’s layouts destabilise the traditional hierarchy of image and

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caption, text and illustration (ibid). Text is subsumed and treated in a variety of ways that challenge the reader. In places it is inverted, turned upside down, sometimes very small, sometimes filling the page. But more significantly, it has treated type as part of the image. In this way it exhibits the “genre of display” that Kress now attributes to electronic media of the multimodal computer screen (Kress 2003: 2). Although Kress’s theory is based on the new media of the computer screen, it can also be applied to understanding this phenomenon of the image explored by designers before the advent of computer games and desktop publishing. When the book was first published, people in the “industry of the word,” as Fiore described publishing, demanded “lots of words,” and declared that the book promoted illiteracy (ibid: 94). In fact what it was promoting was a new visual literacy.

Generally in a book, the image serves to illustrate the written word. However in the late 1960s and early 1970s, books like Fiore’s emerged in a spirit of experimentation spawning artists’ and writers to use expressive and creative means of presenting a narrative. A new form of visual literature was created where the image no longer merely illustrated the word, but was central to the reading of the text. Books like Barbara Kruger’s No Progress in Pleasure, and Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1962) are works that exemplify the mode of the visual essay. Books like Rushca’s embody primarily visual content, multiplicity, cheapness, ubiquitousness, portability, and non-preciousness that traditional art forms do not. A number of artists turned the book as a medium; Andy Warhol’s Index (Book) (1967) Sol le Witt’s, Four Basic Kinds of a Straight Line, (1969), and Kevin Osborn’s Real Lush (1981) are books that have an affinity with “the way one reads a painting or a photograph, rather than a novel” (Lyons 1985). However, some writers do write novels where images are an integral part of the text. W.G. Sebald has made use of imagery that adds more than mere illustration to his work. One of Europe’s greatest writers of recent years, Sebald uses photographs, architectural plans, engravings, paintings and restaurant bills inserted into his texts, not to merely illustrate but to bring depth and humanity to the text (Poyner 2004),

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creating work, described by Susan Sontag as being, “unlike any other book one has ever read” (Klein 2003).

By making greater use of the image, many contemporary printed texts are, like Fiore, also challenging the dominance of typographic representation. As the screen shapes reading strategies, where the logic of writing is subordinated to the logic of the visual, the design strategies of the printed book also change. When the book is treated as an image-site, the reading paths are more open to the ordering work of the viewer (Kress 2003). Kress explains the difference; The organization of writing – still leaning on the logics of speech - is governed by the logic of time, and by the logic of the sequence of its elements in time, in temporally governed arrangements. The organization of the image, by contrast, is governed by the logic of space, and by the logic simultaneity of its visual/depicted elements in spatially organised arrangements.” (Kress 2003:1)

Meaning is derived from the possibilities given by the mode of representation, so that whatever is represented in writing must obey the logic of time and sequence in time. Human engagement with the world through writing is ordered and shaped by this logic. The “genre of the narrative” is a formal expression of this (Kress 2003:2). Similarly, whatever is represented in image, equally cannot escape the logic of space or the simultaneity of elements in spatial arrangements. This logic orders the way we represent the world, so that engagement with the world through image, will shape how we interact with it. Thus the genre of display is the formal expression of this. Thus, “the world narrated” is different to “the world depicted and displayed,” or “the world told is different to the world shown” (ibid: 2). The book now becomes a site for reading images as well as a site of reading words, as the new media technology of the screen moves the reading of images to the fore.4 A readjustment of the ratio between text and image in digital media compels the incorporation of more elaborate graphics in printed books, reflecting and

4 David J.Bolter refers to this phenomenon as “the breakout of the visual,” and cites as evidence for this cultural effect of ‘image dominance’ such diverse scholars as, E.H.Gombrich, who believes this is an “historical epoch in which the image will take over from the written word (1982:137), W.J.T. Mitchell who claims we live in a “culture dominated by pictures” (1994:2) and Frederic Jamison who remarks “My sense is that this is essentially a visual culture, wired for sound- but one where the linguistic element… is slack and flabby” (1991:299) (Bolter 2001:47).

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rivalling the cultural power of the image (Bolter 2001:48). As a result, the work of the graphic designer also responds to this cultural shift.

Bruce Mau, graphic designer and author of S.M.L.XL, a large book of biblical proportions, uses the image as a dominating mode. Mau sees a direct correlation between new media technology and the use of the image in book design. The image, Mau has noticed, has migrated to building surfaces, large urban screens, elevators, cars, aeroplanes and shopping centres changing the environment into what he calls, a “Hypercharged global image machine” (Mau 2000:319). According to Mau, …there is simply no greater or more obscure force than the pictures compelling action, reflex, behaviour, and routine in our society today. No denser or more tacit form of communication, no shaping or organizing force, more comprehensive or more insidiously embedded in our lifeworld than images” (Mau 2000:36-37).

It is a view that supports Gunther Kress’ concept of the screen’s push towards a new multimodal literacy (Kress 2003). In a recent interview with Gerard Mermoz for Baseline magazine, he explained why he believes technology has had a significant effect on the way books are designed, attributing the domination of the image to two developments; the low cost computer generation of the image, and the ease with which these images can be moved and manipulated (Mermoz 2003). This has enabled both the liberation of the image and, as a consequence, the book, for as Mau points out, These two things have pushed the image almost to the point where the computer is to the image what the typewriter is to text. You can begin to imagine an image keyboard. The image has a literary potential, and for me that is deliriously exciting. If you combine this possibility with the fact that the separation between text and image has collapsed, that we can now merge the two so effortlessly and succinctly, there really is, contrary to all the literature slogans that claim its demise-that claim the death of the book. I think we are, instead, entering into a new adolescence where the book is emerging in a different form and the visual essay is part of that (Mermoz 2003:36).

The fact that designers are able to use the image the way an author uses text, is one of the reasons why use of the visual essay is an increasing development of the

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book. This may be attributed to the visual nature of mutlimodality, for as Max Bruinsma, editor of the typographic journal Eye, comments, In a visual world such as ours, text, words, letters, tend to turn into images…Words entwine themselves with imagery and iconographies; they become loaded with associations, contexts, “third meanings”… What we need, therefore, is a typography of images” (Bruinsma 1999:1).

Asked whether there is any value in overturning existing hierarchies between verbal and visual form (where, for example, “photographic fragments can be read both as a verbal sentence and as a coherent narrative of images” (Bruinsma 1999:2) Bruinsma sees this visual language, not as a radical alternative to reading as we know it, but rather as an extension of the ways in which we communicate (ibid).

Many contemporary books have taken on a new kind of compositional possibility that is connected to “the very act of multimodal communication where text and image are in dialogue” reinventing the book “for a new kind of possibility” (Mermoz 2003:36). John Cage and Richard Hamilton are both artists who produced their art in a book format and greatly influenced Mau’s approach to book design (ibid). Along with designers such as Re-Verb, 2X4, Bethany Johns, and Permanent Press, Mau has worked with artists to produce publications ranging from small press to high-volume publishing (Phillpot & Lauf 1998:78). Bruce Mau’s approach to book design in making an art of the book, is an example of the changing form of the printed book in a New Media Age.

The printed image is one attribute of the book. Another is the sensuous appeal of a book when held in the hand. The book is not a text to be read behind a glass case, museum type barrier that makes the text untouchable – the computer screen. You can look and listen, but you cannot touch. The availability of high quality digital printing technologies not only intensifies the visual appearance of the book, but also enhances its tactile appeal, a unique print media attribute of the book. As a medium the printed book appeals to all our senses. When reading the material object of the book, our reading experience includes beyond the visual, to our aural and olfactory senses, to our sense of imagination and, most particularly, to our sense of touch.

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Appealing to the Senses The presence of New Media technology and the increasing efficiency and quality of printing technologies, hypermediates the print media attributes of the book’s materiality. The shift from mechanical to digital means of reproduction that transpired in the last decade of the twentieth century made digital printing available to the everyday user of a personal computer. A recent magazine advertisement for Epson’s desktop printers announced that its digital printers produce, Quality photographic prints now in the comfort of your own home… makes it simplicity itself to print quality images instantly from home…And best of all you have the flexibility to print your images as small as you want, or as big as A4! …it’s more than an inkjet, it’s a photolab you can take home” (Epson 2001:011).

The accessibility of the “photolab” has not only increased the use of the image, but is also transforming perceptions of the medium of the printed book. With the colourful, slick, professional finish of the printed image so freely available, print media needs to offer something less attainable, and so it is becoming hypermediated. In David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation, hypermediation is the “fascination with media” that heightens an awareness of that medium (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 12). A Medieval cathedral, illuminated manuscript, and a digital multimedia application, for example, all use a “logic of hypermediacy” where the designer strives “to make the viewer acknowledge the medium as a medium and to delight in that acknowledgement” (ibid: 12). Print acknowledges the digital by increasing use of the image and appropriating the graphic conventions of the World Wide Web. But it also draws attention to itself by promoting print media techniques and materials. Print hypermediates print. Released from the burden of information dissemination, print can do what it does best. It can give us the pleasure of owning a book as a work of art, for an outmoded medium is often newly discovered as an art form, changing our perceptions of its role (Levinson 1999).

The twenty first century, far from seeing print die, is witnessing a rebirth and perfection of print media. Books are now image rich with tactile effects more important than ever before. The use of multiple colours, embossing, varnishing

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and gold foil, in short, the graphic illumination of print, is increasingly evident in the design of contemporary books (fig. 2). In his essay, Eating the Image ; The Graphic Designer and the Starving Audience, Francis Butler, attests that printed texts and images are still central artefacts for the containment of memory in a literate culture, adding that, The material components, the ink and the processing of the paper through glazing, embossing, foil stamping, laminating and coating for a gloss or matt surface have been of great interest to designers and have led to an amazing elaboration of graphic arts technology… The changing material quality of the ink has gone hand in hand with changing fashions in hue and value contrast and chromatic saturation, all of which have affected the way the intention of the image is perceived (Margolin 1989:164).

So it seems that in response to digital new media, as David Byrne comments in The End of Print, books may very well be perceived as, icons, sculptures... a means of communication of a different order,... Print will no longer be obliged to simply carry the news. It will have been given... its freedom. It’s not really dead, it simply mutated into something else. (Blackwell 1995)

That something else is the contemporary book. Many examples arrive daily on the shelves of book retailers as testimony to the way in which print media, challenged by digital media, is responding by making the medium of printing more evident, drawing attention to itself and offering the reader the hypermediated experience of a twenty first century ‘illuminated manuscript.’5 Reading a text from a book involves an interpretation of the text’s meaning, and some of that meaning is derived from the unique experience that the book provides through an appeal to the senses.

One book that fully engages the attributes of print media to add meaning to the text is the adult novel, The Sensualist (fig. 3). Written and designed by Barbara Hodgson, a Canadian graphic designer, it is an extremely successful integration of the book’s form with its content. It is a book that fully exploits the medium of print by maximising the use of the paper’s surface and a variety of printing and ‘bookish’ techniques. Hodgson evokes the world of the novel by using words

5 Further examples the way in which book designers are utilising the unique attributes of print media, that is, drawing attention to the media itself as part of the design of the book, are further discussed in Appendix III Case Studies.

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integrated with images in what would appear at first impression to be an ordinary textual novel. The satin varnish finish of the book’s jacket, the first contact the reader has with the book, engages the sense of touch before even beginning to read the text. On opening the book the eye is seduced with the anatomical pencil drawings of endpapers before turning to the title page with its pale palimpsest image of the nervous system beneath the type of the title. The smell of the paper and ink are present and the sound of the paper rustles as tipped in illustrations are lifted to reveal the images beneath. There is a page with Braille embossed over images, and a diagrammatic fold back illustrations often found in the backs of old text books and encyclopaedias.

The story is about a woman who is a scholar of antique anatomical drawings and is literally losing her senses. Her sight, hearing, smell, and taste are disappearing. A journey through the capitals of old Europe and from the sixteenth century to World War II, brings her sense alive, the history of her body being re-written in an unknown land (Hodgson 1998). The narrative content is eloquently matched with the design of the book’s form, as Hodgson involves the reader in a sensuous experience of the book as an object. She acknowledges the traditional design of the book through her conformity to form, the choice of a soft, cream paper, a traditional typeface and classic page typographic page design. These features give the book a sense of age and authenticity, evoking associations with past books and histories. The illustrations are a combination of the photographic reproductions of three dimensional assemblages, images of old engravings, anatomical drawings, maps, old texts, and collages of 16th century book fragments (fig 4).

This is a book rich with historical reference to the conventions of the master printers of the Renaissance, contextualising both the book’s its narrative content and the material form of its design. A story ‘told’ and a story ‘shown,’ the graphic presentation of this book’s form accentuates the narrative theme of sensuality by exploiting print as a medium and the materiality of the book’s architecture. The meticulous attention to detail that Hodgson has applied to this book’s design, adds a rich layer of meaning that enhances the aesthetic experience of reading, in much

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the same way as the pictorial glosses of the Medieval illuminators, enlightened the reader of Middle Ages. Thus, The Sensualist, the book as a printed medium, is not only read for the meaning of the text but also enjoyed for its sensuous, aesthetic pleasure.

Whether reading The Living Book on the screen or The Sensualist from a book, the experience is changed by the technology of its presentation These two books are representative of the shift from print to electronic media and the creation of two reading sites; one a virtual space, the other a material object, in one ‘the world told’, in the other ‘the world shown,’ revealing a palimpsest of the two previous reading sites - the Cathedral and the illuminated manuscript. As Kress has noted, the potentials of the virtual narrative are not fully knowable at this stage, so the focus of this discussion will move to the second these two reading sites, the printed book as an object of desire and illuminated manuscript of the twenty first century.

OBJECT OF DESIRE

Next to the psalter there was, apparently finished only a short time before, an exquisite book of hours, so incredibly small that it would fit into the palm of a hand.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 77

In September 2000, a study conducted in Ohio State University6 discovered that students who read essays on a computer screen found the text “harder to understand, less interesting and less persuasive” than students who read the same essays on paper (Frost 2002c). While the study did not say why this was so, research by Gary Frost into reading habits, led him to conclude that it was because of their lack of bodily engagement with the medium. Apart from using our sense of vision, when we take a book in the palm of the hand, we engage a

6In American Libraries, September 2000.

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manual act of reading that conveys conceptual patterns to the mind. In his exploration of the role of the senses in reading, Frost takes the view that haptics, the study of touch as a means of communication, may affect reading behaviours (Frost 2002b). According to Frost, we negotiate our consciousness in terms of our physical body and pre-human legacy, relevant to the haptics of the book, of primate dexterity. Primate dexterity adapted us to ‘grasp’ concepts in physical objects, and the manipulation of a book object may exemplify such an ergonomic understanding, as he explains, Acts of manipulated navigation in book reading involve the vertical page moving in position with previous and next page, and in recto/verso relationships, and these pages handled in a mobile, bound structure which provides the mechanism for delivering and timing concepts. Fingers tend to start the lift of a leaf during the page read, and tend to conclude motions at the page turn. Paper grain, paper thickness and other tactile features such as book’s weight are continually mapped against an emergent meaning. An embedded learning path of hands prompting the mind is at work as we read a book. The meaning is delivered and exemplified by a manipulated physical object (Frost 2002b:1).

The Medieval illuminated manuscript was a physical object of great beauty and extraordinary pictorial richness achieved through the intensive manual labour and artistic endeavour of the monastic scribe. The significance of this is noted by Frost, when he observed that, “the codex reading mode arose in context with cultures dependent exclusively on manual craft skills.” Dexterity is a medium of information conveyed for centuries by direct exchange from hand to hand, making reading, in part, a handcraft (ibid:4). Alberto Manguel adds insight into this importance of the hand in the reading of a text when he writes, Of all the shapes that books have acquired through the ages, the most popular have been those that allowed the book to be held in the hand. (Manguel 1997:128)

Constructed with tactile materials, covered with leather (skin), printed in ink lying on the surface of paper, the book is designed specifically to be held in the hand as a pleasurable tactile object. It is therefore interesting to note that the book has been intimately associated with the human form throughout history and even bares the nomenclature of the body in its construction. Bookbinders refer to the “spine” of the book, the “head” of the book, and the “body” of the book. Words such as “heading” for the title of a chapter, “body” for the main text of a literary

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work, “footnote,” for a note at the base of the page, “figure” for a diagram or illustration supporting the text, iterate the relationship between the body and the book. Realized in this way, the act of sewing and binding a book by hand could be considered a reflection of this connection, making the medieval illuminated manuscript the penultimate example of the hand crafted book. The level of achievement reached before the development of mechanical printing, still remains a source of aesthetic pleasure and wonderment at such beauty and skill. What we admire when we see a medieval manuscript is the apparent negation of technology (Bolter 2001:15). It is the fact that the manuscript is not a printed book, and therefore not a product of the machine, but a product of the human hand.

But there are other factors involved. Surely much of the delight of seeing the art of the manuscript, as Adso makes clear in the Rose, is due to our ‘sense of awe’ when we see a book such as this, ‘painted by the hand of a gifted artist’ and, to a certain degree, our response to the esoteric experience they sought to elicit, designed as they were to ‘brighten the mind.’ It is therefore no accident that these books are beautiful objects in themselves and not merely a fancy container for written texts, as many recent critics of the book believe (Derrida 1981, Landow 1992 et al). By focusing on the verbal content of the book, they extract a mere parte, membri, articuli, of the text and treat it as the whole, when in fact the text is, as the Medieval knew, read as a totality of the book object itself. If the statues or stained glass windows were taken from the cathedral and placed in the town square, would they convey the same message they convey in the cathedral? The written word, the illumination, and the format of the codex are all, in their entirety, the text of the manuscript, and they were designed in such that they were always, objects of desire.

The Art of the Book After the invention of printing, the desiderata of the elite, was the illuminated manuscript and many of the wealthy elite like Cosimo d’ Medici, a great and respected patrician of Florence, took up the hobby of book collecting, representing a major stride away from the pragmatic book ownership of the Middle Ages

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(Hamel:1997). The collecting of books became a new and secular passion that sought ownership of these books as objects of aesthetic pleasure. The response of the old media, the manuscript, was to take up the role of a magnificent art form evidenced in this description by de Hamel, Italian Renaissance manuscripts are very splendid things. The vellum pages open beautifully. The lovely humanistic script is laid out with superbly proportioned margins. Elegant white-vine initials spill over into the borders with charming little putti, insects, and butterflies (especially in Florence) or parrots (especially in Naples). The illuminators excelled in the opening pages of manuscripts with full white-vine borders enclosing vignettes, birds, and coats of arms within wreaths. These were the work of great painters like Filipo di Mattero Torelli… The edges of the pages are gilded. The books are bound in the smoothest goatskin stamped with arabesque designs, sometimes with gold or painted with the owner’s arms. These are treasures for the cabinets of the most refines and princely book collectors (Hamel 1997: 248-249).

Going so far as to copy paper and printed books onto vellum, these collectors drove the art of the book to new heights. Art is promoted by patronage and the 15th century Renaissance patron considered the manuscript to be “a thoroughly desirable artefact” (Hamel 1997:265). This elevated the manuscript to new heights of artistic excellence and the Renaissance collector no doubt responded to handling these beautiful books as we might today, … their instincts for acquisition, once inspired, was no different from that of the scholar humanists of 1400 or of private collectors at any time. To allow oneself to indulge this instinct seriously is peculiarly …humanistic… They bought books because they liked them and enjoyed being surrounded by books. This is a very modern attitude (Hamel 1997:236).

It could be said that the modern illuminated manuscript of the twenty first century is the artists’ book. Johanne Drucker defines the artists’ book as “the quintessential twentieth century art form” and a unique genre, which is as much about its own forms and traditions as any other art form (Drucker 1995: 14). However, there is much scholarly debate about what defines an artists’ book7 (Lyons 1985, Drucker 1994, Klima 1998, Hubert 1999), so for the purpose of this study it is a book produced outside the mainstream publishing industry. What makes them

7 While there is no one definition, other terms are use to suggest the same concept: book art, book artwork, bookwork, artists’ bookworks, and book objects (Rossman 2002).

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important in this discussion is that artists’ books are predominantly visual art and so they offer a different paradigm to that of the graphic designer, who has been trained to treat the book as predominantly textual (West 1990, Tschichold 1995, Hendle1 1998, et al).

Proponents of electronic texts have also consistently ignored the form of the book other than to treat it as a convenient storage of textual information. Within the humanities there has been a traditional schism between representation and the technologies of production (Hayles 2002:19). So when Katherine Hayles wrote Writing Machines, a book about the materiality of the book, she was attempting to redress the fact that “literary criticism has for too long tended to regard the literary work as an immaterial verbal construct” (Gitelman 2005:1). Print had become transparent due to its ubiquity, but Hayles, arguing that literature was never “only disembodied constructs,” evaluated current theories of semiotics and concluded that they do not take materiality sufficiently into account, Texts have bodies, readers and users have bodies, and meaning emerges from material engagements with the rich resources of a physically vibrant world as it is crafted through artistic practices and instantiated in artificial objects and processes. To settle for anything else than a fully embodied and material practice of literary theory and criticism is to risk impoverishing our understanding of the meaning-making practices through which we engage with the world. (Gitelman 2005: 2)

Hayles became aware of the book’s materiality when she was given an artists’ book as a gift, prompting her to read Johanne Drucker’s book The Century of Artists’ Books. In this Hayles noted that Drucker’s careful attention to the book’s materiality, revealed how the reading of images in the artists’ book used many of the same strategies she was used to bringing to words saying that, “she couldn’t imagine why, in a literary education that was fairly extensive, she had never heard of an artists’ book, much less handled one” (Hayles 2002:65). As a result of her study, Hayles concluded that both print and electronic works needed “to be taken more seriously as physical artefacts” (ibid). An advocate of electronic texts, Hayles’ thinking was both stimulated and altered by her interaction with artists’ books. She now believes that if books were only seen as immaterial constructs, the rich potential of the interplay between the reader and the book is lost. The artists’

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book, she said, had “permanently changed her mental landscape,” and her senses as well, “including tactility, vision, smell, and proprioception.” For Hayles the long accepted concept, “form is content and content is form,” was now seen as, “materiality is content and content is materiality” and she would “never read the book the same way again” (Hayles 2002: 75).

The artists’ book has also captured the imagination of graphic designers who take the materiality of the book seriously as an integral part of their design. Using paradigms inspired by the artists’ book, combined with new media technologies now available to them, these designers are restructuring the book as a thoroughly desirable artefact. In the twenty first century, as it did in the sixteenth century, the book is responding to a new media by becoming the treasure of the modern book collector. This development of the book as an artistically imaginative artefact is now made possible as publishers find new technologies mean that they can produce less numerous, economically viable editions.8 Like Bruce Mau, many designers are working to produce books as highly desirable material objects, not unlike the products of Alberto Alessi who turned kitchenware into designerware.9

Reading Material In his study of multimodal effects on reading, Gunther Kress also neglects to address the material significance of the book admitting that he “has not given much space or time to any detailed discussion about this matter” saying that it is a question “which is in need of more exploration." (Kress 2001:125). However he does begin to acknowledge the role of materiality when he argues that, It is apparent that paper comes in very different forms, colours, weight, texture, etc., all of which constitutes resources for making meaning; but we are not sufficiently part of a community which treats paper as a mode, and as authors we cannot choose on what kind of paper our work will be printed and hence what meanings paper will add to our work" (ibid).

Designers are a community who can and do use paper to add meaning to texts. Artists and designers are the community that knows how to use paper as "sign' and

8 For examples of books being designed for limited print runs and in experimental formats, see Case Studies. 9 For the philosophy behind the Alessi range, see Fay Sweet (1998) Alessi: Art and Poetry.

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are therefore can be “the producer of the text as much as the author” (ibid). They know that the sheen, texture, colour and weight of paper can all enhance, transform or even dictate the design, and that the tactile qualities of paper can be used in an expressive way (Williams 1993:13). Many designers, like printmaker and book artist John Risseeuw, appreciate the semiotic significance materials like paper can make in the reading of texts, and use these materials to artistic and semiotic advantage.

Risseeuw makes paper as an integral part of his design process, not just because the paper he makes has the colour thickness, shape, size, texture, and so on that he needs for his book making, but also to be able to make it from materials that contribute conceptually to the work, thereby broadening its meaning (Gentenaar 2002:73). Flags, indigenous plants, and money, are some of the materials Risseeuw has used in papers designed to interrogate the content of a texts. An example of this is a book with the world arms trade as its subject. The colophon in the front of the book, explains that the paper is made from the paper currency of the countries that deal in the arms trade, mixed with clothing from the victims of conflicts where these weapons have been used. The impact of the book is intensified when people are aware of this fact, connecting the reader to the subject more intimately than the mere printing of the text and images alone. Indeed, Risseeuw notes that some readers have dropped the book in shock, "unable to bear the weight of the association the piece has with arms, money and death" (ibid). He says, Knowing what the paper is made of forces people to reconsider the content and meaning of the text... I see many opportunities for heightened meaning in print and book content through the use of tailormade paper... Meaningful intersections of content and material abound for the artist [and designer] with the eye for it and the ability to make it happen (Gentenaar 2002:75,79)

This is a clear example of how the materials used by the book designer can contribute to the reading of a text, in much the same way as the graphic treatment of the paper.10 The production of handmade paper is undergoing a renaissance,

10 While this is obviously a promotional venture, nonetheless, it seems that young designers could now be educated without a sound knowledge of the importance of paper in graphic design “off screen.” Once basic training, knowledge of how to design with and specify paper in the production of design for print, is now found wanting. In a recent full-page advertisement for a ‘paper school’, the following comments seem to demonstrate a renewed need for education in paper and print.

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and for small commercial runs with adequate time in their schedule, it is sometimes feasible to have them customized for specific needs (Williams 1993:13). The customization of the printing is also undergoing a renaissance.

Graphic Illumination One of the features of the manuscript as a medium was its uniqueness. Due to the technology of its handmade production, each manuscript was an interpretation of the scribe, even though, on the most part, scribes were given the task of copying, human error, the individuality of the artist, and the editing of the texts meant that no two books were identical. Uniformity and exactness of reproduction came with the invention of the printing press. Having become used to this notion of the book as an exact duplicate of another book, the idea of printed books being unique was, until recently, quite untenable. One of the effects of new digital media on printing is the ability of computerization to customize print products. Digital technology now makes the customization of the artists’ book available to commercial practice, and is already being used by direct mail companies to personalize written correspondence and advertising products. Customizing of print media is now more feasible as short-run colour printing becomes cheaper and faster. Feeling important and unique is part of the value of receiving an individualized product (Whitebread 1997) and as a concept in design, significance to the user adds value to a product. New media technologies are enabling this to happen, as John Heskit argues, An effect of new technologies has been to open up the possibilities of customized products designed in detail for niche markets by enabling flexible manufacturing. Designers are responding by pioneering new approaches by evolving methodologies that base products on user behaviour and needs… In contrast to the emphasis on efficiency, significance has more to do with expression and meaning (Heskit 2002:33,40).

"At Spicer’s Paper, we think it would be a good idea if printers, designers and paper professionals all went back to school. Which is why, in association with Paperpoint, we've created the Spicer’s Paperpoint School - an educational and informative workshop on the processes involved in creating A+ print jobs. Papers, inks, equipment, budgets, design and everything in between are on the curriculum. And pupils will be encouraged to find new and better ways in which design and print professionals can work together to keep themselves head of the class" (Desktop2003:6).

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There is no reason to presume that computer personalization could not be used in the design and production of books, to add “expression and meaning.” This innovative approach to the use of printing technologies is being extended to include, not only colour changes but also individualized text and images. A book that goes some way towards this ideal is Gould’s Book of Fish (fig 5). It was designed as a traditional book but with an unusual printing feature. Each chapter is printed in different coloured ink giving an added sense of value and uniqueness to the reading experience as author, Richard Flanagan explains in a radio interview with Margaret Throsby, … for various reasons I thought books matter more, and I wanted to write a book about the love of books, and I wanted to show books still had all these creative possibilities with them and that's why I had this idea of printing it up in the different coloured inks, and I went to the publisher with this idea and they very boldly backed me with it…as far as we know, it's the first novel in the world to have done this, to use colour to drive a story forward and publishers around the world are leaping onto it (Throsby 2001).

While Gould’s Book of Fish is not a one-off book, it was printed in a limited hard cover edition, and is an example of how a novel can be enhanced by the considered use of print media, along with a respect for historical research, as the designer. Mary Callahan describes her design process: Gould’s Book of Fish is book about a book, so to start with, referencing book design was a big part of my task… Mimicking the feel of letterpress type I used Historical Felltype, set in narrow measure on a tall slender page. After a lot of thought, we decided to use ampersands throughout the text to evoke the period and truthfully portray a 19th century journal. Richard (quite bravely) decided to use spelling specific to the time, so the tone of the writing and the choice of font and colour worked in unison… I wanted to suggest the feel of an old yellowed book but avoid the sentimentality and the usual cliché’s inherent in a facsimile edition. I wanted to make something new and original…I looked at handcrafted books from the time and found a local paper marbler, altering the colours of his paper to take the traditional marbled endpapers into the realm of the fantastic (Bartlett 2003: 16).

Designer and writer, worked in close collaboration, so that not only were the author’s ideas coalesced into a vision for the design but design ideas also stimulated possibilities for the writing (Bartlett 2003). This customising of the book is also an example of how materiality of the book object can enhance the writer’s intent using semiotic modes other than black and white type. Furthermore, visually supporting the narrative by drawing on past traditions of book craft gave

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the book authenticity while locating it in a contemporary context. Finally, the reader response from Margaret Throsby, “it's a very nice book to hold in your hands too, I sort of feel the pages and look at the different colours in the print. It's lovely” (Throsby 2001), demonstrates how these books, designed as whole entities, rather than mere containers, bring a richer semiotic and aesthetic pleasure to the reading experience.

The current state of play for the designer is the extraordinary opportunity to design beautiful books for in an age of information, “the book begins where information leaves off” (Frost 2002e). We are living in an age awash with ‘information’ and the idea of containing it all in one encyclopaedia, is an idea that has prompted so many to want to relocate all texts from books into an electronic library. However, books work in very different ways to computers: Reading is too varied and personal to be bounded by the distinction between digital and analogue. I have some beloved books that I’ll never want to browse through in ant other form, and piles of books threatening to topple over onto my desk that I’d love to access electronically, and some inscrutable texts that I’ll never get anywhere with until they’re available with active annotation and online connections (Gershenfeld 1999:30).

What works for some information does not always work for other information and books are about more than information, as the Renaissance collectors knew. While the computer remediates more and more information onto the screen, the book is being freed to be transformed into an art form, a graphic illumination of the twenty first century and object of desire.

Conclusion Electronic books simulate the present conventions of the printed book by regressing to a print reading mode. There is a significant difference between reading a printed object and the electronic one, overlooked in the hyperbole of the e-book. E-books move beyond print media by offering searchable texts that can extend the printed book in ways not possible with printed books. But they will compliment rather than replace the printed book. This is because the codex format of the printed book works. Its conventions of text organization and

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presentation have been well established and refined over many centuries (Frost 2004: 1). One of the more significant differences is between clicking on a page and turning a page as Gary Frost explains, E-book copy must be read to last word before the page is turned. In a paper book you will notice that the fingers begin separating leaves and lifting up the page to be turned well before the last word (Frost 2004:2).

The reader uses more than his eyes when reading, he uses his body and mind in unison. The hand is an integral part of the reading experience and the access device to printed books is the reader, not a machine conversion of text as code, complicating then process by an added layer of decipherment, albeit invisible to the eye of the reader: E-books disguise machine reading accessibility as eye reading accessibility… The passivity of the paper book image of print, or the much admired invisibility of good typographic and book design may be symptomatic of simple and direct eye access. Direct access-direct design. Likewise, paper books in both their composition and in their collection and use are aimed at direct transmission of the conceptual works of their contents (ibid).

The predictions of the electronic book superseding that of the printed codex are, to this day, yet to be realised and one reason why this is so might be that CD ROMs, DVDs, and the Web go beyond e-books and the printed book in a number of new and technologically driven ways. These multimodal reading sites anable an exploration and searchable access to information that compliment and extend, rather that compete with, print publishing (Crawford 2000).

As digital science attempts to gather all universal knowledge into the virtual library of the World Wide Web,11 the book takes ‘takes centre stage’ and assumes a new identity as a quintessential twenty first century art form. New media technologies are refashioning the book to reflect the multimodal reading experience of the electronic screen. Computer and book, cathedral and

11 This seems like a return to the medieval fascination with the containment of all universal knowledge, as Christopher Hamel notes, “The twelfth century was an age which delighted in the classification and ordering of knowledge... they arranged and shuffled information into an order that was accessible and easy to use. Twelfth century readers loved encyclopaedias. They wanted books that could actually be consulted... practical summaries and extracts. The fact that monks began making library catalogues at all reflects this fascination with order and accessibility of universal knowledge” (Hamel 1997:98).

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manuscript, the duality of a multimodal reading culture sees a return of the Middle Age reading experience. In the hands of contemporary graphic designers, books once more become objects that are equally valued and desired, not only for their content, as a source of information, but also for the intrinsic art, craft and design attributes that enhance the aesthetic pleasure of the book. In this new media world reconstruction has meant the reordering of past paradigms. We admire some books for their apparent ‘negation of technology,’ appealing on some deeper level to our humanity and connections to an ancestral past and others for their uniqueness in a world of reproduction.12 Now new media technologies turn the mass produced into the custom produced, as the time consuming labour of the medieval illuminator or the twentieth century artist is remediated in the digital studios of artists and designers alike.

Digital technologies bring a return to the medieval practice of ‘illuminating’ the book. The early printed books of the fifteenth century were, in the opinion of David J. Bolter, “not as visually sophisticated as medieval manuscripts, and printing never achieved the fluid relationship between the verbal and the visual that was characteristic of medieval illumination” (Bolter 2001: 48). Even though diagrams, maps and illustrations appeared in printed books, these images were constrained by typographic texts. This, says Bolter, was because, originally type and image were reproduced by different means (type in a metal matrix and images as woodcuts or engravings) so that word and image tended to occupy “separate visual as well as technological spaces” (ibid). Then as literacy reinforced the notion that important information was written and only supplemented by graphic illustration, the form of the book continued to follow this paradigm into the twentieth century.

Now digital technology, in comparison with mechanical techniques, is fostering a new heterogeneity “in both form and content” (Bolter 2001:49), and if, as Katherine Hayles claims, books are writing machines then they are also reading machines and it is the materiality of their form that makes them so functional. As

12 Perhaps, like the Renaissance manuscript collectors, we too “just like some books handwritten” (Hamel 1997: 256).

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the new media technology takes up the dissemination of more and more information, the book is being reconstructed as a new art form, and venerated as a trusted and proven reading site. The new media reading site reflects the old media reading site of the cathedral, but a second reading site, the contemporary book, is ‘rewriting’ the illuminated manuscripts of a past ‘new media’ age. Beautifully designed, richly illustrated, vigilantly constructed and widely treasured as precious objects, the illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages engaged the senses, enthralled and informed, amazed and enlightened those who had the privilege of reading them. Books designed in the twenty first century can once more engage, enthral, enlighten, inform and ‘brighten the minds’ of the modern reader.

Publishing is an art not a science.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 256

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Chapter 5

I L L U M I N A T I O N S

S E X T Noon, the hour of the midday meal

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ON BOOK DESIGN

He showed me … a great folio volume, bound in ancient parchment, with leather ties… I’m not a bibliophile, but this was something I had to have.

UMBERTO ECO 2001:441

Introduction Designing books of desire, books the Renaissance bibliophiles ‘had to have,’ requires a viewpoint that includes the idea of the book as a work of art. A twenty first century designer would do well to look to the Renaissance illuminators but would benefit even more by considering the contemporary artists’ book as a conceptual frame of reference. The importance of artists’ books lies in their formulation of perceptual content that alters the concept of authorship and invites the reader into “a new discourse with the printed page” (Lyons 1985:7). The keystone of the artists’ book is its visual literacy and graphic designers who aspire to more meaningful book design are turning to the material and visual language of artists’ books whose treatment of image and texts challenge conventional reading habits. Unlike conventional books, the reader of an artists’ book is required “to take in intentional but semi random scans in several directions” (Phillpot & Lauf 1998:79) (not unlike the reading dynamic of the computer screen). Moreover, the boundaries between the work of artists’ and that of designers are blurring. As the liberating potentials of desktop publishing, where everyone can scan in photos and texts, jumble them up, and create personal books in greater numbers than ever before, books are becoming “part of the rhetoric of self-representation developed by the artist, cognizant of the complexity of late twentieth century living” (Phillpot & Lauf 1998:53). Book artists and book designers are thus inherently connected through the production and reception of their work and many are crossing the boundaries that once divided commercial and artistic practice: Whether a limited edition artist’s book, a trade publication printed in a run of ten thousand, a compact disc, or a website that reaches millions, the number of projects published by artists is at an all time high. Never before have so many artists taken an interest in manipulating their representations in print-or been

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able to do so, thanks to Quark X press, Syquest, and sites on the Web… Even as entire archives of images are purchased and digitised, books still lead in determining cultural content. This is because the ideas artists bring to publishing have kept pace with technological innovations. As even the early offset books of artists like Ed Ruscha have become relics, contemporary artists have resisted the siren’s call of the museum, the library and the collector. Instead they make books that function in the world, as catalogues, fashion magazines, cookbooks, children’s books, and political handbooks. Artists’ books have grown up (Lauf & Phillpot 1998:67).

Now that we read information in so many different forms of media, print as well as electronic, to continue to design books based on a print tradition without acknowledging the shifts that computer mediation is incurring, would be a negation of the context in which books are now being read. With the advent of new media technology, the printing press, now digitally remastered, no longer demands the constraints it once did. As a result, the design of the book and its materiality are becoming far more important aspects of the book’s design, a focus not seen since the Middle Ages, when the book, as an illuminated manuscript, was a synthesis of content and form, of art, craft and design.

THE ARTISTS’ BOOK

The brightest places were reserved for the antiquarians, the most expert illuminators, the rubricators and the copyists.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 72

To refer to the artists’ book as simply a book created by an artist fails to indicate its true nature, appearance, or purpose, even though this definition plainly designates it as an artefact rather than a mere carrier of more commonplace documentation (Hubert & Hubert 1999). While artists’ books often reflect the historical traditions of book production and, in the case of the private presses, even reinstitute procedures abandoned centuries ago, they have nonetheless produced unexpectedly substantial and diverse variations on the idea of the book (ibid). The codex form has been confirmed as an exceedingly practical

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disseminator of the kinds of content entrusted to it and it is this form of the book that inspired generations of artists who rediscovered the codex, almost as a “found structure,” during the 1960s (Lyons1985). Because artists’ books were no longer viewed as ordinary books, no longer only containers of information, the artists’ book is free to expanded the notion of ‘reading’ in relation to the book as an object (Phillpot & Lauf 1998). A new mode of reading was intentionally sought out by book artists.

Clive Phillpot makes clear that the artists’ book differentiates between two kinds of reading, linear reading and random reading. He then sub-divides these into retinal and tactile reading, the former dominating the traditional reading experience, the latter referring to the sculptural qualities of the book (its three dimensionality, or architecture), which require both “hand and eye for the full experience” (Klima1998:63). Most writing, according to Phillpot, is “just one long line of words or phrases” and conventional reading follows that long line from beginning to end (ibid) (as many literary theorists and media theorists, Landow et al, have reiterated). Artists’ books complicate and interrogate the temporal relationships that usually prevail by introducing different kinds of textural, pictorial and architectural sequential manipulations (Hubert 1999). In this way artists’ books, by taking such an approach, had already broken the ‘shackles’ of print media well before ‘electronic writing’ and ‘hypertext’ challenged the role of the printed book.

Towards the end of the century, new media technologies, the photocopier and eventually the computer, inspired rather than deterred the production of the artists’ book. Artists’ books arose during a period of “almost hysterical commentary” over the future of the book (Klima 1998:69). Paradoxically because of emerging technology, the most significant effect of the computer on artists’ books was the freeing of obligations and limitations; the book was “relieved…of its informational responsibilities” (ibid). Far from the predictions of the books ending (because the computer would do to books what the printing press did to manuscripts) the computer relieved information of its singular dimension. There

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was a renewed interest in the book and an eruption of classes at college and community level in bookmaking, signifying an expanded interest, once again, in the codex form and the practical aspects of bookmaking (Klima 1998:82). Now the ubiquitous codex had ‘moved to centre stage’ as McLuhan had proclaimed it would. According to Stefan Klima, an old medium has indeed become an artfrom in the “illuminated manuscripts” of the twenty first century Suspicions abound that the book may indeed have come round full circle. The manuscript book of the Middle Ages was revered for its religious significance, for its rarity and singular perfection. Perhaps too, the book of the 21st century, in its hand-crafted beauty will be revered. The book more than any other object produced by humans requires for its operation the complete interaction and participation of the ‘end user’; it appeals to the hand, to the eye, to the mind, and to the heart (Klima 1998:69).

The art of the book has captured the hand, mind and heart of contemporary designers of commercial books. Graphic designers, inspired by this shift towards the book as an artform, have taken on board many of the breaks with convention exhibited in the artists’ book and also in the work of artists themselves. Roger Fawcett-Tang makes the observation that the book You Can Find Inspiration in Anything* designed by Jonathan Ive, is almost impossible to fit on a normal bookshelf but because it is a beautiful book he says, “throwing it away is not an option” (Fawcett-Tang 2001:009). The desire to collect books like this one is related to the fact that they are designed more as objects than as information for shelf storage and it seems that graphic designers are designing books that, rather than just being showcases for artwork, are works of art themselves. One of the reasons for this is, as book designer Jackie Merri Meyer observes, “because art directors like myself have been pushing to let publisher’s know that we believe the taste level of the audience is higher that they think” (Finamore 1997:33). A changing interest in the book’s aesthetic is born out by the fact that, when presented with two books offering roughly the same content at the same price, an increasingly design-conscious book-buying public will always choose the more attractively designed volume (Fawcett-Tang 2004). Today graphic designers are responding to a demand for more innovative and conscientiously designed books requiring a more editorial role and meaningful interpretation of the book as an aesthetic object.

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THE DESIGNERS’ BOOK

I reaped a harvest of curious reproductions, but they weren’t enough. To choose the right picture for an illustrated book, you have to reject at least ten others.

UMBERTO ECO 2001:254

The illuminating of manuscripts is one of the earliest examples of the practice of what we now call “graphic design,” and “the Church was its first patron” (Fawcett –Tang 2004:006). Five centuries later, graphic designer, Bruce Mau, has produced a number of books of biblical proportions designed for private patrons and when asked to identify designers who may have influenced his work he responded, interestingly enough, by naming two book artists. One was Richard Hamilton for his high standards, particularly in his typographic practice and for his capacity to be a beginner and experiment. For example, Hamilton's ‘Collected Works,’ Mau declares, “was one of the greatest adventures I have ever seen; because it had all the order of Swiss design; but it emerged from the material” (Mermoz 2003:34). The other was John Cage who typographically allowed for chance operation “in a systematic way where “form and content” were one and the same thing” (ibid). Bruce Mau has previously acknowledged the impact of computer technology on graphic design and attributed the digitalizing of the image as a factor in the design of his immense visually rich tomes (Chapter 5 p76). Gunther Kress also noted that books published now are, in very many cases, already influenced by the new logic of the screen and these are not read as they would have been thirty or forty years ago (Kress 2003). However, the influence of artists and the paradigm of the artists’ book have nonetheless also played a role in a greater shift towards commercially published books being purchased as objects of desire and perhaps today the boundary between the artists’ book and the designer’s book is becoming less defined than it was in the past. Books by designers, until recently, were predominantly textual while artists’ books are predominantly visual and using Kress’s spatial logic of the image.

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The idea of the book as purveyor of sequential narratives with illustrations attached, was being readily challenged by conceptual art's “packages,” emerging digital/visual culture, and a generation that “didn't read print so much as graze it” (Rexer 2002:110). Evidence of this trend can be seen in many books adorning the shelves of book retailers like Ariel’s bookstore in Paddington. The bookshelves of Ariel, and many other book retailers, display a diverse range of commercially produced books from the largest tomes, like The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture, (displayed on a lectern styled stand supplied by the distributors, Bookwise International on which it can be read like the medieval Biblia Paupora), to the small, exquisitely presented “books of hours,” containing inspirational texts like that of, I CHING: THE PERFECT COMPANION (fig 1). Covered in silk, printed with mat ink, the cover held shut with a toggle closure, this book is a palimpsest of the Renaissance books of hours,1 often bound in embroidered fabric and kept closed with a metal clasp. Published in 2001, I Ching is a version of an ancient Chinese oracle that, like a book of hours, is consulted as a philosophical text. Books like these are made all the more appealing by literally adding a sense of ‘preciousness’ in the materials used on the first point of contact, their covers.

Reading Material Suspicion of the outer wrapping of an object “runs deep” in society, according to Roger Fawcett-Tang, and is a reflection of the religious belief that the body is merely “packaging around our true selves, our soul” and any anxiety about packaging is a symptom of a wider phenomenon, Within Western culture there is a residue of iconoclasm, the medieval heresy that believed that any representations of God were idolatrous. The truth can only be experienced without the packaging of statues, paintings and murals. It's no accident that when this cultural prejudice is applied to books you end up with a whole moral code... “Never judge a book by its cover...” By regarding the packaging of books as something unnecessary we miss the impact of the message they carry (Fawcett-Tang 2001:040).

1 Made for the layperson, especially women nobles, Books of Hours were usually beautifully decorated and admired for their delicate illumination. They were not designed for the library shelf, but were designed as a compendium of devotional texts meant for private readership. Generally produced by hand, even after the invention of the printing press, they were often covered in a fabric chemise that wrapped around the book, enclosing it in a “colourful parcel” (Hamel 1997:197).

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The book’s cover is, in fact, the very thing by which the book is most often judged in the world of book retail (ibid). This is not to say that the book will be purchased solely on the appeal of the cover, for the content must live up the expectation of its outer wrapping, and often, upon closer scrutiny, it fails in this regard. However, the covers of some books carry an additional interpretation of the book content through the materials used in their design and production. The old adage, “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is proven to be somewhat inaccurate if we judge the covers of the books on the shelves of Ariel bookstore. In a conversation in 2004 with Charlotte Fish, curator of Ariel’s design section, she commented on how the design of book covers had become a much more carefully considered aspect of the book’s retail appeal than in the past. Facing out from the shelves the book covers are the main feature of the store display and one of the most noticeable features of these covers is the prolific use of printing embellishments, such as embossing, varnishes, foil lettering, the photographic image, an increasing variety in size and formats and, more recently, alternative materials to cardboard and paper (metal, fabric, plastic), used in the covers themselves.

Material Matters The material qualities of book covers convey meaning on the basis of our physical, bodily experience of them, firstly by saying what they are, a soft material meaning ‘soft,’ and hard material meaning ‘hard,’ and then by the “extensive metaphorical edifices” that can be derived from them (Kress & Leeuwen 2001:75). The subtexts that materials can evoke in the design of a book are evident in the number of books recently discovered on Ariel’s bookshelves. People always attribute emotions to objects and designers can elicit, communicate, recognise and share emotion through the conscientious manipulation of all the sensory qualities of the products they design (Kurtgozu 2003). Emotional satisfaction and a joy in use are achieved by focusing on designing a context for experience and not just the function of the product. According to Aren Kortgozu, implicit in an emphasis on experience is an aspiration towards the development of an emotional attachment between the user and the product, which would go some way towards explaining people’s ‘love’ of

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books. Designing the book as an ‘experience’ appeals to the whole consciousness, “the whole being” rather than a reliance on specialised or limited states or the faculty of vision alone (ibid). In keeping with the sensuous appeal of materials, the titles of the following books, some descriptive of their subject, others alluding to it, also reflect this enjoyment of experiencing the emotive qualities of books as material objects. The designers of these books have all used the materiality of the book as an expression of content, demonstrating the semiotic richness materials can bring to the reading experience.

The tactile nature of the content in the book, FELT (fig 2), for example, is declared as soon as the book is sighted on the shelf and reconfirmed when the book is taken in hand. A book about felt origins, techniques and a catalogue of felt artists’ work, the book is presented in a slipcover constructed of thick grey felt, stitched together with orange saddle stitching into a soft envelope enclosing a small square book. The book is covered in a buff matt paper with the word ‘Felt,’ in bold grey sans serif type (made ‘fuzzy’ in the middle) opening up to bright orange endpapers. Rich coloured close-up images of felt products and garments fill the pages of the book so that the texts and images blend harmoniously in a ‘visi-verbal’ narrative that echoes the qualities of the actual felt fabric enclosing the book. The reading experience of this book is one where the intellectual text is supported by a tactile knowledge of the contents of the book, literally felt in the hand.

Unlike Felt, SKIN (fig 3) has a cover that visually stimulates a sense of the tactile, covered as it is with the photographic image of a three-dimensional quilted surface, one that begs to be touched, but on contact belies the deep texture of the image and feels ‘as smooth as silk.’ When held in the hand the ‘sponginess’ of the padded surface gives beneath the fingers mimicking the softness of real skin, so that handling the book lends an experiential ‘reading’ of the concept, ‘skin.’ Full colour images dominate the text of this book. Before the reading of any text can begin, a series of full-bleed images of faces, different skins, different faces, anticipate the subject matter for several pages before arriving at the title page. Edited by Ellen Lupton, the text and images of this book are presented as a

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compendium of products, furniture, fashion, architecture and media that expand our perceptions of skin…“thick or thin, smooth or rough, porous or impermeable” (Lupton 2000:cover). The skin is the barrier between the hidden interior and the exposed exterior, protecting the body like the covers of a book. Marshall McLuhan described electronic media as being an extension of our nervous system, so perhaps a book about skin in some way corresponds to an awareness of this extension, an awareness of the sensations of the body receiving semiotic messages in the materiality of the object.

The texture of skin is also explored on the cover of BODY PIERCING (fig 4), designed by Dean Lahn, in the leather grain paper used to create its folded paper cover. It is a fine example of how the cover of a book can pre-empt the content by describing its subject matter in an intriguing if startling cover design. In his review of Body Piercing, David Meagher said that touching the book seemed almost too personal, “as though the book itself is a pierced body” (Meagher 1999:8). He is referring to the fact that the cover of the book is bound in black leather grain paper with the large word BODY embossed on its surface. In place of the letter “O” a silver ring has been threaded by hand through a slit in the paper cover, simulating a body piercing, but also creating an impression, as Meagher noticed, “of the book designer’s hand in the work” (ibid). The hand finishing detail of the book gives it the appeal of being custom-made and is evidence of a trend in commercial books to respond to the new electronic environment with an emphasis on the material assets of book design. The “touch” of the book is of paramount importance in expressing the ideas and meaning of the text in this book.

In celebrating the handcraft values of the bookbinders skills and the addition of the ring attached by hand, the designer acknowledges the importance of our embodiment of the book. The contents of the book are also designed to touch the mind, to visually seduce with the art of superb photography by Andrew Dunbar, elegant and sophisticated use of typography and subtle language of the text, all intended to create an experience of the book as an aesthetic object of desire. In the year 2000, Body Piercing won the Australian Publisher’s Association Design

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Award, Best Illustrated Book of the Year, Best Designed Jacket of the Year and Best Designed Book of the Year, bearing testimony to the way in which utilising the intrinsic values of art, craft and design of the book, can give a book an edge. Michael Bollan, publisher of Body Piercing, while acknowledging the design, look and feel of a book can give it an edge, he also comments that, “the idea of the book as a precious object is going to help books hold their own” (ibid). From metal ring to metal cover, the materials used in the design of books are becoming more diverse and expressive of books’ unique presence.

SPOON (fig 5) is a book in which metal was not used as an accent but in the design of the whole cover. Phaidon, the publisher of Spoon, refers to this edition as, “an exhibition in a book” (Bartlett 2000:041), alluding to the curatorial role of the ten editors who brought the book together, Rod Arad and Giulio Capellini, among them. The book is described as an “overview of contemporary product design” presenting the work of one hundred designers “who have broken new ground” including ten deemed to be “design classics”(Arad et al 2002:3). In book reviewer Gillian Bartlett’s estimation, Spoon is a book “only to the point that it displays its content on pages,” because the front and back covers are made of sheets of polished aluminium, moulded in a serpentine shape, which she feels, renders it unfit for any standard bookshelf, “only of use as a coffee table book and collector’s item” (Bartlett 2003:041). But as the screen becomes a sight of information retrieval, taking the book “off the shelf” and onto the table makes it a more apparent as an object, one with a physical and material presence the screen cannot deliver. Bartlett, by describing Spoon as a collectors’ item, validates the idea of the book as an old media artform, reminiscent of the sixteenth century.

However, the form of this book has not been designed as a stylistic gimmick for collectors, but is reflects the meaning of its content. In the context of the twenty first century, its curved metal covers immediately denote the industrial nature of the design works selected for display within the book, as well as alluding to the metallic nature of a ‘spoon.’ When turned, the pages follow the shape of the cover and form a wave like shape in front of the reader, reflecting the innovation of the

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object designs the book showcases, rather than a mere carrier of their image.2 Nonetheless, some designers, like Roger Fawcett-Tang, feel that although it is visually stunning, it is irritating to read and potentially detrimental to other books on the shelf (Fawcett-Tang 2004). This was also a problem for the medieval book owners, when they stored their manuscripts in ‘treasure’ bindings. But the book is not difficult to handle, and if treated as a material and aesthetic object, like the illuminated manuscript in the libraries of the Middle Ages, there is an expansion of the reading experience that a book like this can offer.

Books of Vision While many of these books are what Fish calls “eye candy,” books that are full of graphic content but with little substance in terms of literary input, other books that have embraced the content in the design of the book as an entity offer a more satisfying reading experience and sales appeal. Fish recalls a customer who had said of Visionaire’s “Vreeland Memos” (designed as a set of manuscript bound in a leather document pouch) that the book was “almost as exciting to own as it was to read” (Fish 2004). During a conversation with Charlotte Fish in Ariel’s bookshop, a copy of the book, DREAMING IN PRINT: A DECADE OF VISIONAIRE, was taken down from the shelf. A showcase of the issues Visionaire have produced to date, it represents the way in which commercially produced books can be designed as economically viable limited editions. Released in a limited edition, Visionaire is located somewhere between the one-off and mass-produced market, crossing the boundaries between graphic design, art, popular culture and print media. In the foreword of the book, David Bowie comments that the limited edition has always relentlessly focused on changing the way we look at the printed page.

The traditional print technology systems of mass-production and the worldview of the book had previously demanded that books were designed to a system of

2 This shape is an iconic form that does seem to signify the act of turning pages and the loose folds of paper that occur naturally in a book when it is opened. The curved form of the book was a significant aspect in my studio investigations, and so it was with some surprise that I came across ‘Spoon” while working on my own “curved books.” I was, nonetheless, pleased to discover that the book was being commercially produced, as this supports the concept of making a book some other shape than the traditional rectangle (that does “fit on the shelf”). Taking books down from the shelf may be an important consideration in seeing the book as an object, and treating it as such.

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standardization and printed in large editions. But new media technologies are making limited editions more attractive due to the development of print on demand and better economies of scale. Customized books will increasingly be an option, as production processes become cheaper (Fawcett-Tang 2001:A066). With manuals, text books and even fiction print runs getting shorter, digital printing offers excellent solutions for smaller scale print production, and it is clearly getting faster and better (McCourt 2004:17). In the UK, 10 per cent of books are already printed digitally by book production house, T.J. International and they expect this double to 20 per cent within five years with full-colour capability following close behind. The US/Canadian Delphax electron-beam imaging engine, the Sigma, can produce 1000 perfect bound or 6000 saddle-stitched products per hour.

Digital printing is moving the printers' focus away from the press and towards the digital workflow, a trend in evidence at Drupa, the International Print Forum, where paper-handling and finishing companies such as Mueller Martini has samples of book and booklet production where digital print engines were simply “dropped in” causing the press to be seamlessly incorporated into the workflow" (McCourt 2004:18). This factor is inspiring more innovative approaches to design, and as Mario Testino notes, Visionaire pursues new and exciting solutions that others increasingly follow. Visionaire, according to guest creator Karl Lagerfield, is “a new view of all things visual… a revolutionary force… mind and eyes are kept open to all things that might seem visionary” (Gan et al 2002). Its influence is one that touches the Visionaire patron and the design community alike.

Most books like these, designed in experimental formats, do appear in comparatively small editions, often due to the fact that they the need hand- finishing, but the care that goes into producing them, as well as perception of rarity, is central to their appeal (Fawcett-Tang 2001). Visionaire is hand produced, and issued in limited press runs of no more than 5,000 (Rexer 2002). This means that enough are produced for retail sales, but not so many as to diminish their aura. Books with an aura about them, according to Johanne Drucker, “generate a mystique, a sense of charged presence” (Drucker 1995:93). Books like these, she

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believes, bear meaning “just in their being, their appearance, and their form through their iconography and materials” (ibid). This aura includes the sense of pleasure we get from hand made objects as a sense of connection with the creator, but there is also evidence of a shift in consumer preferences towards the hand made in the design marketplace.

William Morris felt that the “joy in labour” experienced by the craftsman in the making, was in some way passed on in the object being made and it might be that the time and care taken in producing an object may also be inherent in the book as an object. Gary Frost refers to this phenomenon as the “concept of migration” and explains that, although the twentieth century has promoted “the artistic personality as the progenitor of art,” there exists a longer heritage of anonymity in the book arts where “the aesthetic achievement of the book “ is projected “downstream” to the user” rather than remaining with the producer (Frost 2002:2). Frost calls this projection, “the principle of migration of achievement,” a concept of the migration of artistic achievement from the point of production to the point of purchase. He notes that this concept has been especially well developed in the book arts where bibliographical content and artistic intent are particularly focused on the reception of the reader (Frost 2002).

There are now many customers who prefer the mark of a designermaker over the designers of mass-produced products, as people turn to evidence of the handmade in a desire for the philosophies this aspect of design represents (Cochranne 2005). Today the public is exposed more and more to a material aesthetic in object design as consumer products seek to fulfil a value added shopping experience and desire for authenticity. David Boyle has given due attention to this desire for authenticity in a world of the simulated and reproduced. He sees our demand for authenticity as partly a reaction to living in a fake, mediated world, where virtual communication is cutting out human contact (despite what Telstra, Microsoft and Optus tells us). While it may be a simple reaction against modernity, it is also something a demand “for a different kind of life in the century ahead when, for the first time since the industrial revolution, questions about how we are intended

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to live -and how we should live - become central again” (Boyle 2003:282). The authenticity of an illuminated manuscript, a handmade, beautifully embellished two-dimensional book space, where the reader becomes immersed in another world, is evidenced in the work designers like Nick Bantock, the ‘illuminators’ of the book in a New Media Age.

Graphic Illuminator Nick Bantock is the author and designer of the GRIFFIN & SABINE trilogy, selling over three million copies and spending one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (Bantock 2001). Described as “A… work of art,” (Associated Press), and an “Extremely original…classical myth,” where “reality, and fantasy are bended artfully” (Los Angeles Times), these comments chronicle the great attention paid to the illustrations supporting the narrative, but even more interest in these books can be attributed to the use of the book itself. The popularity of these books (they quickly became bestsellers) is not only due to the enigmatic nature of the narrative, but also to the unique way in which the story is told through the richly illustrated imagery of personal correspondence in the form of a series of postcards and letters. The only verbal text in the novel appears as information within the illustrations or as handwriting in the letters themselves. The letters, folded and placed in envelopes adhered to the pages of Bantock’s richly illustrated pages (fig 6), add an intimacy that comes from the experience of opening and reading the postcard and letters of correspondence between two separated lovers.

In this way, the book is treated as an interactive reading site, involving the reader in the act of opening and reading the correspondence and in doing so becoming an active player in the mythology of the book. A further significance of the letters and postcards in Bantock’s books, is that they represent a form of “shared documents” that, according to John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, provide a kind of “social glue” and bonding of relationships (Brown 2000:2). Readers and writers, they write, have made the paper document “a powerful resource for making, shaping, warranting, interpreting and even protecting information” (ibid). Furthermore, as Gary Frost suggests, conceptual transactions are embodied to

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paper and handling paper in this way imposes a particular receptivity to the content of the texts (Frost 2002c). The physical manipulation and interaction involved in the reading of these books, not only engages the reader in the complex psychological subtext of the story, but also offers the unique reading experience of the print media book in a multimodal world.

The opulent, vivid illustrations are far from superficial gimmickry, they are integral to the narrative and provides a second level of meaning that echoes, “in an allusive rather than illustrative manner,” the plot of the text (Wiersman 2001:2). While these books have the appearance of a richly illustrated children’s book, they are, as it happens, adult ‘fairytales,’ that in the opinion of Robert Wiersema, appeal to the reader’s “sense of romance-and their voyeuristic inclinations” (Wiersema 2001:1). Why letters are being exchanged in the age of email is explained by the romance of handwritten correspondence. For the reader an email ‘postcard,’ that has not physically travelled the treacherous route through the world from one place to another, would fail to express the investment each of the lovers is making in the relationship. Postmarks and the wear and tear of handling leave their mark on the postcard or envelope of mail correspondence, and tells of its travels. The sanatized message of the email screen, even if printed out onto a sheet of paper, would seem less authentic, and less romantic.

Bantock’s graphic ‘illumination’ of the book (presented as ornamentally rich illustrations, postcards, stamps, envelopes and ephemera) is far from mere decoration or novelty. The graphic detail is integral to the story in affording another echelon of meaning that echoes developments in the plot, his graphic images developing into an elaborate language of symbols and motifs that “speak more directly to the reader’s subconscious than words do” (Wiersema 2001:2). It is a pictorial language that, like the illuminations of the Middle Ages, is “replete with angels and animals, fragmentary maps and figures from myth” (Wiersema 2001:2). The images captivate and engage the reader in a visually fictitious world.

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Alberto Manguel draws attention to the fact that the reading of images rather than words in a book like this requires more work, perhaps, as Kress has noted, using the spatial logic of the “world shown.”3 Most of the time, he notes, “a sequence of signs follows and established code, and only my ignorance of the code makes it impossible for me to read it … but if a book is illustrated, even if I can’t read the captions I can usually assign a meaning” (Manguelo 1997:96). In the visual essay, or the vis-verbal book, authors count on the reader’s creative skills to interpret meaning. Relating text to image and image to text is the central problem that most designers confront when crafting books (Phillpot 1998). Most designers tend to replicate traditional ways of integrating the two forms of expression so that “a fully integrated verbi-visual book is most uncommon” (ibid 53). That books can act as more than a passive container for texts, and the materiality of the object, the printing technology and the graphic treatment of the book can convey meanings in themselves, means that the reading experience of the book is not the reading experience of the screen. Book designers who utilise the unique aspects of the book mode, in a way, show up, enhance or exaggerate the semiotic materiality and value of the book as an object. Book designers in a multimodal world will need to consider the idea of the book as a visual essay, the book’s interaction, the reader as viewer, the interpretation of texts, random access to texts, the book as an artform, its materiality, and the handmade, all factors that now contribute to the making of meaning in the book.

3 See Chapter 5 in Part One of this study.

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DESIGNER BOOK CASE STUDIES

You must single it out from all the other information, then find the right image… and we’ll give it a full page, in colour.

UMBERTO ECO 200:241

For an insight into a conceptual approach to the design of contemporary books, we can do no better than to turn to the designer of some of the most influential books in recent time, Bruce Mau. Primarily known as a publication designer through his work for the Zone publishing program, his redesign of I.D. magazine and for architect Rem Koolhaas’ 1996 opus, S.M.L.XL, Bruce Mau published the book, Lifestyle in 2000, as a chronicle of his studio output over the past fifteen years. Lifestyle showcases the studio’s trans-disciplinary ambitions, made manifest in numerous collaborations with architects and artists. Mau then began a research project, Massive Change in 2003, to determine where design might be headed. He urges that the new generation of designers need to relinquish the narrow specialisation of the twentieth century Fordist model of mass-production and take a more critical stance.

Considering the state of contemporary book design, Mau has noticed that there is “a huge production of illustrative complexity striving to be convincingly complex” (Mau 2000:204). It is a view that Max Bruinsma shares when he observes how readability is no longer “the holy grail” and that what counts is not so much the simple message “as the complexity of possible connotations, allusions and meanings that are implicit in the message” (Bruinsma 1997b:3). Today all media are similarly caught up in this graphic complexity, using super-impositions, out-of- register photographs, hyper-saturated colours, the layering of text, as a graphic language of communication. The problem as Mau sees it, is that the eye’s cone of vision can only accommodate a certain amount of information before it becomes over-saturated with information. The reader then ceases to see the content, being preoccupied with what he calls, the ‘filters’ (Mau 2000). In designing his books,

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Mau strives to make the content legible, while maintaining layers of meaning, by working with what he terms, “the depth of the page” (Mau 2000:204). Contemporary image culture, he says, commands our attention at a particular level where it is arrested. The many layers of content built into the design of his books, are not instantly registered by readers. They unfold on a subliminal level, beneath the threshold of conscious perception. “This” he says, “is where we want the effects to be felt” (ibid). Mau clearly sees the book as an architectural construct, taking the concept of spatial referencing into the two-dimensional space of the page.

His design methodology is derived through a conscious exploration of the relationship of a cultural reading practice to the materiality of the book added to the fact that Mau believes the designer must also be a reader, A designer who places primacy on the value of reading texts to be designed may do very subtle things that will be crucial to the reader’s experience on both the cognitive and associative levels…the relationship between an image and a text can really only be executed by the reader-designer because a designer working solely as a viewer has missed half the equation (ibid).

This equation involves the creation of a “metafiction,” one that Umberto Eco suggests, is be both semantically and critically interpreted. A semantic interpretation of written texts is one where the reader fills it with a given meaning. The critical interpretation of a text on the other hand, aims at describing and explaining why a given text produces a given response, assuming “a form of aesthetic analysis” (Eco 1994:54). A designer who reads critically discovers something about its nature, along with our reaction to it (Eco 1994). Thus the designer as a critical interpreter is more likely to construct a “visual metafiction” that supports the text, rather than providing a mere styling of the page. Any act of interpretation is, according to Eco, “a dialectic between openness and form, initiative on the part of the interpreter and contextual pressure” (Eco 1994:21). Texts are, Eco concludes, “the human way to reduce the world to a manageable format, open to an intersubjective interpretive discourse” (ibid). When approached in this manner, the designer generates a resonance between an image and a text that happens on several levels, instigating an interpretive discourse that Bruce Mau believes is crucial for the advancement of the book,

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Our insistence on playing a collaborative editorial role as part of the design process has been fundamental in shaping the direction of our practice and leading towards the development of content... We believe that the most effective and ambitious practice involves the creation of new cultural artifacts... the objective is to design new objects that possess clarity and complexity within an environment ruled by circulation and dispersion (Mau 2000:325,327)

The clarity he speaks of is derived through a conscious exploration of the relationship of a cultural reading practice to the materiality of the book. The role of the designer as a “content provider,” is the common thread running through projects where the designer is intimately involved in the conceptual development of a project and not simply its aesthetic resolution (Blauvelt 2001:85). The evidence of designers approaching the design of the book as content providers, with a deep awareness of the material power of the printed book as an object, is demonstrated in the following case studies.

Case Study 1: Codex Aedificium

I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE EVERYWHERE, WITH EVERYONE, ONE TO ONE, ALWAYS, FOREVER, NOW.

Written by Damien Hirst Edited by Robert Violette Designed by Jonathan Barnbrook Paper engineer Herman Leslie Reprint 1998 First published USA 1997 BY Monacelli Press New York Printed, bound and hand assembled in China

Gunther Kress argues there is a vast difference between being immersed in a cinema movie and zapping from television channel to channel, just as there is such difference in reading a book from cover to cover or leafing through a magazine. Their weight and size, the way they are bound, the quality of their paper, their

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gloss or matt finish, are all aspects of reading the book that “are of increasing significance in the age of “interactivity” (Kress & Leeuwen 2001:122). The design by Jonathan Barnbrook for Damien Hirst’s monograph embraces the interactive, the architectural, and the semiotic experience in a large dramatic and fascinating book that, since its publication in 1998, has become a highly sought after collector’s volume (fig 7). Jonathan Barnbrook designed this edition with the artist’s collaboration so that as both the artist and the author, Hirst had a considerable part to play in its design and production.

Conceived as a large folio format edition, the book is about thirty centimetres square by about five centimetres thick with a case bound cover in red embossed high quality book cloth, square backed and stitched. Protecting the cover is a full colour dust jacket displaying a full-bleed image of a hospital room, with an overlay of scientific grids and images and a molecular image on the back cover. The front end papers are a full bleed photographic image of the inside of an ambulance, the back end papers consisting of another a full-bleed image of a hospital corridor. Before the reader begins the book, the impact of the imagery has set the tone for the coming dissections, deconstructions, preservations and surgical procedures of Hirst’s art practice. The inside flap introduces Hirst as “one of the most controversial artists of his generation,” saying that, “Hirst possesses an unflinching view of modern life and an original talent for making images that fearlessly communicate the urgent themes of our time” (Hirst 1998:jacket). The book covers the entire range of his work; paintings, sculptures, installations and films, and as such stands as an “iconoclastic work that challenges the boundaries of art, science, media and popular culture” (ibid). His is probably best known in the public eye for his iconoclastic shark in formaldehyde quoted in movies and television advertisements.

In a world of the screen, Barnbrook has created a reading experience in design of I want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, now, unique to the medium of the book. A die cut of Hirst’s name revealing the colour on the page beneath, is the first indication of the extensive use of media techniques

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unique to the medium of the printed book. A stark white table of contents presented on a graph-like background of blue grid gives the books a clinical, scientific aura. The orientation of the page is such that the book must be turned on its side to read the text and this format continues throughout the following pages of the first essay. The reader has already begun a bodily interaction with the book as a physical object, turning its weighty bulk in order to read the text. The essay then ends with the book being returned to its normal orientation and finishes with a right hand page folding out to show nothing but a blue background with a sentence running along the top edge saying, I remember when I was young I used to do a drawing and say “I’ve finished it” and my Mum would come and stick a piece of paper on the end and say, ‘Carry on.” At points like that you think about expansion, and how far you can take it. Once you go beyond the limits of a piece of paper it’s easy (Hirst 1997:15)

How well the action of unfolding the paper, opening into a longer piece as the sentence progresses, expresses the meaning of these words. Barnbrook sets the scene for an engagement with text and images through an interaction with the page. In this way Barnbrook’s design takes the design of this book, beyond the limits of the traditional art monograph. From this stark white beginning a change of art brings a change of approach to the design of the layout, typography and imagery, immersing the reader in an installation, When Logics Die. Here the gloss black ink of the background surrounds the images of dead bodies, surgical instruments and large glass boxes containing medical objects, hatching flies, and a tripod viewed through a die cut window. Larger type merges with a graphic image of a surgical operation across a double spread before the page is turned to reveal quotes in fine white type floating in a black void. The following page shows two empty glass boxes in a laneway in front of a brick wall. There is a sense of having ‘moved’ from inside to outside the hospital rooms. This page is engineered so that tabs can be pulled at the base of the page so that the glass moves to reveal two cow heads, the word beneath changing from “anaesthetics” to the word “stimulants.”

Next, a set of pages with images of Hirst’s glass boxes in an exhibition are cut in two with the words, “ I like the idea formally of trying to cut something in half.” (Hirst 1997:60). The sliced images are of a chair, desk and ashtray, all cut in half,

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with a packet of cigarettes branded “Silk Cut,’ placed on one half of the table, adding further meaning to the work. By cutting the pages in half, as the art works are, the reader is presented with an added conceptual representation of the idea behind the original work. In this way Barnbrook is utilizing the printed page beyond the conveyance of texts, by engaging the turning of the page as part of the reading experience. Throughout the book, a variety of paper engineering techniques that can be manipulated and moved, are employed to actively engage the reader in the art experience in a way that is unique to the book as an object.

An art exhibition is an event that can be represented in a number of ways, including attending the physical presentation in a gallery, viewing a film of the works, or viewing reproduced images in an exhibition catalogue or a book. However, when publishers produce a printed book of an exhibition, it is usually in the form of a monograph, with full colour still images of the works on display, accompanied by written text, usually in a fairly conventional or unobtrusive format. This book seeks to take the reader beyond the boundaries of the conventional art book to include an experience of the artwork in itself. By taking advantage of the physical properties of the book’s format, Hirst and Barnbrook have exploited the three dimensionality of this graphic format. Hirst admits to the origins of the idea for making a interactive book as coming from his childhood experience of a book.

Children’s books are the most common place to find paper engineering, pop-up mechanisms and moveable parts as illustration. But books in which the reader can interact by manipulating the page, have their origins in the sixteenth century. Heidi Rombouts, in her essay The Moveable Book, describes one of the earliest books to use this form of paper engineering, printed in 1551, a time when the printing of books was rapidly advancing scientific and technical knowledge, One of the oldest preserved books with a moving illustration is 'Sphaera,' written by Johannes de Sacrobosco in 1233. This book about astrology contains moveable parts, which can be used by the reader to study the universe and its different constellations by means of layered discs… Perpetual calendars, chronological tables and astronomical charts are subjects that lend themselves perfectly to the oldest techniques: lift-up-the-flap plates and the volvelle or revolving disc (Gentenaar 2002:161).

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These books were designed for adults and contained scientific and technological information at a time when printed books were a product of the ‘new media’ technology of the printing press. Throughout the following centuries, the content of these moveable, or interactive, books continued to be educative in content, as their diagrammatic designs made scientific and technological information more easily understood. Eventually, towards the end of the nineteenth century, they would become more a form of entertainment and an indispensable part of a child’s world (Gentenaar 2002). Hirst’s use of these techniques combines a tradition of scientific illustration and the childish pleasure of manipulating and interacting with the pictures on the page. But these manipulations also add meaning to the works by adding movement to the reading of text and image.

An example is the way he uses a revolving disc represent two of his round paintings from an exhibition, making beautiful paintings. “They spin on the wall because I was annoyed with people asking which way up they were meant to be” (Hirst 1997:259). By using the revolving disc, images of these paintings can be spun on the page, simulating the gallery experience for the reader of the book. However, a further level of meaning is revealed when it is known that the paintings were also produced by a method whereby Hirst poured acrylic paint onto a spinning disc to make the paintings. Thus the action of the revolving disc in the book also echoes this aspect of the work. In this way the book offers more than a two dimensional image of a painting on the wall. The book becomes an interactive medium where the reader can manipulates the image in the same way the viewer manipulates the paintings. Parts that move, discs, pull-tab plates, pop- up images, change the book from a passive to an active reading experience where the reader “has an adventure” with the book. (Gentenaar 2002:161) It is an activity that is perhaps closer to the screen reading of a computer game: Moving books have something magical, theatrical and spellbinding about them. Before cinema, television and computers existed, events were illustrated with movement in a book. The reader experienced what was happening by creating the movement and could repeat the sensation time and time again. The figures literally came to life. General knowledge and science could also be visualized this way, making everything clearer and easier to grasp than the text and drawings ever could… Modern computer technology may have replaced the instructional

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value of their animations, but structures are now appreciated in their own right, and their mechanical ingenuity viewed with admiration and amazement. (Gentenaar 2002: 183)

There is certainly something theatrical and spellbinding about Damien Hirst’s art exhibitions, and although computer mediation might offer a simulated a walk through experience of these works, Hirst and Barnbrook show that by taking optimal advantage of print media technology, the book as a material object can present another equally unique viewing experience of art. The more technological the world becomes, that is, the more we rely on the computer to carry out our work, the more fascinated people will become by things that are made in this way, requiring design and ingenuity, imagination, skill and the acquisition of knowledge that comes through the 'physicality' of solving problems. Hirst’s monograph is an example of the book designed as an architectonic space, an object read as an interactive work of art, taking on an attribute of new media while exploiting the technological innovations of print media. The interactive aspect in the reading of the material book is also represented in the next study, where the hand and the mind are engaged through the literal materiality of the book’s design.

Case Study 2 : Codex Sensus

HOPSCOTCH COMPENDIUM 2003

Edited byTry Lum and Frank Cox, Designed by Mark Gowing Bound by MchPersons Binding Published in 2003 Printed, bound and hand assembled in Australia

Charlotte Fish is a designer working in the book retail industry as buyer for the Design Section at Ariel bookshop, Oxford Street Paddington. Fish had previously worked on a project with graphic designer, Mark Gowing, on a book promotion for the film distributor, Hopscotch. After an introduction by Fish, a discussion about the impact of new media technology on the book and design was entered

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into and Gowing made the following observations, before presenting a copy of Hopscotch Compendium 2003 for the study (fig 8).

When asked about his views on the role of new media technology in design, Gowing said that technology makes it possible to be more experimental. “Technology set me free.” As a young designer Gowing found he lacked the specialized skills needed to execute his design concepts, airbrushing, for example. As an art director this would not be a problem, but as a young designer the computer enabled him to execute typographic, illustrative and layout concepts more easily and rapidly and, at a lower cost. He feels that technology is forcing attention back onto the book. People spend all day at the keyboard, using new media technology to send and receive information, or generate work documents. The computer is used by a great many people for work so that books are now more to do with their “personal time.” Books are now more to do with personal time where the reading of books brings a greater engagement with the senses. “A book gives a more physical and tactile reading experience, even though it may be a on a subconscious level” (Gowing 2004).

Experimental books are becoming more prolific he believes, because people are spending less time reading books for information and so want to enjoy books that “look nice” and can be enjoyed as objects. This, he believes, is reflected in the growing market for experimental and designer book. In previous decades, the book was used to a greater extent as a utilitarian object. Mass production meant that many had access to books but that books were fairly standardised in appearance. The content was often more important than the container. Today Gowing believes, “People want to buy books that are different.” He notes that designers are designing books that express more emotional connection to the content. Books that ‘feel’ right and convey the intention of the text; a book on architecture might use “cold” materials, colours and type styles; a book about food might use “warmer” materials, colours and type styles, for example. Shape, size, weight, texture etcetera, all play a part in the reading experience.

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Mark Gowing on the Design of Hopscotch Compendium 2003 The compendium was commissioned by Hopscotch Film Distributors to launch the company within the industry. It was to be marketed to people in the film industry, and therefore not for public use. It would be targeted at 150 selected filmmakers, whose films Hopscotch wanted to promote. They were looking for an identity that expressed their philosophy of representing, “honest, beautiful and cultural/art house” styled documentaries. It was a book designed to “build faith” in the company. In the competitive film industry, Gowing asked himself the question, “Why choose Hopscotch to distribute your film?” The answer; “a good track record and being perceived as the ‘right people for the job” (Gowing 2004).

The conceptual framework for the book was “Reality.” Gowing wanted to give the reader of the compendium a sense of experiencing the films in a “real way,” drawing on everyday experience, and materials, brought together in a “poetic way.” He came up with the idea of the book being made of found materials for pages, and that the essence of each film would be expressed in the imagery, textures, colours, and objects included in the compendium. Thus every film had a unique set of signifiers - fabrics, maps, text, card, plastic, feathers and so on. This treatment of the content helped to get Hopscotch noticed, and as they were a young company and wanted to build a reputation quickly, they needed to make a unique impression.

The edition of one hundred and fifty copies, was hand assembled and machine bound. After designing the layout and concepts for each film, materials for the book were collected and collated in the studio. A team of designers and assistants then hand cut the difficult materials, like fabrics, plastics, maps and so on, while the inserted printed pages were printed and trimmed conventionally. A Perspex template was used to cut the materials. This enabled the designer to select the most appropriate sections of, for example, a map or fabric pattern. The template also meant that all pages were exactly the same size. These cut pages were then

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hand collated and assembled into the text block of the book ready for the binder. Gowing then packed and hand delivered these assembled and collated pages along with their printed covers to the binder.

The binder, McPherson Binding, used their latest binding technology to bind the assembled ‘text’ blocks into the silver Chromolux cover. However, because the machine was automated, it would have dislodged the components in the usual binding process. To address this, the machine was adapted for the job and Gowing and the binder hand fed the machine to have more control over the process. The whole process took about five to six hours and nine copies were “lost” in the process, that is, some pages were not adhered into the binding perfectly. This was due to the unusual materials being bound together and the experimental nature of the project. However, Gowing was pleased with the result and was able to deliver the order of one hundred and fifty copies on time.

It took four months to complete the book, but was not only well received by the client but also by the film buyers. The use of ‘real’ materials made for a tactile, visually rich, stimulating representation of thee cinematic medium. Sixty eight of those who received a copy responded to both Hopscotch and Mark Gowing to express their delight with the compendium, by letter, email and more directly by telephone. This is an unusual response to a commercial book, and is attributed by Gowing to the fact that it was a “warm, human, and poetic” approach to selling a brand in a corporate, economically driven environment.

Mark Gowing’s approach to graphic design is not only innovative but also shows a conscientious awareness of the need for designers to engage more fully in the interpretation of content in addressing the needs of the client and the public. The Hopscotch Compendium 2003 is a unique example of book design that demonstrates how the design process can take the materiality of the book as part of the ”message” in the reading experience, into account. Its positive reception by both the client and the end customer are a testimony to his expertise as a designer and to the unique reading experience he inspired in the design of this book.

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Hopscotch Compendium 2003 The company, ‘Hopscotch’ is a partnership between Try Lum, former head of Dendy Films and Frank Cox, industry pioneer and owner of New Vision Films. Between them, they have released some of the seminal independent movies of the last decade, including Ameli, Clerks, The Blair Witch Project, Kundun, Beuna Vista Social Club, Leaving Los Vegas and The Three Colours Trilogy. The text in the opening of the book headed “Introducing Hopscotch” begins, As cinema viewing habits become more sophisticated, so too has the need arisen for more intelligent and emotionally satisfying movies. Hopscotch is a new distributor that promises to deliver films of a distinct quality. Movies will be handpicked from all over the world and each of them will be tailored for an audience that demands that films challenge, entertain and inspire them” (Lum & Cox 2003).

Taking his cue from this description of the company, Gowing chose to emphasise these qualities by making a hand made book to allude to the “hand picked” movies by designing the book as handmade “especially for you.” The Hopscotch Compendium was designed to “challenge entertain and inspire the reader” and Charlotte Fish pointed out that the concept behind this book was to give the reader an “experience” that gave a “sense” of the film, rather than a “wordy” account of the slick graphic promotional booklets common in the industry.

The book is packaged in a white postal box with a sophisticated grey sticker sealing it closed. The book arrives sealed in a bubble wrap bag, folded and closed with another smaller sticker with the warning, “Handle with Care,” printed in black type. This hints at the importance of the hand in the making and the reading of this unique book. On opening the box, the first visual delight of the bubble wrap surface is father gratified on lifting the book out by the sensation of handling the texture of the “bubbles.” Inside the book has a cover of metallic silver with the edge of the cover folded back giving it a substantial feel and a sense of quality. The white title of the word Hopscotch and a logo inspired “hopscotch’ design decorate the bottom two thirds of the cover. These are the only graphic elements that appear and belie the rich tactile experience to follow on opening the book. The opening endpaper is bight yellow and turns to reveal a sumptuous rich

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baroque, heavily embossed and tactile furnishing textile sample. This is the first clue to the rest of the book, that it is different and will be experiential. The fabric “page” is unexpected and sets the tone for what is to come. Now the reader has been oriented to expect something unconventional and as the films are also unconventional this is a good marrying of form to content, an enhancement of the reading experience not possible with a computer screen or printed book. The tactility this provides and the ability to experience real objects, feathers, record sleeves, movie tickets, takes the reading experience “beyond the book.”

To achieve these gaols they began the book with a real full-page Gregory’s type street map with a transparent drafting paper over the top with WISH YOU WERE HERE indicating the location of the company headquarters, begins the narrative of the book. Cut from a real map it is bound into the book along with all other content with a blast binding. Turning the page reveals the back of the map. The next right hand “page” is a popcorn package cut out to fit into the binding but covering only half of the blue fibreglass bag “page” beneath it. This is shiny and textured and crackles when the “page” is turned. Following next is a section of a film poster cropped to display four stars and the words in red and black capital letters“ infinitely humorous” … “any recent”…”total film.” Enough words to entice an interpretation. The next page is a sophisticated grey drafting film revealing very discretely the typeset title of the first film in the compendium, “Bowling for Columbine.” Over the top of this page, a strip of three movie tickets, “Admit One” has been inserted. The grey drafting film interrupts the textural experience by providing relief and a foil for the following page.

Having introduced the film credentials, the next few pages are a visual and tactile summary of the film’s narrative. Left page: a blown up photocopy of Uncle Sam. Right page: a genuine printed paper target used for shooting practice, inserted into the book with “bullet” holes punched through the paper revealing the image below. When this is turned over the back is a plain paper sheet with the holes showing through Uncle Sam next to the right hand “page”, a plastic US flag, the stars and stripes. Without showing any explicit images of the film, or using any

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verbal description, these pages give a sense of the narratives they represent, through the association of images and the realness of the objects used as pages; a paper target, a plastic flag. The plastic of the flag “says” something about the American culture and has a contradiction in the meaning in a patriotic sense and the “plastic” alluding to the surface perception of American values covering the reality of the violence the gun culture perpetuates. The next page takes us back to the grey drafting paper that now signals a new film, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” The sequential structure of the book is now repeated with the glossy Photograph and sophisticated typography giving the film details.

The book continues in this rhythm, but one of the most intriguing pages is made from a translucent woven fabric with two feathers sewn on in a zig-zag pattern that gives the impression of a flight path or route on a map. Underneath is a map from an atlas and the juxtaposition of the object with the map, signifies that the film is about birds flying over the countryside. The film is the documentary called, “Travelling Birds.” The next film, “The Little Chinese Seamstress,” is represented by a page from a book inserted over a dressmakers tracing paper pattern, layered over a piece of red Chinese satin embroidered fabric. The red colour and the design of the fabric signifying the culture, the tracing pattern, the seamstress and the page from a book representing the “subversive books” by Flaubert, Tolstoy and Balzac. “…this visually lush story of life in a remote Chinese village…” can be imagined through the imagery of materials and objects that reference the story. Another reading of the film, another way of reading a book.

The frayed edges of the fabrics gives an added textural look to the book, “the more it is handled the better it gets” says Fish, and the content’ bulks makes it seem almost gift like. “A package of goodies” (Fish 2004). The whole production was hand assembled by two to three people, over a period of four to five months, with considerable time spent sourcing the material, the images, objects and fabrics. A small limited edition that few would want to throw away, gave it a longer “life” than a conventional printed version might have, and the response from both the client and the audience, which Gowing claims was extremely

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positive, bore this out. What both this and the Damien Hirst monograph demonstrate is a willingness to step outside the paradigm of the printed book and to engage the reader in more than words and pictures.

The physicality of the book is a more important part of its appeal they may have been previously realised. Speaking at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum on “Emotional Ergonomics,” Richard Seymour of the London based industrial design partnership, Seymour Powell, had this to say about the physicality of consumer products in today’s multimedia environment, …as organisms we desire what I call ‘granularity’, physicality, texture. Physicality is evaporating. It can’t disappear completely, but what we do need is things like email to be more granular, we need texture put back into things... We can now do almost everything. So that means it’s now about what we ‘should’ do, not about what we ‘can’ do. The choices now involve moral reality rather than imperative and they require the intellectual comprehension of what we are going to need emotionally and physically in the future. The twenty first century is about resonance and appropriateness; it’s about appropriate technology and it’s about what is right for people. We need real thought leadership now more than ever, because the stakes are now very high indeed (Ferguson 2003:030).

The books of Damien Hirst and Mark Gowing (one interactive in an architectural way, the other interacting with all our senses), add the granular, the physical, the textural and emotional resonance that electronic communications seem to lack. In a recent interview, publisher James Fraser was asked how much of threat e-books are to conventional publishing? He answered that despite the prevailing “hype,” evidence suggests that e-book sales are very small and although there is a place in the market as a delivery mechanism (like Amazon.com et al) he did not see this being at the expense of the traditional book. The electronic delivery of texts may be evident in areas like education, but according to Fraser, “a different style of book is going to come back, probably more tactile than at present. Dare I say it, maybe deckled edges might come back big time?” (Blakeney 2001:3-4).

Books for a New Media Age More new books are now published in a single day than Gutenberg saw in a lifetime (Fawcett-Tang 2001). In the design of these books, accuracy, science, realism, beauty, and passion are attributes that designers can bring to their concepts for the shape, materials, meaning and purpose of the contemporary

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book. It is evident that there new paradigms and parameters to the ordering, structuring, and experiencing of books will need to be considered as technologies facilitate new patterns of thought and creativity (Ducker 1995). Whether these forms will be radically different, envisioned as new versions of an old idea, or whether they become radically new, “it is clear that electronic and conventional media are forging new forms and definitions of the book as we know it” (ibid:157). So why should designers make books where the materiality of the book is as important as the content, or even is the content? One reason is that through the centuries beautiful and unusual books have been shown to have had the best chance against the ravages of time. Beautiful books are cherished, protected, and preserved, while ordinary volumes become worn out, lost, or discarded (Butler 1940). Furthermore, and more importantly in a New Media Age, the multimodal nature of texts in the form of digital delivery is changing a screen conscious culture perceives the book.

The dominance of the image over written texts is the single most evident influence of the new media technology. Some book designers are taking advantage of the ease with which images can be utilised in the design and production of print media. As we have seen, the image, especially the colourful and spectacular images of the illuminated manuscript, were restricted to black and white for many years after the invention of the printing press. In later years, the technologies for printing colour became available but the extent of the use of imagery was in terms of the expense of their production. But today, digital technologies are enabling designers to push the boundaries of print production and to explore new materials and methods of production. The physicality of the book, the use of materials as part of the design concept, is easy to forget when you are working on a computer, Today, when most design is done at the computer, and printing presses throughput paper faster than the eye can follow, there is a sense of remove between the designer and the creation of an object. Books...with unique or experimental formats do not necessarily utilise any more craft skills than their more conventional cousins, but the input of the designer or craftsman is more obvious, and accounts for a large part of their appeal (Fawcett-Tang 2001:A008).

But designing the book as a more unique object, in limited editions, utilizing expressive materials and finding new ways of designing with print “adds depth to

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the reading experience” (ibid:009). Roger Fawcett-Tang points out that a younger generation oriented to the media screen are attracted to read something because of its visual richness. However, he believes print media does have an advantage over television in creating visual richness (ibid). From textbook to image book, the effects of the new media technology on the architecture of the book, as Kress has already stated, require design decisions significantly different to those taken before the emergence of computer mediation.

Fine, black and white it is. Accuracy above all. But against a gold background. It has to strike the reader, make him feel he’s there on the day the experiment was carried out See what I mean. Science, realism, passion.

UMBERTO ECO 2001:241

Conclusion When the book is seen as more than a purveyor of texts and more of an aesthetic object, then the status of objects and reasons for their existence is a further consideration of the designer. Dr. Alberto Alessi4 recounted in his paper, “Beautiful but useful,” presented at The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufacture and Commerce, in the Midlands 2001, how he realised that the status of objects his company produces were of importance to his customers. Apart from their functional value, he discovered people responded to other values in the objects they desire. Objects are becoming more and more signs of communication and whether as status symbols or style signs, according to Alessi, they form a kind of vocabulary, a vocabulary that he feels is “even more clear and more able to communicate than words” (Alessi 2004:2). In addition, his objects also have what he calls, “artistic value,” setting them apart from the mass-market: Objects are more and more the vehicle of an artistic form of creation and of fruition. I have also learnt during my career that there is an enormous need for art and poetry in our society, in our market, that is not yet understood by the normal mass-production companies ( Alessi 2001:2).

4 Alessi commissions “the talent of the world’s most interesting designers” to merge function with aesthetics in the homewares he produces in the Alessi Factory, incorporating, in his words, “the extra dimension of emotion” (Sweet 1998:13).

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As we have seen in this study, designing the book as ‘vehicles of an artistic form of creation,’ utilising the visual and tactile appeal achieved with print media, can certainly set books apart as objects with an aesthetic value. But in the end it is the “bookness”5 of books, that separates them from other media, and the transportation of texts to the screen only represents the text. A text, as Philip Smith points out, is a text and it is questionable that something can be called a book, an iBook for example, by being labelled as one (Smith 1996:1). “Bookness,” according to Smith, is a quality that has only to do with the book, In its simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include pre-codex carriers of texts such as the scroll or the clay tablet, in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV screen, poster or hand-bill ( ibid).

Or a computer screen. As Kress reminds us, “meaning is made in many different ways” and the affordances and the organizations of the screen are reshaping the organization of the book to be a more engaging experience (Kress 2003).

The interactive aspects print media design used by the Stephen Gan and the designers of Visionaire, and the work of Nick Bantock, Bruce Mau, Jonathan Barnbrook, Damien Hirst and Mark Gowing, show that contemporary books, realised in the material and kinetic qualities of the object itself, “are of increasing significance in the age of interactivity.” (Kress 2003:122). The visual and emotional interaction in the books by Visionaire will influence a new generation of book designers living with the dominance of the screen. The work of Bruce Mau will inspire future designers to critically interpret the books they design and employ the image intelligently in the mode of the visual essay. Jonathan Barnbrook shows them how the architectural dimensions and the elements of motion and interaction associated with new media, can be equally employed in the ‘hypermediated,’ printed book. The handmade, tactile and emotional

5 Philip Smith coined the term “bookness” in the 1970s after reading James Joyce’s Ulysses the “horseness of the horse,” leading him to ask the “whatness of the book” or its “bookness” (Smith 1996).

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experience of Mark Gowing’s Hopscotch Compendium is a unique demonstration of the ‘granularity’, physicality, and texture’ identified by Seymour Powell as a desire in today’s multimedia environment. The poetic reality of Gowing’s book design met a need for art and poetry in a mass-produced corporate world.

If, as Richard Seymour says, we need real conceptual leadership now more than ever, then the books and designers featured in this study might go some way towards identifying the design excellence a leader might inspire too. These designers have broken with tradition, dared to experiment and taken new directions dared to risk new ways of thinking about the book as a reading site. It is five hundred years since the invention of the printing press and ubiquity of print has been at the cost of the unrelenting uniformity of book design. Uniformity has been one of the book’s greatest assets but may also be a liability in a multi choice, multimodal context. This thesis does not intend to suggest the only future for the book is to design them in experimental formats. The traditions of fifteenth century book production and print media reading practice are far too valuable and will no doubt remain the central form of reading for novels and treatises involving more substantial contemplation. Rather, this discussion is aimed at discerning what might be achieved when designers are willing to entertain new conceptual frameworks. The case studies are presented here to corroborate the theory that, books, designed as beautiful and meaningful objects, will remain viable as reading sites of the future, distinguishing themselves as material objects of desire in a world dominated by the New Media screen.

I read, not to believe what the manifestoes said, but to look beyond them, as if the words meant something else.

UMBERTO ECO 2001:394

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P A R T T WP O a l i m p s e s t A pachment which has been written on twice, the first writing being erased to make roomfor a second writing.Traces of the old text remain.

Graphic Investigations

A study of space, form, materials, processes and techniques of production, towards the realisation of book object concept models

Composite image: Penelope Lee 2003. Hand: Bronowski, J. (1981) The Ascent of Man, BBC, London, p57. Script: Fewster, K. (2000) Leornado De Vinci: The Codex Leicester – Notebook of a Genius, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

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Chapter 6

C O D E X : CODE X

N O N E S The hours between 2.00 and 3.00 in the afternoon

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THE BOOK AS MATERIAL OBJECT

During our time at the abbey his hands were always covered with the dust of books, the gold of still-fresh illumination, or with yellowish substances he touched in Severinus’ infirmary. He seemed unable to think save with his hands …

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 317

Introduction Joseph Bronowski, in his book The Ascent of Man, believed the hand was so important to the progress of humanity that he called it “the cutting edge of the mind” (Bronowski 1981:116). Like Eco’s learned Brother William of Baskerville, the designer also thinks with his hands when making models or drawing the sketches that enable the concepts of the mind to enter the physical world of the object. Indeed, while the digital technology of computer mediation still requires the use of the hand for its operation, even if in a highly diminished sense, and despite the rise of mechanisation lessening the need for manual work, for the architect or designer, making by hand is still a fundamental means of learning about space, form and the forces of the physical world.

For Confucius, effective learning depended on putting that which is seen and heard into action and the truth of his now familiar aphorism, I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand, was also recognised by such great minds as Goethe, William Blake and William Morris. Goethe believed in the necessity of understanding the “mechanical side of craft” in order to judge it, while Blake went even further, in his belief that mechanical excellence was “the only vehicle of genius” (Chappell 1980:7). Peter Dormer, in his highly reasoned critique on skill and its meaning in design, also argues this point of view maintaining that the constitutive fundamentals of a craft can only truly be learnt by actually doing the activity of that craft, that essentially “you cannot understand it until you can do it” (Dormer 1994:42). Tacit knowledge, he explains, is a body of knowledge gained through experience, through the experience of our senses and of doing work and propositional knowledge, although held higher in regard than practical

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knowledge, “is underpinned by practical knowledge” (Dormer 1994:14). Richard Buchanan sees this design activity as “technological reasoning,” based on an understanding of natural and scientific principles that serve as “premises” for constructing objects (Margolin 1989:96). For designers, technological reasoning is the way designers “manipulate materials” to solve design problems (Margolin 1989:96).

Practical knowledge denotes manipulative skill, mastery of materials and coordination between the hand and the eye that contributes to the executive excellence of a work of art or design (Johnson 1991:185). However, not everyone holds this view and many have argued that technique is secondary to conception and that craft knowledge and conceptual thinking, are separate activities, and that “it is quite the fashion still, as it has always been, to deprecate the importance of technique, to put it down as the mechanical part of the book or the picture, something subsidiary to the thought” (ibid). Perhaps the reason for this rejection is, as Dormer concludes, that tacit knowledge is difficult to acquire and too slow for the contemporary student or artist wanting to establish their work quickly in response to a fast changing world. Even the practical skill involved in computer mediation requires a level of expertise in order to generate exceptional design.1 Tacit knowledge is absolutely necessary if the designer’s goal is one of design excellence. Throughout history there has never been a great work without it, for the world's greatest writers, musicians, painters, sculptors are also the world’s greatest craftsmen (ibid).

This chapter introduces the philosophical design methodology of one of those great craftsman, William Morris,2 as a model upon which the practical component

1 The value of making as a way of accessing new knowledge is suggested as a research methodology by Brenda Laurel, who says, “It is through making (rather than observing or interviewing) that these contributors generate new information… projects and practices that serve as experiments through which they interrogate their ideas, test their hypotheses and pose new questions” (Laurel 2003:82). 2 Brenda Laurel also observes that “The kinds of utopian aspirations that Bauhaus designers [who followed the design theories and practices of William Morris] and other modernists had for the field, have been obscured by a miasma of Coca Cola campaigns and automotive styling, but perhaps it can be reinvigorated in this era of electronic image-making and vectoral world building” (Laurel 2003:14)

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of this research is based. This is then followed by an account of the four studio areas that constitute the architecture of the book and in which tacit knowledge was acquired. Three of these studies, papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding, were chosen as traditional technologies that constitute the book as a material object. The fourth study is an investigation into contemporary new media technologies and materials, towards the ‘rewriting’ of traditional techniques into a palimpsest reading of the book in a New Media Age.

WILLIAM MORRIS

I found William at the forge, working with Nicholas, both deeply involved in their task.

UMBERTO ECO 1992: 196

One of the world’s greatest designers was William Morris, a man whom Fiona MacCarthy considered “arrives only once or twice each century” (MacCarthy 1994:xix) and whose ideology embraced the integration of art, craft and design. As a result he was a designer who worked in a great variety of media, including stained glass, hand-painted tiles, tapestries and woven textiles, embroideries, rugs and carpets, and hand-printed wallpaper and fabric pattern designs that were to become his hallmark. He believed that designers should familiarise themselves entirely with both the material and production techniques required in any medium and he put this into practice throughout his life. His versatility meant that he became skilled in many arts, studying the intricacies of each one with obsessive intensity, resulting in his having “a thoroughgoing knowledge of technical process and intuitive flair for handling materials” (Hamilton 1998:48). His was a truly ‘hands-on’ approach to design: He never designed anything which he did not know how to produce with his own hands, and by extension he insisted that nothing should be produced by his workshops which he could not do himself… It was his practice never to employ professional designers, who he felt too often had no understanding of how their designs would be executed, with invariably hackneyed, repetitive results. (Dore 1990:11,14)

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His invariable practice in researching a craft was to return to the time when it was at its highest perfection, examine the process in the best examples, and then apply this knowledge to existing needs and circumstances (Valance 1986). In 1891 he set up the Kelmscott Press in order to produce books using these principles with the aim “to revive the allied crafts of type-designing, fine printing and book production, producing hand-printed limited editions on hand made paper” (Dore 1990:117). Over fifty books were printed by the atelier, including the Kelmscott Chaucer, which along with the Gutenberg Bible (which even Morris considered unsurpassable), was one of the most elaborate books ever produced. The Kelmscott Chaucer was William Morris’s last venture and it seems fitting that his philosophies of design should culminate in this book, which indeed stands as a monument to his ideals. He approached the design and production of this tome by applying his method of conducting a thorough investigation of the materials and processes involved, and drawing on his lifelong studies of illuminated manuscripts and incunabula. The materials were chosen for their authenticity but also for their appropriateness or “fitness for purpose” to the design. Printed on an Albion Press the paper was modelled on a fifteenth century Bolognese sample, hand-made by Joseph Batchelor with pure linen rag and carrying a distinctive watermark also designed by Morris (Robinson 1982). In true form, when collaborating with Batchelor, “he rolled up his sleeves to make a sheet himself, undaunted by the difficulty of the process” (ibid:18). Even if he was not the maker of the products he designed, he still insisted on a hands-on approach.

The firm of Jaenecke was commissioned in Hamburg to make a traditional ink, modified and tested for density of colour and the binding, although conceived by Morris, was executed by the best bookbinder of the time, Thomas Cobden Sanderson. Type, however, was designed using photographic projection and then machine-cut from Morris’s designs by Edward Prince. Edward Burne-Jones drew the illustrations using photography to reproduce the drawings for engraving by William Harcourt Hooper (Robinson 1982). While he was ambivalent about mechanisation, he welcomed the labour-saving potential of machinery and,

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although he is most well known for his passion for handcraft, he demonstrated his willingness to use the latest technological innovations in the production of the books of the Kelmscott Press. Through research into traditional methods and concepts he sought to bring something of value into the design of the present by mastering the processes of paper-making and inks, designing page layouts, typefaces, ornamental borders, and bindings to prove that printing could be an art, and setting a standard for private new art presses that emerged in England, Europe and America (Hamilton 1998). In doing this he became one of the greatest influences on modern book design.

Following William Morris’s design philosophy, which also arose in response to radical technological change, this thesis includes comprehensive research into the materiality and architecture of the book, through an empirical ‘hands-on’ study of the materials, techniques and processes of book production. These investigations expand and support the theoretical concepts of the thesis towards a deeper understanding of the technological implications inherent in the design of the book. Furthermore, they aim to provide a knowledge base from which innovative design solutions might evolve in the development of a conceptual framework, as having practical knowledge of an object is a “spur to conceptual reflection” prompting questions of what might happen if something is done in a different way (Dormer 1994:57). Peter Dormer validates this connections between conceptual thinking and tacit knowledge when he writes, “in a general sense tacit knowledge is an aspect of all thinking, including conceptual thinking in such disciplines as mathematics, theoretical physics or philosophy. There is a craft to such thinking and one learns it, becomes expert, and applies it to solve problems” and tacit knowledge “is harder to acquire through books than it is face to face with a skilled practitioner and teacher” (ibbid:23,11). The medieval artisan practiced under a master of his chosen art as an apprentice until they had mastered that art enough to be the teacher of another.

This remains a practice for designers today, with the exception that the masters and apprentices are now more likely to attend institutions of learning rather than

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being taught individually. Knowledge of technical skills is best passed on from a skilled practitioner to a novice, and working with an extended community of students helps to expand and challenge ideas (Dormer 1994). To take advantage of this environment, in conjunction with the theoretical study, I attended a series of workshops in the design and production of the book as an object. My approach was to deconstruct the book into its basic historical components; paper, print and binding and then reconstruct contemporary designs by combining these traditional techniques with new media technologies and materials. The production of the fifteenth century book involved the practice of papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding. These crafts are not only still practiced today in the design and production of handmade books, but are fundamentally the same processes, albeit mechanised, used in modern commercial book production.

The last research project of William Morris, the Kelmscott Chaucer, is also an example of the notion of a Dunne’s “material thesis,” one that expounds a philosophy of design that saw him reviewing the Middle Age origins of book design, gaining a thorough understanding of traditional techniques and materials, while at the same time embracing new technologies. This methodology is one that I chose to use in the development of my own research for his understanding of what book artist Gary Frost terms, a learning channel, makes Morris’s methods as relevant today as they were in his own time. Like Bronowski, Frost also recognises the role the hand plays in learning, arguing that the hand “prompts the mind” due to millions of years of primate dexterity, increasing brain size and engendering a learning mode based on “discovery by manipulation and tactile observation” (Frost 2002b:1). This perceptive “channel of primate dexterity” then prompted the mind toward conceptual thought and created a learning channel that is still with us today. In relating this theory to book design, he says, Crafts of hand papermaking, calligraphy, hand bookbinding and hand printing all nurture the arts of dexterity. In fact these crafts, including their conceptual issues, can only be approached through the medium of hand skills. In book arts the hands prompt the mind and the mind prompts the hands in a rewarding integration (Frost 2002f:2).

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The aim of the following studio investigations were engaged to take advantage of this “hand-to-concept learning channel” by exploring the techniques and processes as they were presented in workshops, and to then apply this knowledge and skill more specifically to book design concepts emerging out of theoretical thesis. This was achieved by: • Attendance at a series of initial workshops to gain knowledge and skills in the techniques and processes of each studio discipline. • Testing the properties and potential of the materials used in these each of the studio disciplines by producing experimental models. • Analysing the results of the studio experimental findings in relation to the theoretical outcomes.

INTERROGATING THE MATERIALITY OF THE BOOK Report on the methods and outcomes of four studio investigations into the space and form of the book, conducted in workshops and explored through autonomous experimentation.

PAPER

The parchment did not seem like parchment… It seemed like cloth, but very fine.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 443

The new media technology that fuelled the information revolution of the fifteenth century would certainly seem like a fine cloth, to the medieval Adso, compared to the stiff parchment pages of an illuminated manuscript. Beginning with the cave wall, writing and drawing had long been inscribed onto the surface of stone, metal, wood, ceramic, papyrus and parchment as a means of recording information. But at the end of the Middle Ages a new writing medium created the impetus for the development a revolutionary form of communication, the printing press. Paper was a new medium made from reconstituted linen rag and it was this innovation that provided the impetus for the revolutionary shift from writing to

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print. The parchment upon which the illuminated manuscripts were so beautifully inscribed, was time consuming and expensive to make. When Gutenberg first printed his Bible, it required the skins of hundreds of sheep, so had parchment been the only material available for the printing of books, “the craft of printing could never have developed” (Hunter1978:17). Thus paper becomes the catalyst of printing and the bridge between the medieval manuscript and the book of modern age. But paper not only provided a quick and cheap printing surface, it also played a role in determining the familiar format of the printed book.

When paper was first developed in China in the first century B.C.E., it was designed as a writing surface for use with the calligraphic brush. Eventually the art of papermaking made its way to Europe through Spain where it was used for the printing of devotional prints and playing cards (Chappell 1980). Before the invention of the printing press, the technique of reproducing images was the Chinese method of woodblock printing. This method relied on frotton printing, the rubbing or burnishing of the back of the paper placed over a carved and inked block of wood (Chappell 1980). However, unlike Chinese paper, European paper was a writing material designed for use with a quill pen used on parchment, a hard and less absorbent surface than Chinese paper. Around 1270 in Fabriano, a town in Italy, the technique of sizing paper with animal glue was introduced to aid the flow of ink from a quill pen, forming a hard, opaque and impervious surface favoured by scribes (Turner1998). By the fourteenth century, papermaking had spread north and was in operation in Strasbourg by the 1430s, so when Gutenberg developed moveable type, he did so in a time when the most available source of paper was that being produced for writing with a pen and ink.

Making a clean and clear impression on the harder surface of this paper therefore required a harder printing surface and an oilier ink than previously used for woodblock printing. So, as this type of paper was the most available form, it determined both the technique of printing with moveable metal type and the size and dimensions of the book (Hunter 1978). Metal type was both suited to the hardness of the paper and withstood the repetitive nature of printing. The final

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format of the book was determined by the folded size of an original sheet and so establishing the book’s nomenclature. For example, the Folio book was a large book where the paper sheet was folded once, the Quarto a book with sheets folded twice with the Octavo the smallest book with the sheet folded four times. Papers are still sold in these dimensions in many parts of the world. So it was that the new technological innovation of paper as a medium was pivotal in establishing the form of the contemporary book. With the emergence of printing upon the European stage, “paper came into its rich inheritance of usefulness.” Paper, more than anything else, “made printing successful and printing reciprocated by making the use of paper universal” (McMurtrie 1989:63). The hand moulding of fine paper continues today in Fabriano, a reminder of the fifteenth century technological innovation continuing to thrive in a New Media Age.

Handmade Paper Handmade paper is undergoing a renaissance as the interest created by makers and current researchers spreads across the world (Turner 1998:41). After being severely threatened by competitive machine made products and even denigrated as a ‘popular’ craft, professional hand production is re-emerging to find a relevant place in contemporary usage (ibid). The first of the empirical research studies was in the production of handmade rag paper, the original substrate of the fifteenth century book. While today there are many sources of fibre used in papermaking, my experimentation with handmade paper was limited to the traditional fifteenth century techniques. Being acid free, handmade linen and cotton papers are regarded as having the aesthetic and archival properties that make them the choice of for any quality work by artists, publishers and designers. Some of the most beautiful books ever printed remain with us today because of the quality of the paper used in their production. These papers have stood the test of time: But for books and records entitled to survive at least as well as the fifteenth century have survived, no substitute has yet to be found for paper manufactured from good old-fashioned linen rags (McMurtrie 1989:74).

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PAPERMAKING STUDIES

Charta lintea, or linen paper… It is said to be very costly, and delicate…

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 443

The Method As my interest in making contemporary pieces using the traditional methods of the past, I have focused my research to a historically Western source of papermaking in line with the design and production of the Western book, even though many contemporary papermakers use plant fibres coming from a Japanese or Eastern tradition. The methods of the early papermakers differ only slightly from those used to produce handmade paper today, the only changes being in the preparation of fibres and the construction of the moulds. Paper is made by firstly breaking down any cellulose material into its separate, component fibres. This is achieved by macerating the fibre, through a process of soaking and beating, into a pulp. The pulp is then suspended in a vat of water and a papermaking mould, made of a steel mesh screen, is drawn through this suspension and lifted out of the vat. As the water drains through away, paper fibres are caught and matt on the surface of the screen, bonding together when pressed and dried. This is the fundamental process of papermaking used in all paper manufacture.

The handmade paper used in this research was made from reconstituted sheets handed down to me by my mother, making a palimpsest as cotton sheets were ‘rewritten’ as paper sheets, and the hand forming technique of papermaking ‘rewrote’ the old ‘new media’ technology of the fifteenth century. The process began by tearing the cotton sheets into 5cm wide strips and then cutting these into 5cm square pieces. I then weighed the pieces into 650gm lots and soaked these in hot water and left the rags for an average of two to three days before beating the rag into a pulp with a Hollander beater. It is was very time consuming and laborious to make rag pulp without the aid of a beater and so the Hollander was invented in the seventeenth century to make the protracted task of rotting and pounding the rag into pulp. The beater consists of a large oval tub with a

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cylindrical roller made up of rows of sharp metal bars. The tub is filled with water and the small quantities of rag pieces are added until all are suspended in the water. The roller is electrically driven and when turned on the roller beats and macerates the rag into a fine pulp. The paper was then formed with this pulp using the procedure explained as above. I made many attempts at ‘pulling’ a good even sheet of paper over the years of the study until I could produce a consistently fine and relatively flawless sheet of paper. I was not attempting to make a ‘perfect’ sheet of paper. That I could buy. Rather, my aim was to produce a robust paper that I could use in a variety of circumstances. Having achieved this aim I turned my attention to the various methods of engaging the surface of the paper as a communicative medium.

A variety of techniques aimed at imparting text and images were explored, in the substrate of the paper itself as well as on its surface, which would visually express the concepts emerging from historical and theoretical research, including studies in stitching, embossing, watermarking, marbling, printing and dying. Stitching was seen as being related to the narrative threads of texts and the binding of the book. Embossing relies on making an impression that relies on light for its reading. The watermark was a device used for trade marking paper without disturbing the surface of the sheet and is also read with light. Marbling was a technique used to decorate endpapers and the fore edges of traditional books. It was a practice that lasted into the nineteenth century but was later replaced with printed imitations. Shibori dying was tested as a contemporary version of paper decoration where folding and tying the paper also creates a ‘marble’ pattern. Printing experiments included the testing of handmade paper with traditional printing techniques and digital processes. Digital imaging experimentation was also conducted as a new media study. Watermarking paper requires the alteration of the papermaking mould to leave an impression embedded in the paper rather than on its surface. The ‘imprint’ is made visible when held up to a light source. A new development of the watermark

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is its adaptation of the commonly used paper watermark inserted into a digital document (Berghel 1997). Appearing in the corners of our television screens and embedded in the virtual images in our computers, digital watermarks are an appropriation of a technique used widely since the Middle Ages to establish authenticity and prevent forgeries. As Professor Dave Bull of the University of Bristol notes, “with a high-tech problem, we needed a high-tech solution, but drew our inspiration from the humble paper watermarks of the fifteenth century” (Bristol 2003). Now digital watermarks, in varying degrees of visibility, are added to digital media as a guarantee of authenticity, quality, ownership and source (Berghel 1997). Watermarks remain in this highly sophisticated digital world as the traces of the past literally embedded in the electronic ‘pages’ of the New Media Age. By focusing on watermarks as the outcome of the paper studies I engaged the ambiguity meaning between its traditional and the new media forms.

The Outcome As a Graphic Designer, making handmade paper has given me a greater degree of insight into how paper can signify meaning in design. The pleasure of making a ‘perfect’ sheet of paper, and being able to repeat that same result as an edition, brought practical insight to the theoretical issues of role of design and mass production. Using computer technology to create digital images on handmade paper inspired a sense of “technological balance and inclusion” that is one of the great attribute of the book arts (Frost 2002f:2). Leaving the surface treatment of paper to one side I eventually arrived at a decision to restrict my papermaking investigations to the development of watermarks, as these offered the best opportunity to create ‘typography as light’ within the substrate of the paper itself.

Watermarks The technique of making watermarks involves the modification of the papermould at the point of making the virgin sheet. An impression is made within the paper itself rather than being a manipulation of the surface. Traditionally a symbolic design made of fine wire was sewn onto the surface of the mesh screen of the mould so that when the pulp strained through the screen, less pulp adhered to the surface where the wire obstructed the flow. Hence the paper was thinner than the

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surrounding paper and when held to up to light, the symbol can now be seen as a watermark. This method of producing watermarks remained the fundamental technique for making watermarks in paper until recent digital technology made it possible to use other mediums. Gangolf Ulbrich has made a thorough study of the graphic potential of watermarks in his Berlin studio, looking for new forms of expression. He has used watermarks of logos and drawings in his book designs, winning the Tiemann Prize at the Liepzig Book Fair in 1995, integrating his watermark drawings in the graphic design of the book. Then in 1997 he explored the potential of watermarks as words, using digitalised adhesive lettering to create a typographic piece called Language Lessons (Gentanaar 2002:70).

This technique was used by Katherine Nix in her large format paper installations for the Australian National Museum in Canberra. Attendance at Katherine Nix’s watermark workshop, amongst other experimental ways of making a watermarking image, introduced the use of vinyl lettering and gave me the opportunity to learn this method of reproducing text. It proved to be a most satisfactory method for my work as the texts could be graphically designed on the computer and reproduced by a digital vinyl signage company to create physical letters directly from my designs. The adhesive vinyl lettering is applied to the screen of the papermould, and in the same way as traditional wire design, creates the watermark.

The final outcome of this study was the design and construction of two ‘book jacket’ objects and a series of five watermarked papers as illuminated background texts for the concept model, Palimpsest Readings. Through practical research into paper as a material, I was seeking opportunities for utilising the properties of paper in the development of the design of books as conceptual models. By making handmade paper, I feel I have gained a deeper appreciation of paper as an element of design expanded beyond its function as a mere surface for printed texts and treated as a material reading of the book.

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PRINT

The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn’t always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea, a sign of a sign.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 317

The most radical difference between print media and new media digital imaging is the fact that for the last five hundred years, printing has required a plate of some description to impress ink onto a surface, usually made of paper, and that new media laser and inkjet printers do not. This challenges the fundamental premise of printmaking, that is, one of making impressions. Printmaking is a graphic tradition anchored in the Middle Ages when the first printers used woodblocks to reproduce images in greater numbers and more quickly than those produced by hand. Each new printing technology pursued an increase in quality, detail and efficiency of reproduction, from etching and lithography to photography, and now digital imaging.

A true understanding of the medium of printing lies in its changing forms and texture and so “it is necessary to experience printing by touch as well as sight” (Chappell 1980:7). Running ones fingers over a print reveals whether a relief, intaglio or lithographic plate was used to produce it. But equally important is the ‘feel’ of the surface that can be read with the eye, the texture of inks and paper, the light falling on embossing and the smooth velvety black of a lithographic drawing. Digital imaging has none of these impressive signs. The laser printer ‘prints’ with a beam of light, the inkjet with a jet of ink. Each places an image on the surface of the paper without leaving and impression and leaving our senses unimpressed. Print media was a product the printing press; digital media is a product of the computer. For this reason I believe digital ‘imaging’ is a far more accurate description of this process than digital ‘printing.’ Nonetheless, digital printing has already been integrated into printmaking practice, so when is print

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handmade? An Albion Press, used by Morris to print the Kelmscott Chaucer, would be considered today as an adjunct to the hand process of printmaking. But as Leila Avrin points out, at the time hand operated printing presses were introduced, they were considered as technological innovations. She writes, In the Renaissance a printed book was considered machine-made, with its cast metal types and its printing by the platen press, duplicating the same text many times over. Metal types invented by Gutenberg about 1450 and the wooden handpress were the first steps in the process of mechanisation of the book’s manufacture… Today when a print is made by an artist or print workshop by means of woodblock, copperplate engraving or etching… lithography, and silkscreen (serigraphy), it is valued by the artist, gallery, and collector as a handmade, original work of art, and not as a reproduction. But when these graphic techniques were first introduced, they too were defined as mechanical methods of printing (Avrin 1991:327).

And as such it was a ‘new media’ technology. Taking this point of view, digital printing could be considered a hand printing technique in the same way that use of an Albion printing press is considered hand printing. The Albion Press is operated by turning a wheel, the digital printer by using a keyboard. Either way, the printing process is in the hands of the creator and not removed as it is with previous methods of mechanical reproduction. In the New Media Age the handmade print is being redefined.

Making an Impression While new technologies in inks and plates and an emphasis of handmade paper have all influenced printmaking, one of the biggest changes in the development of the graphic arts has been the computer (Hoskova, 2000). Lynne Allen, graphic artist and professor of art at Masson Gross School of the Arts, sees the computer playing an important role in challenging the traditional boundaries of printmakers. She believes the computer has been one of the greatest influences on the graphic arts and leading to experimentation and innovation, Digital imaging has opened up new possibilities for artists because it is so versatile. I am not interested in copying something which already exists, but in using the computer in conjunction with other print techniques (ibid:129).

Claude Sinte, Graphic Artist and professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Belgium, also argues that “whether we like it or not, in art as in everyday life,

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the most important change has taken place as a result of the personal computer” (Hoskova 2000:125). Although the printed image emerges on the basis of a “virtual matrix” and is often looked down on by the advocates of tradition in printmaking, Sinte claims we should allow that, in its basic principle, “the image printed from a computer is not very different from the image created on a lithographic stone or copper plate” (ibid). This may be so, but while digital imaging might be legitimized as a printmaking medium, I cannot agree that the results are the same as those obtained from more material means.

The computer image is materially different; it is created in a different environment-inside the computer not out in the physical world; it has little tactile appeal; it is fundamentally a commercial technology, not unlike offset litho printing so rejected by the art community in previous decades. The involvement of the artist is more separated from the act of making, as the final act of printing the image onto paper is often not carried out by the artist but by a commercial bureau. As Dianne Longley points out, “the hand printed image [of more traditional methods] has an intangible allure. The ink sits upon the paper surface in a way that is not possible with laser prints” (Longley 1998:12). The hand made print, like handmade paper, has a physical presence and material sensuousness that digital prints most certainly lack.

Nevertheless, the new media technologies of digital imaging and printing are being embraced by artists and designers alike. Those who capitalize on the potential of digital technologies to create new artforms, will go farther than those who are simply enamored by it, failing to imbue their work with any real content (Grishin 2004:9). The print technologies of the past; woodblocks, letterpress, etching and lithography, will continue to be the defining technologies of the printmaker, but a new technology, far from making the old obsolete, merely expands the range of options available for the creation of more innovative and compelling graphic art and design.

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PRINTMAKING STUDIES

The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is.

UMBERTO ECO 1996:317

The Method Studies in printmaking were made using both collagraph and polymer plate methods of plate making in a number of printmaking workshops. I wanted to explore methods that were easily accessible, and fairly immediate, given the time constraints of the project. My intention was to incorporate the printmaking process into new concepts about print, texts and the book as an object. Towards this end, experimentation with three print techniques was undertaken using contemporary methods that translated the printing traditions rather than reproduce them. These three techniques use non-toxic, environmentally sound processes and materials with the characteristics of relief and etching plates.

1 Collagraphs: A contemporary technique, that utilises both intaglio (etching) and relief (woodcut) methods on the one plate. Instead of needing a new plate for each application of colour as traditional printing requires, these plates can be inked up in multiple colours and printed in one pass. Made from art board, they are an inexpensive and safe method of experimenting with printing techniques and therefore a useful introduction to the hand printing process. The plate is made by cutting into the board as an ‘etching’, or adding card, PVA glue, and other collage materials as relief (hence its name), then sealed with shellac to make a hard and impervious surface from which to print. This plate is then inked up with etching inks and printed on an etching press

2 Solar Plates: Photopolymer plates are also known as solar plates due to the fact that they can be exposed using sunlight. Solar plate printing is a contemporary method of printmaking, using commercial printing plates utilized predominantly in the packaging industry. However, as computer to print technologies improve

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their capacity, polymer plates will eventually join etching, engraving, letterpress and lithography as a residual art of printmaking. While the reproduction of a print can be executed with photographic or digital technology, it is the material qualities that make solar printing appealing. An account of why this is so, is given by printmaker, Silvi Glattaeur who explains, A polymer plate is hand pulled photographic print… transformed into a beautifully textured and individual [artwork] through the combined effects of fine art papers, archival inks and the etching press… Polymer gravure is the combination of the nineteenth century photographic process, Photogravure, with twenty first century technological innovations that brings together digital media and photosensitive printing plates with traditional printmaking (Glattauer 2003:16).

Although not authentically either a traditional method or digital, they represent a type of new media convergence, flexibility and interpretation of processes. For me the fact that they use a photographic process of exposing the plate with sunlight, and then etching away the unwanted parts of the image with water, rather than toxic acids, also makes the environmental and health aspects of using these plates sit well with handmade cotton rag paper.

3 Digital Imaging: Printing with jets of ink and laser light, a plate no longer needs to make contact with the substrate upon which an image is to be transferred. Traditionally paper served the printing press, but now digital printing releases print onto many new and variable substrates. Laser and inkjet printers are changing the limitations of how printing is utilized making it faster and cheaper than previously possible since printing began. My experiments were mostly concerned with the printing of handmade paper and digital imaging onto Lazertran transfer products, tested on alternative materials; metal, ceramic, wood and fabric substrates.

The Outcome Workshops with Bernhadine Mueller and Anne Starling provided grounding in printmaking methodology, and a background in etching, relief, collagraph and solar plate etching. After experimenting with these processes, I finally chose to limit my printmaking studies to the use of solar plates as my preferred method of print making, as they met the following objectives:

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• They have the versatility of being able to be produced as either intaglio or relief plates. • They are activated by sunlight and developed in water making them non- toxic and environmentally friendly. • They enable the reproduction of graphic images from photographs, artwork, and digital imaging.

While being true to William Morris’s methods, I was not setting out to reproduce fine art private press books, but contemporary books that interpret traditions in a contemporary context. Solarplates have the advantage of being able to produce traditional printmaking impressions while using contemporary printmaking technologies. I made a number of prints using this technique, creating a number of separate plates to create one complete image, in an attempt to quote the digital imagery of computer mediation. However, I did not pursue this method of printmaking further in the development of the final book objects, as digital imaging proved to be more suited to the emerging theoretical concepts. Instead I utilised the solar plate method of printing in experimental work using porcelain to make ‘parchment-like pages’ by incorporating handmade paper printed with underglaze ‘ink.’ These experiments were considered as a type of ‘new media’ investigation into the materiality of the book as an object.

The initial printmaking studies were undertaken with the intent of including the printed book as part of the theoretical study. However, as the study progressed, it soon became clear that the production of traditional printmaking did not serve the developing conceptual framework. Consequently by exploring digital printing using an inkjet printer and the services of a print bureau, I proceeded to print a series of digital images in a concertina ‘book,’ a form that sits between the codex and the scroll of computer technology. Further investigation was also conducted into laser cutting and imaging as a new media form of printing. The experience of hand making prints did, however, leave an impression in my mind, a “print of an idea, a sign of a sign” (Eco 1996:317) and continues to inform my design practice.

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NEW MEDIA

Or is the message really that we should look at everything in a different way, including the glass cases and the instruments that supposedly celebrate the birth of physics and enlightened chemistry?

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 13

A book is conventionally made of printed pages of paper bound with covers of paper, cloth or leather. Considering the book more unconventionally, however, might include using alternative substrates to paper, ways of visualising texts without words and using the ‘physics and chemistry’ of new technologies towards more innovative and captivating cover designs. Graphic designers need to be encouraged to experiment and to “extend their boundaries by trying printing materials and applications that they may not have considered before” (Williams 1993:7). While many designers steer clear of experimenting with anything unusual, failing to venture further past using a limited range of papers and run-of- the-mill techniques, Nancy Williams notes that, “those who are open minded in their approach to one aspect of design tend to be receptive to all sorts of influences and ideas and do not impose artificial parameters on what they can and cannot do” (Williams 1993:8).

Throughout this process of investigation into the studio practices of bookmaking, an open mind has been essential, and this last study in alternative mediums grew in response to the theoretical research being executed in conjunction with the workshop regime. As theories of book design developed, the idea of expressing a New Media Age began to demand a ‘new media’ approach to the materiality of the processes and materials being studied. Defining ‘new media’ to mean both digital technology and the use of a new medium (in the sense that canvas is a medium), I began looking afresh at the meaning and purpose of the book’s construction. If the characteristics of the structural materials changed, then the idea of the book might equally take on new dimensions. In the new media information architecture of the computer, paper is substituted with a new media

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screen, printing plates replaced with a new media CD ROM, and the binding of pages linked by new media satellites. It seemed useful to consider interpreting the book as a material object with new materials and new techniques that reflect this new media environment.

The New Media Book Digital media has introduced a reproduction technology that is ‘rewriting’ the traditional production methods of the book. Now any work a designer creates can be digitally translated to suit any other digital reproduction technology. The design of the book can move beyond the constraints of the printing press, to include a variety of alternative substrates and printing methods. Paper can be substituted with stone, ink replaced with light and the hyperlink acts as a surrogate binding. In order to explore the book as a material object in a New Media Age, I investigated a number of unconventional forms of graphic reproduction, testing the new technologies of laser etching, waterjet cutting, and digital imaging on a variety of materials.

Metalmesh, for example, was used as book pages referencing the paper mould screens of medieval papermakers and the digital screen of the computer. Ceramic ‘manuscripts’ were made to carry the print of the past within the substrate of the page, rather than on its surface. The paper that supported the printed text was burnt away, leaving traces of the old print media remaining in the ‘new media’ illuminated porcelain page. The use of laser etching onto acrylic denotes the transparency and ephemerality of the screen with ‘pages’ ‘printed’ in light. Precious objects embedded in Lucite, float as three-dimensional iconic images within a transparent text block alluding to the three-dimensional nature of multimedia. Some have defined the last decade as the ‘digital decade’ provoking profound changes in the way we ‘represent’ as digital technology modifies not only technical procedures, but also the way we create through them (Hoskova 2000). These experiments with materials and digital technologies were all aimed at evolving creative and innovative concepts for the design of contemporary books.

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NEW MEDIA STUDIES

Computers are made with silicon aren’t they? But silicon isn’t a metal. It’s a non-metallic element. Metallic, non-metallic, why split hairs.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 256

The Method Taking these concepts of the semiotic qualities of materials to convey certain meaning, I selected two materials to represent concepts of past and future technologies. These were, ceramics; representing both the parchment manuscript and the idea of the digital ‘page’ as a ‘compuscript’ and acrylic; representing the transparent nature of the computer screen. These two materials became the more representative in terms of expressing the ideas of light, new media technology, the ‘old’ (ceramic ‘parchment’) media in the context of the ‘new’ (acrylic ‘screen’) media, as well as being experimental materials as alternatives to paper and print.

Ceramics The concept of combining ceramics with the idea of the book arose out of the theoretical inquiry. I saw connections between the first clay tablet books, the use of clay in fine art papers and the recent use of ceramics in the development of computer screens, 3 as having relevance to the idea of the book as a palimpsest, the pages being rewritten in a material that expresses the archaeological life of the book. Ceramics represent the remnants of civilization, and ceramic artefacts feature in museums as material evidence of the past. Porcelain is a hard, durable, but translucent material that allows light to pass through it. It has a parchment like quality when made in thin sheets. What I saw in this material was a way to

3 Ceramics are being used in the manufacture of the latest state of the art computer components. This is due to its superb properties such as high insulation, high strength, high wear-resistance and chemical resistance in applications from artificial joints to system components for the space industry; from packages for supers peed chips to printer drums for page printers, to cutting tools whenever metals have reached their limits (Kyocera 2004). High Tech Ceramic News promotes ceramics as an industry that is far from being “mature.” Rather it is an ancient technology vigorously meeting the rigorous demands of a highly technologicalized, twenty first century. (BCC 2004)

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express both the permanence and the fragility of the book. Fire destroys a book, but creates a ceramic artefact. The idea of using fire to burn out the paper of the book while leaving the impression of print embedded within a sheet of permanent, material, in ceramic ‘pages,’ signified a palimpsest of the book fused into the fabric of a technological age.

In a lecture on the future of the book at the Bibliotheca Alexandria in 2003, Umberto Eco spoke of three types of memory; the first was organic, made of flesh and blood and administered by our brain; the second is vegetal, represented by the first papyruses and later the paper of the book. The third type of memory Eco calls “mineral memory,” of which there are two types as he explains, “… millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today’s computers, based upon silicon… It happens frequently that in newspapers or academic papers some authors, facing the new computer and Internet era, speak of the possible death of books.” However, if books are to disappear, as did the obelisk and clay tablets of ancient civilisations, this would not be good reason to abolish libraries. On the contrary, they should survive as museums conserving the finds of the past, in the same way we conserve the Rosetta Stone in a museum because we are no longer accustomed to carving our documents on mineral surfaces” (Eco 2004:1).

It is this third type of memory that the ceramic ‘pages’ in the study represent. My intent was to take a mineral surface of the past and the mineral surface of the screen, and fuse a type of archaeological memory of the printed book into a ‘new’ media form of a ‘light through’ parchment/porcelain ‘manuscript.’ The testing of this concept became a major component of this study due to the complexity of the process and the time taken in drying and firing ceramics. The concept of ‘fusing technologies,’ however, seemed well suited to this technique and so, to achieve this aim I began by testing the properties of porcelain clay in both plastic and liquid forms. My initial ideas began with the use of paperclay to make ceramic ‘pages.’ After several tests I came to the conclusion that the utilisation of actual paper to create ceramic pages would realise the concept more eloquently, so I began testing the idea of slip casting handmade paper. The concept involved the entrapment of print within the ceramic rather than printed on the surface. The method I developed to ‘entrap’ the printed page consisted of firstly making handmade

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cotton rag paper of a suitable size, thickness and absorbency. When this had been established I then proceeded to making a solar plate of text from Gutenberg’s Bible. This was then printed onto the prepared paper using underglaze pigment mixed to a stiff ink-like consistency. When dry, this printed ‘page’ was then sandwiched between two layers of porcelain slip.

After a number of test firings of various clay bodies and methods of bonding the print to the porcelain, I finally arrived at a decision to use Southern Ice porcelain slip to make the ceramic ‘pages.’ The method involved applying the slip to a plaster bat with a large soft paintbrush. The paper print was then placed face down onto this base to avoid smudging when the second coat was applied. Another layer of slip was the brushed over the back surface of the paper and the slip around the edges. This bonded the paper between the layers of slip. When the ‘page’ had dried to a leather hard stage, it was lifted off the bat and placed under the weight of books to dry out before firing. These were then fired in a kiln at 1260 degrees. After many failures, breakages and test firings, five ceramic ‘manuscripts’, for use in a concept model, were finally produced. In this model a series of illuminated manuscripts reveal how the print media of Gutenberg remains as a palimpsest beneath the surface of a new ‘archaeological layer’ of technology, the illuminated computer screen. When light penetrates the porcelain the text becomes more visible, reminding us that the text of the first printed books remains as a palimpsest in the pages of new media technology.

Acrylic Since the 1950s, when plastics were seen to be the epitome of modernity, there has been a backlash against the use of plastic, but designers have recently returned to these materials, creatively experimenting with the various textures and opacities they offer (Williams 2002:115). Plastics are again a symbol of modernity, used not only in household products but have been a predominant material in the manufacturing of both computer hardware and software. The packaging of CD ROMS, floppy discs, DVDs, and videos of new media (designed as covers, hinged one side and resembling books) are all made of plastic. For this reason acrylic has

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many connotative meanings well suited to visually ‘speaking’ of the book in a New Media Age. In the design of the conceptual models, the traditional materials of the book (cardboard, paper and print) were replaced with ‘new media’ material of acrylic. Acrylic has the transparency quality of glass without its fragility and the added advantage of being easier to cut, mould and manipulate.

To test the properties of acrylic, a series of test samples were cut, moulded and etched towards developing the design of concept models. The first investigation was in sourcing acrylic suppliers and it was soon evident that there were different grades in the quality of the material. This and the range of fabrication service determined the supplier as Bass Plastics. Henry Lieberman, an engineer, was extremely helpful in realizing the forms I was envisaging. I was seeking to curve the covers of a book based on a cardboard model, and on his suggestion I made three wooden forms upon which he could mould the acrylic sheets. This was done by heating the acrylic in an oven and placing it onto the mould until cool enough to hold the shape independently. The acrylic was also tested using laser cutting and etching technologies on small samples of the material, before going ahead with the further design development.

Digital Printing Steve Danzig, is an internationally recognized digital artist, speaker on digital art and founder of the International Digital Art Awards. In an extensive survey he found that some inkjet printers have been developed to print directly onto a variety of materials of substantial thickness, with the only limitation being that the material is sufficiently smooth enough to be accepted by the feeding mechanism of the machine (Danzig 2004:9). This opens up a range of design possibilities for graphic designers as digital imaging brings the promise of taking graphic design off the paper page and onto those made with plastic, silk, wood, and even metal.4 The reason for this is that the substrate being printed no longer needs to come in

4 Contemporary artists are printing on leather, rubber, metal and even automobiles (Hoskova 2000). The trend towards printing images of buildings, including digital projections, is becoming a familiar sight in contemporary culture and is reflected in the move towards alternative substrates in art and design.

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contact with a plate. Unlike conventional printing presses, machines like the Zund inkjet printer hold the medium in a fixed position and the print heads moves across the surface to be printed. The height of the jets or the laser beam can be adjusted to suit. My own investigations began with studies in the processes of digital printing. As this was mostly an area in which I already had adequate expertise as a Graphic Designer, I focused further research into areas of new and less familiar methods of imprinting images and text.

Laser Etching When the idea of designing book objects with acrylic was first conceived it was to convey a sense of light and to this end I was also seeking a light and transparent approach to the reading of type and images. I discovered that the process of imparting text onto acrylic was used extensively in the trophy industry and decided to try taking my ideas to one of these companies to have them do the laser work under my direction. This was much like supervising the printing of a conventional book. However, when experimenting with new processes, the main problem is often finding someone with a willingness to experiment with new ideas. After investigating a number of companies, I was fortunate to find one where the ‘printer’ was more than willing to provide the expertise I was seeking. Jane Deane, of Leichhardt Trophies, not only did the laser etching for me but invited me participate in the process and to observe how the laser etching technology worked. This gave me the opportunity to become familiar with the processes involved and to design the work to satisfy the demands of the technology and exploit it through understanding both its potential and limitations.

The method of producing an acrylic ‘page’ was to begin by sourcing and designing the text and images for reproduction. Having done this the designs were generated in a computer programme, Adobe Illustrator, and saved in an EPS format compatible with the laser machine programme. I then took this information on a CD ROM to Leichhardt Trophies where the laser operator transferred the designs into the laser etching computer programme. I was then able to check and adjust the designs to suit this new format. The laser machine was connected to this computer and so etched the acrylic sheet directly from the designs supplied as digital

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information. The laser beam moved across the sheet of acrylic in a linear configuration, etching into the surface on each pass. The text or image appeared as the beam worked its way across the surface, working like a digital printing machine using light instead of ink.

Waterjet cutting I also tested a sheet of slate with the laser etching process as I was considering making book covers with this material. However, this laser machine was not designed to cut materials like slate so I sourced a company that did. The process for cutting the slate was similar to the laser etching, but instead of using laser it used a stream of water. Waterjet Australia enrgrave and cut stone, slate, glass and ceramics for the building industry so the idea of cutting book covers was seen as an unusual request. However, the process was the same as for the laser etching in that I produced the design on the computer and they produced the covers using my designs in digital format. After considering the use of stone, ceramic, glass and slate tiles as materials for book covers, in discussion with Marina Pavina the technical designer, I decided to use slate. This suited the developing conceptual framework most closely, but it has a tendency to flake when being cut. We decided on granite as an alternative material, should the slate prove too difficult, but my preference was for the softer, ‘warmer’ quality of the slate. The slate was first cut to size and then a cross and binding holes cut out with the computer operated waterjet machine. Those covers that were to be engraved with an image were first cut with the waterjet and then engraved with a high-powered laser machine. The final research outcomes of these tests were realised in the conceptual models developed as book objects for exhibition.

The Outcome After testing the properties of a number of materials, those that proved the most relevant to the concepts and practical in terms of their suitability were, the Southern Ice porcelain, 3mm Bass Plastic acrylic sheets and Chinese black slate. The digital technologies of computer programming of machines meant that the laser and waterjet processes and the firing of kilns results in a precision and quality of design from the hands of the designer to the final outcome. The outcomes of

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these experiments in material and technological processes were as follows: • The final ceramic ‘pages’ were fired with a computer-programmed kiln by Jock Shemell in his Alexandria studio. These were subsequently used in a series of five illuminated conceptual models, demonstrating the theories of McLuhan relating to reflected and transmitted light. • Two sets of acrylic prototypes were made, one of which one was used to construct a book with curved acrylic covers for the BEA@Kinokunya exhibition in 2004. The second set were used in the conceptual book object relating to the digital screen and new media technology, exhibited as part of the exhibition Palimpsest Readings at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 2005. • The slate covers were used in the conceptual book object relating to the cathedral and manuscript illumination, exhibited as part of the exhibition Palimpsest Readings at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 2005. • The acrylic laser etching process was employed in the production of both the conceptual model book objects and the studio investigation exhibition notes as part of the exhibition Palimpsest Readings at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 2005 (see Appendix II).

The research findings arising out of these studies in new media (interpreted as new materials and digital processes) have contributed towards the development, not only of book objects for exhibition, but also new and innovative concepts for conventional book design. The laser etching process, for example, has already been used to ‘print’ the binding of the book, L’atlantide, designed and bound by David Newbold for the Seventh Biennial World Exhibition of Bookbinding in France, 2003. This book was brought to my attention by Jane Deane who had laser etched the leather cover of the book and demonstrates the validity of experimental research into new media technologies in the design and production of conventional books.

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BOOKBINDING

At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had been metal studs… Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 500

In the Middle Ages books were precious possessions and covers were required to protect and preserve them. When Adso returns to the burnt out library of the Aedificium in The Name of the Rose, all that remained of many of the precious manuscripts were their bindings. When the Romans used scrolls to record their texts, a binding was an unnecessary addition, but when the scroll was eventually folded into pages and stitched together the codex form of the book craft of binding was invented with it. The Romans found that sheets of parchment withstood this folding better than papyrus used for scrolls, which tended to break at when folded. Parchment sheets could be folded into sections and then a number of these arranged inside one another to form a gathering or quire (McMurtrie 1989). Stitches through the folds of this gathering held them together and when a number of these sewn sections were combined, by attaching them together on leather cords, the basis of bookbinding was established.

Eventually it was found that, through use, the parchment leaves of the manuscript tended to curl and so boards were sewn on either side of the bound pages to prevent this occurring. Ultimately leather was applied to cover both the boards and the spine of the bound text forming a book cover. These soon became very elaborate, indicating the value the owner placed on the book, with the large square books of the Byzantine era bearing covers of gold, silver and precious stones. Later, the illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth century were also enshrined in equally costly bindings (McMurtrie 1989:538). These bindings were designed to demonstrate the power and wealth of their owners, who had come to

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value such objects as financial securities and as symbols of their social status. When printing was invented in the fifteenth century, books were no longer a prerogative of the moneyed class. The printing press served to stimulate the craft of binding as books were produced in greater quantities but while some books still demanded more elaborate embellishment, most books came simply bound in leather decorated with blind stamping. Then the sudden profusion of books in the sixteenth century imposed techniques that were easier to apply, quicker to produce, and less costly (Annie de Coster 2004). Binding design throughout the prevailing centuries was based on pattern-books widely used in all the decorative arts, a process that persisted until the twentieth century. Then in 1913, Sonia Delaunay produced a book for the first time without reference to traditional methods of ornamentation opening the way for new forms of designer binding (ibid). Today these new forms continue to evolve as the book emerges as an art, craft and design object in exhibitions throughout the world.5

In Australia the book seen as a designed object is being brought to public attention through the exhibitions like those of Bookbinding Exhibitions Australia. Established in July 2003, BEA was created with the primary aim of the promoting book binding as a form of art through exhibition. They have since presented over five exhibitions where the qualities of binding demonstrate both magnitude and direction ranging from the traditional to the avant-garde (Pierard, 2004b). These comments in the visitor’s book at their most recent 2004 exhibition, Landscape, express the shift in perception that such exhibitions can achieve: “It’s so wonderful to see such creativity expressed in an object that would normally seem so square!” writes Margot Aberajd and from Jan Roberts of Ruskin Rowe Press, “A most surprising and beautiful exhibition. You have made us see books differently. Thank you.” To see a book in a new light, where a square book is no longer ‘square,’ or to ‘see books differently’ is the intention of Sabine Pierard who explores the idea of the meaning of form as a challenge to common perceptions of bookbinding. Speaking in her bindery she explained how she likes her books “to challenge people, to annoy, surprise and even shock” their perceptions of what a

5 In the latest BEA newsletter, Head to Tail, over 20 exhibitions around the world were listed for 2005. Bookbinding Exhibitions Australia Inc, PO Box 260 Willoughby NSW 2005.

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book should be (Pierard 2005). Overcoming the ubiquity and banalization of the indefinitely repeated codex form that has “exhausted our vision” (Hoskova 2000) requires book designers to surprise, if not shock, the public into a greater awareness of the book as an object. Pierre-Jean Foulon, curator of exhibitions focusing on books as objects has observed that readers of books forget that, in turning the pages of a book they are also the manipulators of a psychic object (ibid). Artists and designers now have the opportunity to return the book to the position it deserves and, in Foulon’s opinion, “to be ranked among works of art, in its most diverse forms and appearances” (ibid:25). Sabine Pierard’s commitment to the elevation of the book in the public psyche is substantiated by her passionate dedication to teaching her craft and encouraging young book designers to challenge perceptions of the book as a cultural and material object.

Hand Binding the Book Challenging perceptions of the book as an object requires fully understanding its construction before the deconstructing and reconstructing of new ideas can commence. For example, my investigations into the techniques of traditional book binding, soon revealed how much the function of the book depends on the method of its binding. The most durable and aesthetic system of binding is the sewn section method used in the fifteenth century. This is a binding technique where the book is sewn onto bands or cords, which are then attached to the ‘boards’ of the book and covered with cloth or leather. Attendance at workshops in traditional fifteenth century binding methods, provided insight into the fundamental workings of the book, particularly the functioning of the book as a site of reading. The way a book behaves when it is ‘correctly’ bound is quite different to the modern adhesive bound books. Traditionally sewn books lie flat when open. Modern bound books do not. The stitching and covering of the book gave me more real understanding of the time involved in making the book by hand using the methods of the Renaissance binders. However, it also gave me an appreciation of the form, and respect for the technical history that is built into a hand bound book. We can use a basic technique to make a pleasurable object or we use this technique to create a book that reaches beyond the past and into the

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future. As conscientious designers we will take responsibility for our actions, act sensitively in the best interests of the book and create something contemporary, whilst honouring the past.6 I have striven in these studies to achieve a level of skill and competence in the traditional techniques, materials and processes towards the design and production of contemporary book objects that challenge and articulate the current zeitgeist of a New Media Age.

BOOKBINDING STUDIES

Isis Unveiled, with a slightly black-magical cover, but not overdone.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 262

The Method Attendance at a number of bookbinding workshops assured that the techniques of bookbinding were extensively explored in a series of samples and prototypes in which a variety of binding methods were pursued. My aim was to gain experience in bookbinding to stretch the boundaries of what I knew about books and to consider the significance of hand binding the book in an age of digital technology. The first two workshops I attended in book making were with Marianne Little and Katherine Nix. In these initial workshops I explored contemporary methods of using binding as the major element of the book’s design. These studies were then followed up with a more traditional grounding in fifteenth century binding techniques. For this study I joined the bookbinding classes of Sabine Pierard, a well-respected and dynamic bookbinder and teacher.

While attending the Book 2003 Conference on the future of the book, I had come across a small hand bound book in the Cairns Art Gallery designed and made by Sabine Pierard. This book impressed me greatly as it was exquisitely crafted yet profoundly conceptual in its design. I consequently attended two terms of bookbinding classes under her tuition. Under her guidance I gained a thorough

6 This sentiment was voiced by five celebrated international bookbinders, Sun Evrard, Tracey Rowledge, Kathy Abbot, Peter Jones and Carmencho Arregui in the artist’s statement of their exhibition, Tomorrrow’s Past in 2002.

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background of traditional techniques including, single and multi-section sewing and traditional case binding. Beginning with a simple single section pamphlet binding, this technique was then expanded to the sewing of several sections into a substantial text block ready for covering with a board and cloth cover. The procedures are exacting and needed to be carefully followed to achieve a satisfactory result. After obtaining the fundamental technique, the traditional techniques of sewn bindings were then translated into contemporary bindings used as an aesthetic and integral part of the book's design. Drawing on this new knowledge of how to construct a book I was able to develop a working model as a double curved book in paper and board, which eventually formed the basis of the design for consequent acrylic book forms.

The Outcome While I concluded that methods based on stitching offered the best design opportunities, other structures, such as concertina fold, expanded my concepts of how binding can play a part in giving the book added meaning. Leaving traditional covers and case binding aside I arrived at a decision to restrict my binding investigations to the development of exposed bindings. Exposed binding is binding left exposed, rather than covered with cloth or leather, so that the binding draws attention itself, no longer treated as a hidden structure. I decided to work with exposed bindings as a dominating element in the design of book forms because of their connections with the idea of exposed structure in contemporary architecture such as Walter Gropius’s Fagus Factory and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre. In exposing the binding I was ‘peeling’ back layers of history to reveal the origins, the foundational structure of the book, usually hidden but still functioning both in our culture and in the design of the book.

The joining together of a text enclosed between covers, presents opportunities for expressing the book as a material object for its own sake. In many of these prototypes, the book asks the viewer to fill them with meaning rather than being mere containers for the written word. The arrival of new media technologies are facilitating innovation in the design of the book’s form, and the combination of the

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old media and the new makes for rich and meaningful objects that challenge and inspire our perceptions of the book. Finally, Gary Frost sees that being analogue and digital at the same time is natural because, as he says, Digital communications are still young variants of print, keyboards, writing, and graphic design. Departing from its origins digital communication will eventually achieve its own expression through spoken interface and, more significantly, with layers of machine consciousness. At every phase book artists can intermingle analogue and digital technique and help to define the influence of digital communication. Books transcend dichotomies of all kinds (Frost 2002d:2).

The studio experimentation conducted within this research project was guided by a desire to integrate the old with the new, the analogue with the digital, the hand with the machine in the design and production of the contemporary book.

If God has now given our order a mission, it is to oppose this race to the abyss, by preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom our fathers entrusted to us.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 36

Conclusion Authors like Sven Birkerts and Niel Postman were often criticised for opposing, as they saw it, the race towards an electronic abyss, by defending the treasure of wisdom represented in the tradition of the book (Birkerts 1994, Postman 1993). The creation of books as objects and the appeal of the handmade book might also be a cultural desire to retain the memory of the past in something as symbolic as the book. In a world where everything is mass-produced, perhaps the handmade acquires value and as more and more communication is received in bits, the atom- based modes of expression like the book, gain a new significance (Finamore 1997:179) It could be said that preserving tacit knowledge of past technologies in this day and age is an anachronistic pursuit, but nothing could be farther from the truth. William Morris was accused of practicing such revivalist notions in preserving pre-industrial skills located in the practice of fifteenth century Venetian printers. However, he did not directly imitate the medieval book but took their design principles and made his own books “with overflowing originality” (Morgan

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1976:69). He was willing to use new technologies when they improved the efficiency or quality of his work, and fulfilled his intention “to create exquisite contemporary products, not to recreate the past” (Eastburn 1996:33). It was also the aim of this study to engage in the traditional practices of book production, to generate a conceptual framework for the design of innovative contemporary books that reference rather than emulate the past.

The traditional skills of the book arts of papermaking, printmaking, and bookbinding remain an important asset in the conceptual repertoire of the graphic designer, for these crafts are not only still practiced today in the design and production of handmade books, but are fundamentally the same processes used in modern commercial book production. This ‘treasure’ of tacit knowledge can now be accessed in workshops all over the world; workshops like the Primrose Paperworks in Sydney and international institutions like the Penland School of Crafts in America. The workshop environment nurtures ‘hand-to-hand’ learning as the knowledge of technical skills are passed on from a skilled practitioner to novice and encourage the exploration of traditional techniques along with approaches that challenge conventional notions of the book. My attendance at workshops greatly facilitated the development of new ideas through the design of the book as an object, enabling me to develop concepts by combining old media techniques with new media technologies.

Investigations into paper, print, and binding techniques, provided first hand knowledge of the architectural structure of the book’s form as a sound foundation from which to design new book forms. The architecture of an object reveals the structure below the surface, “a hidden grain,” which, when exposed, makes it possible to take formations apart and to reassemble them in new arrangements (Bronowski 1999:95). The extent to which a designer can create designs that exploit the ‘hidden grain’ of the book depends on them having an intimate knowledge of that form. My interrogations of the book’s architecture provided that intimate knowledge, aided by the activation of the ‘hand-to-concept learning

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channel’ known so well to William Morris and more recently advocated by architect Daniel Liberskind, It’s a given that computers have altered the design process. Is there a drawback to the computer? Of course, in a staggeringly short period, I’ve started having trouble finding young architects who can draw. The computer is their pencil; they are lost without it. Yet the physical act of drawing with one’s hand is an important part of the architectural [and design] process... Let there be no mistake. The human hand cannot be replaced by the computer. (Liberskind 2004:234)

However, the computer can be of great assistance to the hand. The usefulness of new media technologies cannot be denied and finding ways they can be incorporated creatively in the design the contemporary book, extends the tradition of the book in a palimpsest of new technology. For Gary Frost the advance of technology is a common human occupation and the book arts enable a person to quarry technologies and appreciate their inter-related qualities, The whole book art technology spans most cultures and the entire historical era. Curiously, none of the basic components of this technology are obsolete. Each component technology is applicable today and each, ancient or modern, as advanced and as relevant as another” (Frost 2002f:2).

By studying the book through a process of making, the book object acts as an “object of research discourse,” that is, it represents a “material thesis” where the material object itself is a “physical critique” (Dunne1999:16). The knowledge and skills acquired in this second part of the research project, contributed tacit knowledge towards the development of a conceptual framework and consequent design of book objects articulated as a material thesis. By analysing the outcomes of the studio studies in relation to conclusions drawn in the theoretical study, a Conceptual Framework was developed forming the final component of the research project. (See Appendix I for a photographic documentation of the studio investigations).

Just scraped with pumice stone and softened with chalk, it had been smoothed with the plane, and, from the tiny holes made in the sides with a fine stylus, all the lines that were to have guided the artist’s hand had been traced.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 76

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P A R T T H RP E E a l i m p s e s t A parchment which has been written on twice, the first writing being erased to make room for a second writing. Traces of the old text remain.

Conceptual Framework

The integration of theoretical and practical studies into a conceptual framework, interpreted as a series of book objects

Composite image: Penelope Lee 2003. Script: Fewster, K. (2000) Leonardo De Vinci: The Codex Leicester – Notebook of a Genius, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Image: the end of print by Rebecca Mendez in Blackwell, L. (1995) The End of Print, Laurence King, London.

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Chapter 7

P A L I M P S E S T

V E S P E R S The hour around 4.30pm or at sunset

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Codex : Code X

The good of a book lies in its being read.

UMBERTO ECO 1998:396

Introduction Criticism of the Kelmscott Press books held that the fundamental purpose of a book is to be read and that William Morris’s books were, first, exercises in decorative design and only secondarily, books intended for reading (McMurtrie 1989). It was felt that the mind was distracted from the sense of the author by “decoration so insistent in area and colour as to completely over shadow the text" (McMurtrie 1989:460). This argument for the word taking precedent over the image was understandable in an era of print media when the legibility of the word was the most primary consideration. However, with the deft use of rich decoration and material mastery, Morris took the book into the realms of the imagination, the senses, and aesthetic pleasure. Designed to be read for more than words alone, a ‘Kelmscott’ book was also a beautiful object:1 … whether they are easy to read or not, they are things of great beauty and the work of a decorative artist of unparalleled genius... Never again will be offered them a like orgy of beauty in the embellishment of books (McMurtrie 1989:460).

With the emergence of artists’ books, fine printing presses and the opening up of printing technologies to designers, books can once again be designed as beautiful and desirable objects. Joan Lyons says, “the book as it will be is yet to be discovered” (Lyons 1995:149). The theoretical analysis and methods of practice explored in this study have been an attempt to facilitate new ideas and discover a new deign paradigm for the book in a New Media Age. The results are demonstrated in the following diagrammatic construction of a Conceptual Frame work for use in the design of book objects for exhibition and to inform commercial design practice.

1 William Morris made his now famous quote, “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” (Wilhide 1991:84).

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A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.

UMBERTO ECO 1996: 316

Throughout this research study the book has been subjected to inquiry by investigating the effects of new media technologies on its architecture as a method of developing new ways of conceptualising the design of the contemporary book. Being able to develop a conceptual framework free from commercial restraint (as the patrons of the Renaissance book designers knew) has been an important aspect of this design research. Opportunity to explore concepts without the limitations client expectations is necessary to change design paradigms,2 for it is only by experimentation that it is possible to surpass reworking the familiar, to discover the unfamiliar and to distinguish between simple innovation and true innovation (Laurel 2003). Changing paradigms were the concern of theorists like Umberto Eco, Gunther Kress, Marshall McLuhan and William Morris, who provided the four cornerstones of a theoretical framework and foundation for the historical analysis and practical investigations upon which new design concepts were built. This final chapter is a summary and synthesis of the research findings into a Conceptual Framework demonstrated in the design of three concept models for the design of book objects for exhibition and informing graphic design practice.

2 Along with designers of companies like 3M and Sony, Renault's celebrated Corporate Design Chief, Patrick Le Quement is a given the freedom to experiment with visions of how tomorrow's products can be envisaged and designed (Caine 2002:9). Concept research is seen by these companies as a regular part of their business to “recast the traditional efficiency measures by widening the breadth of exploration without the premature limitations of practicalities” (Laurel 2003:239).

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Research Design for the Construction of a Conceptual Framework

theory practice

Historical analysis of the Studio investigations into effects of new media materials and processes technologies of the production of on the book as a the book as material object a material object

outcome

Development of d e s i g n a conceptual models for d e s i g n the design of books as material objects in a new media age

Synthesis of Theoretical and Practical Findings The development of a conceptual framework was an iterative process and dialogue between the ongoing theory and the practical research. This “Iterative Design Process” is a design methodology based on the cyclical process of prototyping, testing, analysing and refining a work in progress (Laurel 2003). The historical analysis informed the studio investigations which in turn lead to further theoretical research. Eventually as the research findings became clear, these research findings were synthesised into a conceptual framework expressed in the form of matrices and implemented in a series of design models.

1. Themes arising out of the theoretical research:

HISTORY the book as codex and object of desire ARCHITECTURE the building as book the book as built object TECHNOLOGY the book as code x and environmental space SEMIOTICS the book as object of material signification

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2. Conceptual Matrix arising out of theoretical findings:

HISTORY ARCHITECTURE SEMIOTICS TECHNOLOGY

PALIMPSEST The Cathedral The Book The Computer

METAPHOR Building as Book Book as Building Book as Space

ILLUMINATION Illuminated Window Illuminated Page Illuminated Screen

LABYRINTH Designing Narrative Reading Narrative Navigating Narrative

CODE Cross as Symbol Cross as Sign Cross as Icon

TEXT Text as Image Text as Type Image as Text

3. Tacit Knowledge arising out of the practical research:

TECHNIQUES papermaking; bookbinding; printmaking; digital printing technologies. MATERIALS paper; acrylic; ceramic; metal; wood; fabric; polypropylene. PROCESSES empirical testing; model making; outsourcing.

4. Design Matrix arising out of practical findings:

TECHNIQUE MATERIAL PROCESS

BOOKBINDING acrylic and stainless steel exposed binding

PAPERMAKING cotton rag watermark

PRINTMAKING acrylic and slate laser etching

NEW MEDIA ceramic and acrylic firing and moulding

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Parallel Media Attributes An analysis of the research findings revealed a parallel between the media origins of the Middle Ages and those of the New Media Age.

Media Origins Old Media New Media Medieval Books Print Books Multimedia Translucence Opacity Transparency Light through Light on Light through Colour Image Black text Colour image Multimodal Monomodal Multimodal World shown World told World shown Ornamental Graphic Ornamental Art as Book Book as Design Book as Art Spiritual Temporal Ephemeral

Multimodal Reading Sites

Chart 1 Demonstrates the two multimodal reading sites of the Middle Ages and the New Media Age divided by the monomodal reading site of the printed book.

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New media technologies, by changing the way books are produced, change the way books are read and consequently the way they are designed. The effects of print media technology on the book in The Middle Ages, resulted in: the development of the ubiquitous form of the printed book; the dominance of text over image; the ‘closing of the door’ on the Cathedral as a multimodal reading site for the monomodal reading site of the printed book; and the elevation of the illuminated manuscript into an artform. The effect of digital new media technology on the design of the book in the New Media Age ‘opens the door’ to the virtual multimodal reading site of the screen; sees the return of a dominance of the image over text; highlights the attributes of print media, liberating the ubiquitous book form as an artform and ‘object of desire.’ As new media technologies release the contemporary book from the constraints of print media production, designers will need to explore more original and innovative ‘semiotic readings’ of the book where paper, printing techniques, materials, shapes, colours, and textures, as well as words, assign meaning to a text.

The response to the demands of new cultural circumstances requires design decisions significantly different to those previously taken (Kress & Leeuwen 2001). As the “old” media of the book is reshaped by the “new” media of the screen, the demands on readers and the demands of reading, will also be different (Kress 2003). Designing books to meet these demands will require designers to break with the paradigms of traditional book design practice, and look to other conceptual models. As part of the design process in a “multimodal world” this model ought to include architectural metaphor as a semiotic means of configuration where “TIME + NARRATIVE = SPACE + ARCHITECTURE” (Hammon 1992:35). The reason for this is because the image has a spatial logic which is read differently to the temporal logic of the word and so calls for a more spatial approach to thinking of the book as an image-site. ‘The world told is different to the world shown” (Kress 2003:1). From this vantage point, designers are no longer compelled to follow the linear narrative or time logic of the traditional printed book but may now incorporate the spatial logic of architecture to “show” the message, as well as narrative logic to “tell” it, in their interpretation of texts.

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INTERPRETATION

A book is made of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts, therefore it is dumb.

UMBERTO ECO 1998:396

A text is ultimately an ‘empty’ sign waiting to be interpreted by its reader, and today, more than ever, graphic design is about the subjective interpretation of signs and the complexity of possible connotations, allusions and meanings implicit in the text (Bruinsma 1997). Of course the interpretation of signs began well before the Middle Ages, but it is in the medieval church that we encounter the idea of the book as an interpretation of texts. Margaret Wertheim gives an account of this reading of an architectural text when she describes Gioto’s fourteenth century Arena Chapel: …this narrative is presented in three consecutive layers of imagery running around the walls of the chapel. To trace the story from start to finish, the visitor begins with the top row of images at the front of the chapel on the right-hand side… In the uppermost layer, the images recount the [holy] family’s history before the advent of Christ: first the story of Anna and Jaochim, then that of Mary herself as a young woman. Following this prelude, the middle layer begins the story of Jesus’ life with the famous annunciation scene. From there we move on to his birth in the manger, the visit by the Three Wise Men, the young Jesus being baptised by John, the resurrection of Lazarus, and so on. The final layer depicts the story of the Passion, from Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, through the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, the Ascension into heaven, and finally the Pentecost. (Wertheim 1999:82-83).

But it was more literally in the hand written texts of the monasteries, where the hermeneutic tradition of scriptural interpretation of texts began. According to Umberto Eco, the process involved in the interpretation of the Scriptures was quite complicated. There was a first book speaking allegorically of a second book and the second book speaking through parables of something else, plus a puzzling identification among the sender (the divine Logos), the signifying message (words, Logoi), the content (the divine message, Logos), and the referent (Eco 1994). Thus,

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both Testaments spoke at the same time of their sender, content and referent, with their meaning being the nebula of all possible archetypes. As Eco explains, The Scriptures were in the position of saying everything, and everything was too much for the interpreters interested in Truth. The symbolic nature of the Holy Books thus had to be tamed; in order to do so, the symbolic modes had to be identified with the allegorical one. This is a very delicate point, because without this profound need of a code, the scriptural interpretation would look very similar to our modern interpretive theories of deconstruction, pulsional interpretive drift, misprision, libidinal reading, free jouissance (Eco 1994:11).

The work of the medievalists then was to make rules for correct textual disambiguation so that, although symbols can assume many meanings, they could be decoded “the only possible right way” with a unique meaning guaranteed by an interpretive authority (Eco 1994:21). History shows a changing relation over time between this relative emphasis on the completed work and ‘definiteness’ of the Middle Ages, back to an increasing emphasis on ‘openness’ to interpretation in modernity (Caesar 1999). This ‘open work’ is, as Michael Caesar notes, one in which the reader or viewer, … must choose their own point of view, make their own connections; its forms are epistemological metaphors which confirm, in art, the categories of indeterminacy and statistical distribution that guide the interpretation of natural facts; it is not a narration, but an image- ‘it is it’- of discontinuity; it represents conjectural freedom (Caesar 1999:20).

In the New Media Age, there has emerged a new ordering aesthetic that challenges the idea of ordering itself, pointing to a myriad of ways of presenting material, “of telling the story” (Bruinsma 1997b:3). Max Bruinsma believes there is now a wider acceptance that one cannot understand everything and the question of interpretation has changed. Meaning, he writes, “is greatly dependent on context and on the interpretations made by designers, whereas the ‘readability’ of those meanings is for a large part delegated to the eye of the beholder” (Bruinsma 1997b:3). Today the designer is also an editor, finding additional content that will affect the meaning of the message and making an interpretation that results in “a more symbiotic relationship between the message and the added content” (Bruinsma 1998b:99).

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The Conceptual Framework developed in this research study is an thus an ‘open’ interpretation of themes arising out of the research findings including the four core concepts around which the framework is built; History, Architecture, Semiotics and Technology. This framework is reinterpreted in a series of matrices that were used to develop book objects for exhibition, representing a ‘material thesis,’ of the concepts arising in the study. These concepts are articulated in the presentation of conceptual models for the design of the book in a New Media Age.

HISTORY: the book as codex By returning to the Middle Ages, the steps of Morris3 and Tschichold are traced by “visiting the cellars,” of history to estimate the stability of the edifice, to grasp the meaning of the cracks and to know the quality of its foundations (Tawney 1978). Despite perceptions to the contrary, the Middle Ages were a vital and innovative period of history, not unlike that which we are experiencing in the present. In his most recent book, Cities, John Reader asserts that the Middle Ages were a time “of tremendous creativity – in the arts, and in technology…” (Reader 2004:86). This relevance of the Middle Ages to the present technological age is also argued in Umberto Eco’s essay, Dreaming of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, he attests, the roots of modern society are to be found in the fundamental infrastructure emerging out of medieval society. It was the era of the development of modern languages, merchant cities, a capitalistic economy, the rise of modern armies and the nation state, the technological transformation of labour, the rise of modern ways of computing and at the end of the era, the Gutenberg galaxy and as such, according to Eco, we are still living “under the banner of medieval technology.” (Eco 1998:64). A return to the Middle Ages is a “quest for our roots”(ibid). If the Middle Ages are at the root of contemporary society, we would do well to look to our infancy to understand the present state in our maturity.

3 Commenting on the significance of William Morris’ research into the Middle Ages, Vincent Aymer makes the insightful observation that, “those who take pleasure in studying the life of the Middle Ages are more commonly to be found in the ranks of those who pledge to the forward movement of modern life… I will be bold to say that many of the best men among us look back much to the past, not with idle regret, but with humility, hope and courage; not in striving to bring the dead to life again, but to enrich the present and the future” (Aymer 1986:336).

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The Middle Ages continue to affect many contemporary theories of meaning with the perpetual power of the Middle Ages remaining in some speculative and systematic approaches of the twenty first century. For example, Theresa Coletti makes the point, that modern semiotics still rely on concepts developed in the Middle Ages, when she writes, “critics who accept the radical involvement with language as a distinguishing feature of contemporary culture have only recently discovered the medieval preoccupation with the nature and function of language as a system of signs” (ibid:18-19).

However, even though we can admire old traditions and try to retrieve the quality of past work in what we do, as W.A. Dwiggens reminds us, “our design is contemporary” and we can only interpret the past yet not know it, because we did not live in that time. To make an attempt at any strict correspondence of historical parallels would be counterproductive, for numerous reasons. This is certainly a factor to be taken into consideration when making a historical study and historian, John Tosh, warns that no one historical situation can ever be repeated in every particular. Thus it needs to be stated that, this study of the historical origins and technological circumstances is not pursuing any deterministic outcome, but rather, by gaining knowledge of the historical precedents, is seeking to ascertain how design solutions in the present can be enlightened by those of the past.

A study of the past can offer insights across a wide range of human thinking and that as knowledge of historical change is gained, old arguments or programmes often become relevant (Tosh 1991:16). While being aware of the dangers of making analogous comparisons he does contend that the drawing of analogies can enlighten aspects of the present situation, which may not be receiving appropriate attention (Tosh 1991:17). So although “comparisons across time do not provide a blueprint for action,” they can add depth and range to our understanding of the present, providing vital insight into the conditions in which future decisions can be made (ibid:17). With so many aspects of the contemporary scene anchored in the past traditions of the Medieval era and early modern events, Tosh believes that without taking these onto account our perspective on current problems would be

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seriously defective. The relevance of this view in the context of this study, is made clear when George Landow states, If we find ourselves in a period of fundamental technological and cultural change analogous to the Gutenberg revolution, this is the time to ask what we can learn from the past. In particular, what we can predict about the future by understanding the "logic" of a particular technology or set of technologies (Landow 1992:30).

In the current technological climate, it seems such a preoccupation with history could be a desirable one for the graphic designer seeking to illuminate contemporary interpretations of the book for a New Media Age. The historical analysis of the codex origins and the events of technological revolution conducted in this study, were designed to provide both insight and a rich source of graphic information in the development of a Conceptual Framework for the design and production of the contemporary book.

ARCHITECTURE : building the book Unlike most graphic design artefacts, which are fundamentally two dimensional, the book is a uniquely three-dimensional architectonic object. Although designers working with packaging and environmental graphics deal with three-dimensional forms, graphic design is applied to the surface of these forms. The contents of a package are disposed of and the package is discarded. Graphics on architectural structures may last longer but do not have any structural purpose. The building will not fall down without them. The book, on the other hand, is designed as a ‘built’ object. Robyn Kinross provides a convincing account of the book designer’s affiliation with architecture when he writes, When the process of designing books is seen as a whole - from the editing of a text, the generation of images, through the devising of generalised "beds" in which that text and those images can lie happily, on to the implementation of these styles as countless possibly routinised small decisions, and into production of the object itself (machining, folding, collation, binding) - then you might compare all this to the process of architecture and building (Kinross1999:85).

Sabin Pierard, a highly regarded Sydney bookbinder, designs contemporary books using the binding as the dominating feature of the book. In Pierard’s books, made as sculptural structures filled with blank pages, the narrative of the book becomes the book itself. In many ways her work is architectonic in nature for her books are

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designed to be read as objects and stand like buildings in their own right. She takes the technique of traditional sewn bindings and exaggerates the sewing the sections to such a degree that the binding literally becomes the content of the book. Devoid of the written word, the paper in Pierard’s books act as the text, the use of paper to making architectural statements as layers of floors and ceilings one on top of the other.

The result is her books appear to be architectonic objects with the proportions and appearance of miniature post-modern skyscrapers (fig 1). Here the book is a built object, the exposed binding acts like the steel framework of a building construction and the layers of paper pages the floors and walls that structure supports. This is not mere coincidence, for she has a keen interest in architecture and believes the act of craft of bookbinding and that of architecture are intimately connected noting that, “they can even share the same vocabulary” (Pierard 2004). For example, binders speak of “building” the book, “constructing” the “text block,” and “tooling,” decoration onto covers. Binders also use tools such as hammers, and saws in the construction of books and like an architect, and must work to a predetermined system to assure the book functions as a utilitarian object.

An architectural vocabulary is also associated with the reading of the book’s content. Early Renaissance books, for example, had title pages with architectural imagery, friezes, columns, basis and pediments (the ‘frontispiece’ of the book is also the word for the principle façade of a building). According to Paul Crossley and Georgia Clark, the architecture-language analogy is as old as Vitruvius and the Renaissance humanists who made it a central a principal of architectural theory. The printing of architectural treatises during in the Renaissance changed the tenor of architectural discussion for, “as is often the case with a new technology, its conceptual scheme was applied by analogy across a diverse area of thought and action” (Crossley and Clark 2000:161). Texts emerged as catalysts of a momentous shift in mentality, which would have included that of the sixteenth century book designer. More significantly, Phillipe Hamon observes that since the nineteenth century, architectural terms like “construction,” “deconstruction,”

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“closure,” “point of view,” “rhythm,” “style,” “framework,” “lapidary,” “monumental,” “edifying,” and “threshold,” to name a few, have permeated literary discourse (Hamon 19920:21).

The visual vocabulary of the building translated as a book is clearly evident in the artists’ book objects of Adelle Outeridge and Win de Vos. In their work, Awakening 2004 (fig 2), the extent to which the codex form can be seen to be architectural is demonstrated. A towering metre tall, made of acrylic and with a Gothic cathedral- like shape, it could equally be a model for the design of a building. The architectonic nature of this design is no doubt related to the codex form itself. Constructed with traditional Coptic stitched binding, it opens into a full circle around its binding, creating form that alludes to the ‘skyscraping corporate cathedrals’ of the city. The use of a transparent material gives the book a sense of light and ephemerality, a form that has volume but denies any real sense of solidity. These two interpretations of the book as an object, demonstrate the close connections of buildings and books, and the significance of architecture as a conceptual theme.

SEMIOTICS : the book as object Semiotics is a huge field with divergent schools of thought so that no treatment of it can claim to be comprehensive, and there is remarkably little consensus among contemporary theorists regarding the scope of the subject, core concepts or methodological tools (Chandler 2002:xvi). The semiotics of reading has been largely located in the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics. But as Martin Krampen argues, “while a linguistic approach to meaning is genuinely, semiotic, semiotics is broader than linguistics. Verbal meaning must, therefore, be distinguished from other meanings such as those of buildings and other artefacts.” (Margolin1996). In the case of this study, these ‘other artefacts’ are books. Throughout this study semiotics has emerged as a central theme in the consideration of the affordances of the book’s materiality. Artists’ books have provided considerable insight into how the reading of texts can be extended beyond words to images, texture, colour, and the structure of the book itself: The artists' book is a new form of reading, incorporating unexpected interactions

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between language and tactile and visual forms. Its investigations of the interplay of communication modes have enlarged the definition of the nature and function of the book, and of "reading itself" (Lyons 1985 cover).

Umberto Eco’s writes ‘semiotic novels’ rich with his theory of signs and layers of interpretation, none so well documented as The Name of the Rose. For Eco, as it is for William Mitchell, “signs are everywhere; there is nothing that is not potentially or actually a sign” (Mitchell 1986:62). In this study of books as objects I have drawn of the semiotic theories of Umberto Eco and Gunther Kress. In his book Kant and the Platypus, a recognition and exploration of the material basis of signification (Caesar 1999), Eco notes that questioning about semiotics has become central to a number of disciplines. Design is one such discipline and perhaps, as Eco points out, many designers are practicing semiotics “unwittingly” (Eco 2000:2). To obtain an empirical concept, according to Eco “we must be able to produce a perceptual judgement” and perception is a complex act that requires “the interpretation of sensible data” (ibid:76). This involves memory and culture and which ultimately leads to an understanding of the nature of an object. The ‘Capacity of Judgement’ is what informs our thinking and the ability to interpret an object, The fact is that the Capacity of Judgement, once it has emerged as reflective and teleological, overwhelms and dominates the entire universe of the cognizable and informs all thinkable objects, even a chair (Eco 2000:93).

We recognize the ‘book’ based on our capacity to judge the object in relation to what we already know, from life experience of the book. Therefore we interpret an object like the book based on what we already know about books, the most significant feature being the codex form as Eco explains, It is true that a chair, as an art object, could be judged only insofar as it is beautiful, a pure example of an end without a purpose and universality without a concept, a source of pleasure without interest, the result of free playoff the imagination and the intellect. But at this point it does not take much to add a rule and a purpose whence we sought to abstract them, and the chair will be seen in accordance with the intention of the person who conceived it as a functional object, whose end is intended for its function, organically structured so that all its parts sustain the whole (ibid).

This makes clear how an object, like the book, can be understood as being a book, even without functioning as a book, because of our previous knowledge of what

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constitutes the object, book. We understand the book as an object because of its ‘bookishness.’ Its codex form having a text block, binding, a recognizable shape, within a specific size range and perhaps being able to open and close, makes the book, as an object, a carrier of meaning regardless of whether it can be conventionally read or not. Gunther Kress expands the ides of a semiotics beyond the word beginning with the foundational concept of semiotic theory is that of the sign and associated concepts such as interest, analogy and metaphor (Kress 2003). He gives an account of his view of this theory saying, In my conception of sign it is both motivated and conventional, which is certainly not the position taken in mainstream thinking. In a semiotic theory, concepts such as representation and communication, and interpretation and articulation, are clearly right in the centre of attention… In a way that was not obvious before the era of the new media of information communication, it is absolutely essential now to consider the sites and media of the appearance of texts, above all the page and the screen (ibid: 36).

While Eco’s theories are connected to those of the Middle Ages and therefore important to the study, Kress’ work on the signification of images his theory of “multimodal literacy” are equally important, and became increasingly so as the research progressed. These two theorists acted as bookends in terms of developing a semiotics theoretical framework. Semiotics is the very business of graphic design, and signs and their signification are a designer’s visual language. The graphic design of a book is not merely “stylistic glaze” remaining subordinate to the “substance” of the text (Bruinsma 1999). Even typographic design, Max Bruinsma argues, involves a semantic field of visual correlations that can sometimes disrupt the specificity of a text while other times they are “the nuts and bolts that tightly fix it into an unmistakeable realm of references” (ibid:2). When the meaning and internal structure of a text, such as a novel, may not be compromised, the designer is then concerned with the “structural clarity of the content”, but in other cases, typography adds a unique formal layer where “the tone of the voice regains a visual expression that may or may not coincide with the word it clothes and the typographer becomes a director of the text” (ibid). Thus the semiotics of the book as a material object forms one of the central themes in the development of a Conceptual Framework for contemporary book design.

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TECHNOLOGY: the book as code X The dominating theme of the research is that of new media technologies, and much debate has raged over printed books versus electronic books and reading on a screen as opposed to reading from the page. Whatever choice is made, what this study reveals is that the new media technologies always have an effect on the way we read. The evidence shows that the latest digital technologies are encouraging all types of narrative to undergo a transformation of the image (Baetens 2002). Literary narratives and ways of communicating texts are moving away from a sole reliance on words. Jan Baetens, writer and producer of an online journal, the Electronic Book Review noted this when she published an issue on narrative theory and the image,4 It’s not just that literary works and criticism have started to incorporate imagery as decoration or visual accompaniment…The pervasiveness of this turn towards the image is indicated by the range of contributors who came forward: poets, fiction writers, book artists, literary critics, graphic designers, visual artists, and author/artists whose work cuts across genres and media (ibid).

We have seen how technology has impacted on the work of designers like Bruce Mau, but the effect of media technologies on the readers of books are also profound. Electronic communication is influencing the culture in which the book is read by exerting a greater degree of influence over the users of multimedia (Grau 2003). Virtual illusion researcher, Oliver Grau, discovered that when an observer is relocated in the image, the distance to the image space is removed, his full-body inclusion demands… “that the observer relinquish distant and reserved experiences of art and, instead, embrace eccentric, mind-expanding -or mind- assailing- experiences of images” (ibid:200).

This experience is, he believes, “a consistently driven constitutive dynamic in the development of new media illusions” and as with earlier illusion of spaces, like the cathedral, virtual reality “works against distanced and critical reflection” (ibid:339). “Gutenberg’s Bible” technology brought with it the “critical reflection” that the book as a reading site so efficiently promoted, one which the new media

4 The original interface, ebr2.0, can be accessed at http:://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servelet/ebr?command=view_essay&essay_id=tomasulain

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technology of the twenty first century appears to be eroding. While this may seem like a literary concern, the graphic designer works within the realms of both virtual reality and the pages of the book. It therefore behoves designers to maintain an awareness of the different reading each mode exerts on the reader. This study into the effects of new media technologies on the architecture of the book, necessarily involved digital technologies arising as an overriding theme in the development of a Conceptual Framework for the design of the book in a New Media Age.

Finally, a number of sub themes emerged as the study progressed and became important concepts around which much of the discussion revolved. The ideas of metaphor, code, illumination, labyrinth, text and palimpsest were concepts arising in the theoretical inquiry that also informed the Conceptual Framework in the development of design outcomes. But it was the notion of the book as a palimpsest that developed into the overarching concept for the art and design of the book in a New Media Age.

A Palimpsest Reading The Conceptual Framework can be summarised as a Palimpsest Reading where layers of meaning and historical structure lie beneath the surface of the design of the contemporary book. The cathedral, illuminated manuscript, Gutenberg’s Bible, the Venetian Master printers of the fifteenth century, the Kelmscott Press, and digital illumination a New Media Age, all remain embedded beneath the visible surface of the enduring, archetypal, consummate, salient and irreplaceable book. A palimpsest of ages, of architecture and technology, of materials and processes, of meaning and interpretation, are all represented within the form of the codex, interpreted in a series of concept models designed for exhibition as a palimpsest reading of the book as a material object in a New Media Age.

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SEMIOTIC READINGS

The first rule in deciphering a message is to guess what it means.

UMBERTO ECO 1996:166

This study has primarily been a semiotic reading of the book in that it has treated all aspects of the book’s architecture as a form of visual semiotics through which texts, concepts and messages are communicated. The viability of such a domain as “visual semiotics,” to the extent that it exists, remains to be constituted, but it is purportedly concerned with “the investigation of all kinds of meaning conveyed by the visual senses” (Sonesson 2004:1). Art historian Goren Sonesson holds the view along with Umberto Eco, that all kinds of phenomena can be counted as visual signs and significations, objects, logotypes, clothing, gestures and bodily movements for example, arguing that “even visual perception per se supposes a pick-up of meaning of sorts” (ibid:3). According to the Griemas school, all meaning is of a kind, and so not only do images and texts manifest the same organizing principles, but “visuality and aurality must be taken to be identical on a deeper level” (ibid). Sonesson sees the real issue of visual semiotics as concerned with the location of visual signs in space, rather than the projection of auditory signs into time, If language is better adapted to the rendering of temporal succession, while pictures lend themselves more readily to deployment of space, then how is it that visuality and narrativity, as many critics of television and more recent media have suggested, concurrently invade our culture? (ibid:3).

In a semiotic reading of architecture, Charles Jencks defines the architectural sign as a dualistic entity comprising a plane of expression (the signifier) and a plane of content (the signified) (ibid). In Jencks’ analysis of the architectural sign, the signifiers tend to be forms, spaces, volumes and surfaces which have “suprasegmental” properties such as rhythm, colour, texture, and density, while the signifieds can encompass any idea or set of ideas of reasonable complexity (buildings cannot communicate complex prose, for example). Then on a secondary level, there are signifiers that contribute an important part of the architectural experience creating

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the ‘mood or ambience’ of a building (noise, scent, tactility, kinaesthetic qualities, heat and so on) (Broadbent, Bunt & Jencks1981). If we take this view of semiotic values in architecture and transpose them onto the book we find that the same set of semiotic affordances can be applied.

In a semiotic reading of the book, there is an employment of formal signifiers (materials and enclosures of the book) to communicate signifieds (ways of life, values and functions of the book) making use of specific resources, (the structural, economic, technical and mechanical aspects of the book’s design). The architectural sign as a dualistic entity also relates to the book, comprising as it does of a plane of expression (the signifiers; form, volume, rhythm, colour, texture, and weight of the book) and a plane of content (the signified; the content of the book, an idea or set of ideas of reasonable complexity). It is the secondary level, the experience of creating the ‘mood or ambience’ of the book (the rustle of paper, the smell of paper and ink, the feel of the book’s surfaces, the kinaesthetic quality of the book’s weight, size and so on),5 that are present in the architecture of the book, take the reading experience beyond the visual translation of texts to encompass the whole object as a site of meaning.

Phillipe Hammon, in his consideration of the book as a literary construct, makes references to architecture as the art of configuring and mastering space, and that it is no coincidence that the post-modern movement, cutting across so many intellectual fields, originated in architecture with the writing of Charles Jencks, Charles Moore and Robert Venturi (Hammon 1992). This development, he feels, can be interpreted as “a symptom of the desire to return to the sign… to communicate with the user or reader, to history, to fiction, and to “representation”” (Hammon 1992:26). In the way that literary text is generally a rewriting of other texts, “a palimpsest,” Hammon considers the “reuse” of other

5 Haptics is a term for the bodily sensation of touch, derived from the Greek “haptikos” meaning “to touch” and is divided into two major categories of sensory information; the tactile and the kinaesthetic. Tactile sense information includes temperature, surface textures and geometry, while kinaesthetic information relates to physical forces applied to and by the body (Isdale 2001).

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constructions (in of architectural terminology, “the quotation”) in post-modern architectural design as having close affiliations with the book, Rewriting exists before the building, inasmuch as to practice architecture is above all to develop a capacity for projecting and thus for rewriting either signs into images, images into blueprints or consignments into images…Rewriting also exists between buildings, for one of their distinct features is that they are eminently plastic and transportable, just like narratives. Just as one cam translate, transport, summarize, or paraphrase a text, one can translate a building into a narrative or a narrative into a building (Hammon 1992:36).

Although Hammon is referring to literary texts, the book designer can take note of the similarities between the book and architecture operating on different yet related levels, but Hammon does not leave the book as an object out of the equation. He argues that a major problem linked to the question of representation, remains “the meaning of the architectural object” and more specifically the fact that attempts by Umberto Eco to construct an architectural semiotics that has, in his opinion “haunted the history of architecture” (Hammon 1992:48). Nonetheless he concedes that the artifice of literature, “an articulated semiotic ensemble that produces meaning,” possesses a structural complicity, “a deep pre-established homology with the very thing “that in reality is already superficial: namely the building (an articulated semiotic ensemble that produces space)” (Hammon 1992:6). A building and a book both produce meaning through the design of their forms and their use of space.

In a critique of Richard Hendels’ On Book Design, a book used as a reference by many aspiring designers, Robin Kinross notes that it is what is most striking about the book is that almost no attention is paid to the materiality of the book (Kinross 1999). Hendle only treats the flat image of the page in his analysis and Kinross concludes that “there is little to be gained from these pages” (ibid:85). While this is typical of most books on book design, Kinross does point to an exception in the work of Walter Nikkels. Nikkels specialised almost exclusively in designing for institutions of fine art, and a relation between the book, art and architecture is evident in his book Der Raum des Buches [The Space of the Book]. In this book, Nikkels articulates the various senses in which the book has spatial and material dimensions and through the striking juxtaposition of images, he suggests the

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architectural nature of the book (Kinross 199). Thus for a sense of the whole artefact, Nikkels has designed the book as an architectural space, one in which Kinross notes, “a fourteenth century manuscript, an Aldo Rossi façade, a Sol de Wit structure, a seventeenth century architectural drawing, are brought together to illustrate the page as a façade”(Kinross 1999:86). To only pay attention to the layout of page design is useful when producing publications for a university press (and Hendle’s experience was in this context) where the transparency of texts aids the reading of scholarly content and the notion of “form following function” should most certainly apply. But if we take heed of Nikkel’s approach to the space of the book, then a semiotics of architecture could be considered useful in conceptualising a new approach to the design of the book.

Umberto Eco, in his essay Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture, refers to two fundamental aspects of architecture; functionality and communicativeness, in his semiotic analysis. He argues that, … if semiotics, beyond being the science of recognized system of signs, is really to be a science studying all cultural phenomena as if they were systems of signs - on the hypothesis that all cultural phenomena are, in reality, systems of signs, or that culture can be understood as communication - then one of the fields in which it will undoubtedly find itself most challenged is that of architecture. (Lagopoulos 1986:56-57)

For Eco, a sign is the union of a sign vehicle and a culturally codified signification and he differentiates communication from stimulation within the context of built forms. He also distinguishes, with respect to objects, two layers of signification: a denotative signification, the “primary function,” which refers to the function of these objects, and the connotative signification, the “secondary function,” which is of a symbolic nature. Eco's conclusions are, that because of the rhetorical nature of architecture as a message of mass communication, its design languages are very conventional, because a building must be used by everyone (as does a book). Yet, over time, new denotative and connotative meanings of all kinds are ascribed to architectural objects by social processes. Consequently Eco suggests that “architects should create structures which, while functioning as forms in their times, are open to new processes of signification appearing in the future” (Lagopoulos 1986:56). This is advice that all designers could heed but as book

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designers, like architects, create objects that endure throughout history (as the medieval illuminated manuscripts and fifteenth century incunabula attest), it is a point that must be seriously considered.

Eco defines the term architecture in a broad sense to indicate “phenomena of industrial design and urban design as well as phenomena of architecture proper.” But he excludes from his definition “any type of three dimensional construction destined to permit the fulfillment of some function connected to life in society.... a definition that would be understood to exclude... the production of three- dimensional objects destined primarily to be contemplated rather than utilized in society, such as works of art” (ibid). It could be said that a book is both a three- dimensional, functional, “industrial design” and a contemplative art object, and that it is possible then, that the three-dimensional object of the book, and the three-dimensional space of the computer interface, might be rightful candidates for inclusion in Eco’s definition. Whether three-dimensional art can be considered architecture might depend on how one defines art. Many would consider buildings like the Sydney Opera House a work of art and a three-dimensional construction “destined to permit the fulfillment of some function connected to life in society” (ibid). Nonetheless, this study draws on a semiotics of architecture, along with the “multimodal” semiotic theories of Kress and Leeuwen, as a guiding framework in the development of a concept models designed as three-dimensional book objects.

The Concept Models By drawing on the concept and design matrices and the subsequent sub-themes, the Conceptual Framework is interpreted in the design a series of book object concept models. In the development of conceptualising books as objects, the design philosophy of Dr. Alberto Alessi encourages a more innovative approach to the creation of new products than are more usually encountered in the commercial world. The approach he takes in the development of new designs is one that he regards as being fundamental to his company’s design practice, referring to his philosophy as the “theory of the border-line,”

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We feel that our activity should always be as close as possible to the border-line that separates the areas of the possible and the not possible. The area of the possible is represented by the new projects that our designers will develop and that people will be able to accept and will wish to own. The area of the not possible is represented by new projects that the final customers, the market, are not ready to understand and to accept (Alessi 2001: 3).

Of course, as he points out, it is difficult to do this in a competitive market environment, and the border-line is not easily defined. It is a border-line of a whole consumption society moving continuously so that it can only be understood in terms of intuition and sensibility (Aleessi 2001). These two qualities, Dr.Alessi observes, are rare in an industrial mass-production culture and so mass- production companies tend to work as far away from the border-line as possible, the result being that “they all produce the same car, the same television set,” (and perhaps the same book) and so continue, “generally speaking, to make the very boring industrial products” that saturate the market (Alessi 2001:3). While working so close to the border-line is very risky, Dr. Alessi believes that when designers are so inspired they succeed in moving a bit ahead of the border-line and that, in his opinion, is “the contribution an industrial company can make to the overall society” (Alessi 2001:3). It is also a contribution graphic designers can make in the innovation and sensitivity of their book designs in a competitive mass- media environment. In order to take the design of the book into the future, designers will need to operate on the ‘border-lines’ between art, craft, design and new media technology for, as Bruce Mau asks, Is it not our role to imagine new futures more rich and complex and wild in their style than any single framework can accommodate? We are suggesting the designer as a difficult, problematic figure, one who cannot afford to be stable, or acknowledge boundaries as impassable… If we are to fully engage our moment in history, we must develop speculative strategies and illuminate the context in which we produce our work… not knowing the answers but at least asking the questions… We believe that the most effective and ambitious practice involves the creation of new cultural artefacts [and] the objective is to design new objects that possess clarity and complexity within an environment ruled by circulation and dispersion (Mau 2000:581,98).

To work at the border-line is not to ignore the role of the graphic designer the creator of functional, informative and practical books, but to expand on the foundations set down by pioneers like Johanne Gutenberg and William Morris. Although experimental books might be regarded as “hothouse products,” off the

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mainstream of publishing, we must not forget that idealistic designers of many impractical books “have done much to inspire higher standards of workaday production” (McMurtrie 1989:85). Bearing this and the advice of Alessi and Mau in mind, a series of concept models (designed as book objects) were developed ‘close to the border-line’ as ‘new cultural artefacts’ expressing ‘clarity and complexity.’ Theses concept models, designed as book objects, were developed to visually demonstrate and articulate a Conceptual Framework for the design of the contemporary book in a New Media Age, derived from the theoretical and practical research findings, and displayed in the exhibition, Palimpsest Readings.

Design is the organization of what is to be articulated into a “blueprint” for production and the work of the designer is seen as being “architectural’ (Leeuwen & Kress:2001). Designed as three-dimensional reading space, this exhibition is not intended to be viewed as art might be in an art gallery, but the rather as a text in the way that one might read information in a museum; a museum where the textual content is one of objects, symbols and written information, arranged in such a way as to be accessible from a number of points of view. Read literally, metaphorically or randomly, this exhibition is a visual narrative of the research, experimentation and design of the book as a material object for a New Media Age. The book objects represent an interpretation of the ideas explored in the thesis and the conceptual framework arising from this analysis, organised within the architectural space of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery.

AN EXHIBITION

On every side were cases of different dimensions, in them, objects of wondrous beauty shone in the glow of torches.

UMBERTO ECO 19996:419

Palimpsest Readings The exhibition, Palimpsest Readings, presented in glass cases and elegant transparent plastic, is a visual interpretation of a conceptual framework where two oppositions

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are merged in one integrated whole. Codex: code x; book: screen; new media: old media; electronic: mechanical; digital: print; paper: glass; book: building; physical: virtual; future: past. By placing these opposites in parallel, the forms that emerge signify an alchemic conjunction of opposites rather than a systematic dichotomy. The traditional techniques of book making, underwrite the design of a series of contemporary book objects, demonstrating the palimpsest of the old media in the new, the narrative within the network, the text beneath the image. Words and images derived from the analyses of the theoretical and practical research findings were integrated as a semiotic matrix and translated into 3D concept models presented as a ‘material thesis’ in the exhibition, Palimpsest Readings.

The Palimpsest Scratch beneath the surface of the book and the traditions of the medieval book designers are revealed. Place the book under the light of research and the traces of its architectural heritage become evident. When the electronic technology of the desktop computer illuminated screens the digital page, a palimpsest was made in reverse. Now the new media writing of digital codes are hidden from the naked eye, beneath the old media of writing of typography, while metaphorically the new media rewrites the old media in the reconstituted form of the book. In the design of the book objects in the exhibition, the palimpsest nature of the book can be read on a number of levels:

• The ‘architectonic’ structures of the past appear in the new book form of the present; the design of the contemporary page and overwrites the structure of the manuscript; typographic columnar structures rewrite their Gothic script origins; the size of the book rewrites its parchment origins; illustrators rewrite the ‘illuminated manuscript’ using the medium of print.

• In the new media technology, remediation is also a form of palimpsest where the computer interface sees a rewriting of the (cathedral) architectural reading space and the illuminated screen rewrites the ‘light

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through’ of the middle ages. Borders rich in graphic image and icons ‘illuminate’ the new media web ‘pages’ of the digital screen.

• In the studio investigations: we experience a rewriting the technologies of the book; paper to screen; print to pixel: binding to hypertext. The traditions of the fifteenth century rewritten in the making of rag paper in a contemporary interpretation, relief printing interpreted in a contemporary context and traditional binding revisited in new and exposed guises.

This notion of the palimpsest permeates the exhibition in both the works and the design of the exhibition space itself. Designed to be read rather than viewed, the exhibition is presented as a quasi museum/cathedral space. The linear or temporal reading of the exhibition as a text depends on whether the reader follows the sequence of signed objects from beginning to end, or reads the walls and showcases of the first space before entering the second. But the reading is also a hypertextual,6 a new media space where entry and exit points of the narrative can be taken at random. Read from any aspect, the interpretation of the work may become individualised, but the content is still equally available. At the end of the viewing some idea of what this research was about will ultimately resonate. Having said this, the fact that the works are explained, either in floor talks or in texts, is a reminder that the exhibition is treated as information design, that it is, like a museum, a space where knowledge is disseminated as well as where artefacts are contemplated. The objects on display are not designed as self-expressive artworks, but as explanations, interpretations and significations of the concepts established in the theoretical and practical studies, translated into the visual ‘texts’ of a “material thesis.”

6 Eco writes in his lecture presented at the Biblioteque Alaxandria, “A hypertextual text is a multidimensional network or maze [not labyrinth] in which every point or node can be potentially connected with any other node” (Eco 2003:3). The exhibition can be read as a series of interconnecting nodes, each represented by an object, and because a hypertext can give the illusion of opening up even a closed text: “a detective story can be structured in such a way that its readers can select their own solution, deciding at the end if the guilty one should be the butler, the bishop, the detective, the narrator, the author or the reader” (ibid:9). “They can build up their own story” (ibid) of the book works as texts, of the exhibition as book.

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SPACE A : Interrogating the Book as a Material Object The first space of the exhibition contains the Studio Investigations7 and book objects arising out of these studies. The work displayed tells of the journey involved in developing the practical articulation of the theoretical text, and then using these discoveries to develop the works for the conceptual models of the second space as a reading site. On entering the first space, the Banner Books hanging on the far wall, act as a ‘title page’ for the exhibition. Designed to be hung as banners, the text of these books is arranged on a grid that allows them to be folded into a concertina book when no longer needed in their current state. Made of transparent plastic, they allude to the new media transparency of the screen, with vinyl letters casting shadows on the wall behind alluding to the palimpsest of the book, created in the ‘light’ of a New Media Age. As an introduction to reading of the works, the banners bear the two symbols of the cross representing the theme of the project, Codex:Code X. “Codex” signifying the codex origins and materiality of the book, and “Code X” representing the new media technology of the digital screen. The sign of the cross is represented in each banner in its contemporary form as “X” and in its archaic form as “+.” Roland Barthes made the statement that, “nothing constructed in the world today escapes meaning (Sontag 1993:217). The symbols of the cross used throughout the design work of the exhibition are the predominant motives used in the design of the book works themselves.

Roland Barthes, in his essay The Imagination of the Sign, cites the cross as an example of a symbol, a sign in which the interior relation of the sign unites its signifier to its signified (Sontag 1993). This symbolic relation is the first of three relations that, according to Barthes, are implied in every sign. The second is exterior to the sign, a virtual relation that unites the sign to a body of other signs. It implies the existence of an “organized memory of forms,” from which the sign need only differ enough to cause a change of meaning, while remaining within the system of forms. This is the systematic or paradigmatic relation of the sign. The last relation is also exterior, but an actual one, uniting the sign to other signs in the discourse surrounding it. This association, analogous to the level of the syntagm, is the

7 For a detailed account of these works see Appendix I.

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syntagmatic relation of the sign. However, when the signifying phenomenon is encountered, one of these three relations will predominate “… sometimes we “see” the sign in its symbolic aspect, sometimes in its systematic aspect, sometimes in its syntagmatic aspect” (Sontag 1993:212). Barthes explains this tendency as a semiological consciousness (of the analyst, not the user of the sign) and that certain ideologies can be implied by the dominant choice. But he also concedes that each consciousness of the sign may correspond to a particular moment of “individual or collective reflection” (Sontag 1993). It is both this individual and collective association with the symbol of the cross that is exploited in the use of the cross in the exhibition and the works themselves.

The X Factor The + sign and the x sign are fundamentally the same mark, but when placed in different orientation, one vertical, the other diagonal, they acquire specific meanings. For example, depending on its context, a + could represent a mathematical symbol of addition or mark the location of a church on a map. X could represent a mathematical symbol of multiplication or ‘mark the spot’ on a map where buried treasure might be found. The old symbol of the Christian church that dominated the culture of the Middle Ages has been tipped on an angle to become the sign of a secular new media culture dominated by the screen. The X sign represent the New Media Age in much the same way the atom sign of the 1950s represented a new “Atomic Age:” With the Atomic Age upon them, American industries called on designers to refashion an image better suited to the new times. The atom and the molecule were used to represent everything from communications technology and mutual funds to gasoline and pistons…The designer used new images to fashion a vision of tomorrow... The American public, eager to embrace these new symbols, was not disappointed, and designers delivered with verve and gusto. (Baker & Blik 1988: 43).

The symbolism of the cross represented in the design of the exhibition, is also evident in the design of many of the book works; Palimpsest Readings, Signs of the Times, Ariadne’s Thread, all carrying the many different meanings of the opposing cross symbols. The meanings of the symbols can be many and varied but the following interpretations explain the primary connotations of the sign.

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The Cross as the symbol + • + = Middle Ages • + = Religion • + = The Cathedral • + = The Centre • + = Addition • + = Grid point • + = Axis

In Christian symbolism the design of the cross represents a sign of completion, where the horizontal element of “waiting humankind” and the vertical stroke represents God’s word, “the Gospel,” cross in the middle, the act of God redeeming mankind (Frutiger 1997). The cross also represents dualism, the marriage of opposites and an expression of being static and anchored, but the graphic association with the crucifix has made it a strongly identified symbol of Christianity. In the context of this study this factor locates the cross as + as an indication of the Middle Age origins of the book.

The Cross as the symbol X • X = New Media Age • X = Secularisation • X = The OS X operating system • X = The unknown • X = Multiplication • X = The code of the computer8 • X = The X generation

The “X” sign has come to be popular culture’s most dominant ‘sign of the times.’ The replacement of the prefix and suffix ‘ex’ in numerous words “Xpress,” “Xcite,” “Xcell,” stock “Xchange,” and “DesignX,” etcetera. The 1990s, “X

8 The term, XML and programmes, Quark Xpress, OS X for example.

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Files,” of popular television science fiction added new meaning for a new era soon to be to recognised by the sign, “X,” the latest popular television show overtly expressing the “X” as a sign of that extra something-the “Xfactor.” The Xerox “X” logo designed by San Francisco-based Landor Associates, for example, is intended to visibly represent new media technologies. It is described in the Communication Arts design journal, as reflecting “the company’s expanding focus on document services technology: scanning, storing, printing, faxing and transmitting documents and databases… the identity features a new marketing symbol-a partially digitised X- and a modified corporate signature” (Coyne 1995: 102), and a ubiquitous sign of the times.

In the context of this study these “X” factors locate the cross in the New Media Age. The cross as a sign carries multiple layers of reference throughout the works and in the exhibition itself. The layout of the exhibition, with its showcases and plinths arranged in a cross (fig 3), is designed as a body of ‘texts’ read as semiotic signs in a navigatible, three-dimensional environment. The dualistic nature of the research project is reflected in the banners, and the pairing of opposites already mentioned; codex: code x; book: screen; new media: old media; future: past, and in the layout of the second space, the Reading Site.

SPACE B : Reading the Book as a Material Object The second space is the Reading Site comprised of two wall hangings, three book objects and a conceptual model for the design of a series of commercial books. The two most significant pieces, however, containing the essence of the thesis and the culmination of the Conceptual Framework, are The Pendulum and The Rose. Placed at either end of the space they represent both the dichotomy of the old and new media and a design palimpsest where these opposites are found to be present in both. Between these sites a Reading Path is displayed in the form of a concertina style book object. Mounted on the wall, the book can be viewed from either end of the space, presenting two readings of the same book, depending on your point of view. The content is made up of images of the path that connects the two building sites represented in The Pendulum and The Rose, Aurora Place and St Mary’s Cathedral.

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The design of the book reflects the links between the old media of the codex, the book form when folded closed, and the new media of code x as the scroll form of the screen when opened. Contained within this single book object is a palimpsest of the old media linked to the new. The final work, Sites of Contemplation takes the concept of the palimpsest and translates it into a design concept suited for the publishing world of the commercial book.

Concept Models and Book Objects The exhibition is comprised of both conceptual models arising out of the studio investigations sand book objects designed to articulate the Conceptual Framework

Palimpsest Readings (fig 5) Reading print from a page in reflected light, is a different reading when viewed with transmitted light. Marshall McLuhan described these ways of reading as 'light-on' and 'light-through' experiences, maintaining that these experiences govern the message we derive from each medium. The different light sources in which a text is read, alter the way the information is received so that reading from the screen is not the same as reading from a page. In the Middle Ages the narrative texts of the cathedral were displayed in the transmitted light and colour of stained glass windows. Scribes attempted to 'capture' this light and colour on the pages of illuminated manuscripts, using gold gilding rich colours to emulate this reading experience on the reflective pages of parchment, a translucent material that could also be seen 'through.' Eventually the light reflecting, opaque paper page emerged with the printing press of the fifteenth century. The 'illuminated manuscripts' presented here, reveal the text of Gutenberg's Bible embedded in porcelain 'pages,' representing the parchment of the past as an archaeological fragment, a fragile yet durable memory of the origins of print media. Behind these fragments, texts appear as watermarks that reveal a transformation from codex to code x, as the Gothic text of the alphabet becomes the binary code of the computer. Fifteenth century title page designs frame a cross symbolising the Middle Age origins of the book, which rotates to become the ‘x’ symbol of the twenty first century screen. Thus traces of the past remain in the

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‘illuminated manuscripts’ of the twenty first century, where texts are once again read in the 'stained glass' windows of the computer screen.

Reading Materials (fig 6) The codex format is presented in these books as a pure form interpreted in five different materials. The first is made in bookbinding muslin, the second in wood veneer. Between a metalmesh and polypropylene book sits a version in paperclay porcelain. Each book, devoid of any textual or image content, is intended to evoke a response related to the materiality of the form. The text of these books is their texture, colour, shape, and size. Can texts be interpreted as being soft or hard, light or heavy, fragile or robust. These studies ask, what might the content be in books like these be? By reading these forms freed of textual content, we gain a more intimate sense of the codex form of the book as a material object. Using alternative materials9 in the design of contemporary books is a practice that is influencing commercial publishing. These studies explore the semiotic meaning materials bring to an object and how we can “read into” a book more than that which is written in verbal texts. Elsewhere in the study the significance of the book’ materiality is further discussed.10 In these works attention is drawn to the fragility or robustness of the pages, the texture of the surfaces and the function of the binding, the fundamental properties of the book’s codex structure.

Ariadne's Thread (fig 7) Designed for the Noosa Regional Gallery Books 03 exhibition, Watermark, this book object references the process of making watermarks rather than using the watermarked paper itself. The design elements stitched onto the surface of this

9 Cradle to Cradle : Remaking the Way We make Things, is a book using alternative materials to allude to the content of the otherwise conventionally designed text. The most radical aspect of this book’s design is the fact that it is printed on plastic pages and as the authors declare; “This book is not a tree” (McDonough & Braungart 2002:5). Conceived by book designer, Charles Melcher, the book is printed on a synthetic “paper” and is a prototype for the book as “technical nutrient,” that is, a product that can be broken down and circulated indefinitely in industrial cycles. Made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, the book is waterproof, extremely durable and an expression of not only of the authors’ intention to move away from using wood fibres but also of the nature of the subject being discussed. While the use of plastic is a response to the problems of an industrialised environment, it also demonstrates an innovative approach to the use of alternative materials in describing content in the design of the contemporary book. 10 See Chapter 5.

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screen demonstrate the method of creating the watermark design on the papermaking mould. In the fifteenth century, watermarks were created by stitching wire symbols onto the screen of the paper mould (often with human hair as it is so fine, strong and waterproof). Thus the book presents a reading of the watermark mould itself while also alluding to a digital reading of the screen. Letters in 'code' spell out the word labyrinth represented in the labyrinth design at the end of the book.

The Labyrinth; Narrative and Display. In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos and gave her lover Theseus a ball of thread to find his way back, after fighting the Minotaur at its centre, out of the labyrinth. The narrative plot is represented by Ariadne’s thread and is in the true nature of a true labyrinth, a direct line from the beginning to the centre of the story on a circuitous route and then resolved leading the reader, or the ‘hero’ out of the depths of the story, the labyrinth. Labyrinths were frequently laid on the floors of the Gothic cathedrals as symbols of life’s journey, the indirect route eventually arriving at the centre, the goal, in heaven.

The labyrinth in this work indicates the labyrinthine nature of the narrative with Ariadne's thread maintaining the connections between the past and the future, the front and the back, of the book. Finally, the moire pattern created by the layering of the metalmesh covers form a more literal version of the term, a moire pattern of a ‘watermark.’

A Stitch in Time (fig 8) Repetition, reproduction, standardisation, miniaturisation, mass production. The ubiquity of the book is testimony to the success of the printing press in reproducing identical copies of texts. But new media technologies now make it possible to produce just as many copies but with degrees of variation. The book is no longer required to be identical to another as flexible delivery of digital printing, the book can be individualised making it possible for the book to become a unique object in the way that the handmade object is unique. Using the stitching of fifteenth century bindings, these studies were made in order to practice multiple

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section binding. Each of these small books looks identical but on closer inspection they reveal degrees of variation echoing notions of repetition, reproduction, mass- production, customisation, variation, hand-production. The bands upon which the sections are sewn are secured with a stitched cross signifying the practice of marking a cross to count such large numbers of items. The mass-production of books, the hand-production of books, these models represent the continuum of the book as a material object.

Codex : Form I (fig 9) The curve is an architectural form that has recently become more predominant in many renowned buildings throughout the world, as the advent of new media technologies have made it possible to engineer curved structures in ways not available in the past. Past technologies of the printing press had constrained the design of the book to a rectangular form much like a modern city building. Designed to satisfy the demands of the printing press, the book's architecture was fundamentally predetermined. The surface design of the book's cover and the pages within it would change, but its structure remained firmly anchored to the printing press. New media digital technologies are liberating the design of the book from the mechanics of the printing press. As in architecture, digital printing technologies now offer new possibilities for the architecture of the book beyond the rectangle to the curve. This model formed the testing of a curved book and was later realised in acrylic.

Code X : Form II (fig 10) Situated between the two exhibition spaces this book object is a transitional synthesis and integration of the studio studies and theoretical implications. The traditionally bound codex form of the paper book, floats in the curved, transparent screen like acrylic code x covers. The work expresses the “new media curve,” alternative materials and the concept of the form of the book as content. Developed from the concept model, Codex : Form I, it represents the connection between the historical architecture of the codex and the new possibilities that digital technologies bring to the design of the book. Drawing on the traditional

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methods of bookmaking, it is a translation of a conceptual framework that sees the book as an architectonic object. The form was inspired by the work of architects Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry, whose buildings reach beyond the rectilinear tradition using computer technologies to construct curved built forms. Designed as a curve, the book is able to stand alone unsupported by bookends or shelves. The original form of the codex is seen suspended in the new media form of the screen.

Book Jacket : Codex (fig 11) Designed as a “book jacket” that folds up into a book, this work references the Middle Age origins of the codex form we know as the book. Double page spreads of handmade paper make up the fabric of this piece, embellished with remnants of hand scripts stitched together with fragments of printed texts. These fragments allude to the changing of technologies, from hand scribe to printing press, while ‘gold leaf’ initials allude to medieval illuminations. Placed at the south end of the reading space, this piece supports the book work, Reading Site I : The Rose.

Book Jacket : Code X (fig 12) Double page spreads of handmade watermarked paper make up the fabric of this ‘book jacket’ with the idea of light the most dominant factor. Holding their texts within the substrate of the paper, the print of the ‘old’ media is now echoed within in the ‘new’ media of light, where the text has left the surface of the page and is visible only when light passes through it. Placed at the north end of the reading space, this work relates to the new media age of light, transparency and codes, supporting the bookwork, Reading Site II : The Pendulum.

Reading Site I : The Rose (fig 13) Medieval Cathedral : Old media : Manuscript Bible Designed to represent the book as CODEX, there are 5 volumes in the first reading site based on Umberto Eco’s medievalist novel, The Name of the Rose. Designed as a book object, the narrative is represented in found objects, texts and iconic images, embedded in ‘text blocks of Lucite ‘light’ and enclosed within covers of slate, representing the stone of the cathedral and the black covers of the

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Bible. Symbols of a cut out cross and an engraved labyrinth11 adorn the covers while gold leaf linings signify the illumination of the cathedral and the manuscript. Umberto Eco's book, The Name of the Rose, forms the narrative of this book object, where each book consists of a text block containing an object, an iconic image and a quote representing the dominating themes of the narrative. Five objects were selected to symbolically represent the narrative of the novel in a visual interpretation of the text. Like sacred relics, the rose, the key, the poison phial, and horseshoe, are symbols of meanings within the story. Thus, the key symbolises the labyrinthine library, where secret books are kept behind a locked door, the 'key' needed to solve the code of the labyrinth and the key to the novel's mystery murders. Attached to a rosary, this key is a crucifix and symbolises the medieval monastic setting of the novel. The codex form of these books, with slate covers and transparent text blocks, was inspired by the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, “the great book in stone,” where narratives are written in the stained glass windows, statuary, and sacred objects within its walls. Suger’s “brilliant light” is represented by the Lucite text block where the texts and the objects ‘float’ in “another worldly” way. St Mary's Cathedral was analysed as an architectural site, drawing on aspects of its architecture as design elements and the architects, Carlo Scarpa and Tadao Ando were inspirational in the design of the forms.12 St Mary’s Cathedral is situated at the south end of Macquarie Street, so the book object is also placed on the south end of the exhibition space, designed to be experienced as a three dimensional ‘reading site.’

Reading Site II : The Pendulum (fig 14) City Tower : New Media : Screen Documents Designed to represent the book as CODE X, there are 3 volumes in the second reading site based on Umberto Eco’s medievalist novel, Foucault’s Pendulum.

11 Of all the medieval paved labyrinths, that of Chartres Cathedral is the most famous and most imitated labyrinth in the world. The careful placement of the labyrinth has been taken to indicate they contain a wealth of coded information, but the more common wisdom is that of a substitute for the long and arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, representing the road to redemption, serving a contemplative purpose as an allegory of medieval Christian life (Saward 2003). 12 The cut out cross of the cathedral window in the cover of the book is both a quote of the cathedral windows and Tadao Ando’s “Cathedral of Light.” Carlo Scarpa also designed many contemporary museum spaces inspired by both William Morris and the Modernist movement in his works, an I have drawn on his work as guidance in the integration of historical and contemporary forms.

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Designed as a book object, the narrative is represented in texts and iconic images, executed on acrylic ‘pages of light’ standing unbound and unconstrained, and able to be reassembled in variable arrangements, representing the ephemeral texts of the digital screen. Umberto Eco's book, Foucault's Pendulum, forms the narrative of this book object. It is a story connecting the technology of the present with the mysteries of the past, the Knights Templar with a computer programme (the past in the present), and the deciphering of a code hidden in the science of the pendulum. The story mostly concerns “The Plan,” a complex code that one of the main character’s creates by feeding random texts into a computer programme. Eco reveals himself to be an intertextual (or palimpsest) writer when he reveals that, “In the early sixties, Nanni Balestrini gave a computer a disconnected list of verses that a machine combined in different ways to compose different poems… Nothing forbids us from putting together different stories in a sort of narrative patchwork. But this has nothing to do with the real function and the profound charm of books” (Eco 2003:9). It does, however, have a lot to do with the plot of Foucault’s Pendulum and the intertextual nature of a Palimpsest Reading.

The architectural form that informed the design of this book object was Renzo Piano's Aurora Place, situated on the north end of Macquarie Street. This building inspired the curve and transparency used to represent a New Media Age in this conceptual model of the novel. A site analysis of this building reveals two curved, translucent structures connected with a ‘net’ of glass and steel, providing an architectural metaphor of the New Media Age. Curved glass panels enclose the core of the building, with an ephemeral quality that denies the reality of its form and mass. Inspired by Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano the architectural forms of this site could represent a concept model for a contemporary building, just as easily as a book. Where light is enclosed between the walls of St Mary’s, and the covers of the codex, here the walls of the building, the screen ‘pages,’ are the light themselves, exposed and unencumbered by the walls of stone or boarded covers. In the New Media Age text is no longer contained in a block between covers but floats on unbound 'pages' ‘printed’ with light. The ephemeral nature of the screen presents texts that can be interchanged, selected and deselected, grouped and

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ungrouped, assembled and disassembled. The codex of the cathedral is transformed into the ‘code x’ of the computer.

Reading Path (fig 15) This work is a visual essay of the palimpsest connection of two reading sites; St Mary's Cathedral and Aurora Place. Signs embedded in the path of Macquarie Street connect the two buildings in these digitally produced images. Presented in the form of a concertina book, the reading of the path depends on a point of view. It can be read both ways, north to south, south to north, left to right, right to left. Unlike the linear reading of words, the reading of images does not need to be sequential to derive meaning. The narrated logic of the word is a different reading to the displayed logic of the image. The syntax of images and any path of reading are chosen by the viewer, rather than being dictated by the writer. Writing is governed by the logic of time and so is necessarily sequential in order to convey meaning. Organisation of the image, on the other hand, is governed by the logic of space, so that the placement of elements in space will always generate meaning.13 This work examines this notion of the reading path by photographically recording the signs in the pathway between St Mary’s and Aurora Place in the form of a visual essay.14 Brass plates set in this pathway narrate a palimpsest of building sites, as previous ‘writings’ have been erased and new ‘texts’ put in their place. A library now stands where a school used to be, a new hospital occupies the site where the old Rum Hospital once stood. These plaques, like giant printing plates, bear the stories of past histories, while newer signs (gas, electricity, telephone signs) tell a more recent utilitarian story. Combined they form a visual essay of the palimpsest nature of the path between the reading sites of the medieval St Mary’s and the post-modern Aurora Place.

Sites of Contemplation (fig 16) City Sites : Graphic Illuminations : Precious Objects Designed as a series of books for commercial production, this concept model demonstrates the application of the conceptual framework to book design. Representing eight separate Books of Hours within the vicinity of St Mary’s

13 Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the New Media Age, Routledge, London and New York 14 See Chapter 5 Reconstruction.

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Cathedral and Aurora Place, the books are designed as small gift books drawing on the concept of the medieval Books of Hours. The narrative is represented in textual quotes by Umberto Eco, iconic images, illuminated manuscript reproductions, on handmade paper and bound into laser etched acrylic covers. Symbolic three-dimensional objects (possibly laser imaged in small crystal blocks) are included as part of the presentation of the books. The conceptual model, Sites of Contemplation, is designed to demonstrate the application of the conceptual framework, derived from the research project, to graphic design practice in a series of commercially designed books. Based on the model of a Book of Hours, this series of books are conceived as ‘sites of contemplation.’ In the fifteenth century a Book of Hours was a small beautifully illuminated book containing a series of short services for each of the liturgical hours of the day. These services begin with Matins, at about 2.30 and 3.00 in the morning, with Lauds held between 5.00 and 6.00am to end at dawn. Prime follows around 7.30am near daybreak and then Terce at 9.00. Sext is the noon hour with Nones between 2.00 and 3.00 in the afternoon. Finally Vespers is recited at about 4.30pm finishing with Compline at the end of the day. I have chosen one of these hours to coincide with eight architectural sites, within the vicinity of the city centre, that are conducive to quiet contemplation. Along with this canonical hour, each book contains a philosophical quote by Umberto Eco, a found object that symbolises the site and an illuminated image to visually represent it. The design of the books would be based on the conceptual framework established in the current research. Further analysis of each site and research of illuminated images and texts, would be undertaken to provide the content for these books. Three-dimensional selected symbolic objects etched into small three dimensional crystal keepsakes would be included as an element of the book’s packaging presentation.

But here the glass case, lighted inside, displayed Manutius books, some of them opened to reveal bright pages. They had gleaming white covers sheathed in elegant transparent plastic, with handsome rice paper and clean print.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 255

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Conclusion A fresh manuscript, a blank page, a tabula rasa, a hidden text. The new media technology of computer mediation can seem like unchartered territory, a cyberspace of new horizons, the beginning of a new era. But have we not merely scraped back of the surface, softened it with light and electronically smoothed the ‘pages’ upon which I now ‘type’ these closing words? The screen is not a page, the writing is not type, they are but electronic illusions of signs we can recognise and read, but beneath these signs are other signs, palimpsest codes ‘read’ by the computer but invisible to the human eye. Like museum specimens exhibited behind glass, these ‘pages’ are really traces of the past guiding us into the future. A ‘Gutenberg Bible,’ where the printed page is embedded within the new technology of pixels and light, a palimpsest of an old text being rewritten by the new. A once forgotten reading site is being realised in the new space of a digital cosmos; Margaret Wertheim’s ‘souls pace,’ David Bolter’s ‘writing space,’ William Gibson’s ‘cyber space’, and Gunther Kress’s ‘new media’ space.

Within the context of this new media space the book remains as a material object, despite the intervention of digital technology, as this study has shown. The design of the book in an electronic age requires conceptual frameworks that look to the future while honouring the past. The Conceptual Framework emerging from this research embraces the book’s history, its architectural metaphor, and the semiotics of its form and the technology of its production. It is a framework that sees the illumination of the book’s pages a palimpsest of the medieval manuscripts now also captured in the digital screen; a palimpsest of the cathedral space in the computer, of the book space in the screen, of the past in the present form; a palimpsest in the codes of the book and the codes of the screen represented in the cross as symbol, the cross as sign, the cross as icon; a palimpsest in the return to the image as text and the text as image.

The conceptual models developed within this framework have reflected this palimpsest nature of the book’s design and production in the creation of book objects displayed in the exhibition Palimpsest Readings. The works presented in the

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exhibition, Palimpsest Readings, show a ‘rewriting’ of the idea, the architecture and the future of the book as a material object in a New Media Age in Palimpsest Reading, an illumination of the manuscripts; Codex : Form II, the old book in the new media screen; Reading Site I : The Rose, the codex as cathedral and book; Reading Site II : The Pendulum, the book as code x screen, and the book as a Site of Contemplation. Of all these studies visually articulated in the form of the book, it is that last that resonates its true meaning. In a New Media Age of instant and continuous communication where interaction and animation occupy the body, mind and mind and the soul, the book can be a respite, a haven and a site of contemplation that, in an ever changing world, returns us to the centre in the stable pages of the book as a material object.

Plato’s techne tou biou, ‘the craft of life,’ requires us to pay attention to art and art is that which invites us into contemplation (Moore 1992). Art, Thomas Moore writes, intensifies the presence of the world and can arrest our attention, “an important service to the soul” (Moore 1992:286). Living artfully requires us to pause, to take time, for in taking time with things Moore reminds us, we get to know things more intimately. The book waits patiently on the shelf for us to find time to attend to it and will do so time and again. The book may be a residual artefact but something of beauty always remains in an object when its function has diminished (ibid). As the Internet, the World Wide Web and the television screen dominate our daily lives, objects like the book can resurrect as art and its true reveal its true nature, Something remains of beauty in a thing when its function has departed. Soul is then revealed, as though it had been hidden for years under well-oiled functioning. Soul is not about function, it is about beauty and form and memory (Moore 1992:276-277).

Beauty is defined by Moore not as pleasantness, but rather “as the quality in things that invites absorption and contemplation” (Moore 1992 279). This is the beauty of the book. In the Conceptual Framework constructed from the findings of this study, a book is a site of contemplation where a palimpsest of design can also make it an object of desire. The models and book objects displayed in the exhibition Palimpsest Readings, have been an exploration of this framework and a

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quest to reframe the book as an aesthetic object, in the words of Thomas Moore, “to pay attention to form as well as function, to decay as well as invention, and to quality as well as efficiency” (Moore 1992:277). The future of the book in a New Media World is assured in the hands of designers who appreciate the history, architecture, semiotics and technology of the book’s design that go towards making it a palimpsest reading in the New Media Age. (See Appendix II for a full photographic documentation of the exhibition).

Whoever held the piece with the X would know everything and not need the other pieces.

UMBERTO ECO 2001: 453

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Chapter 8

C O N C L U S I O N

C O M P L I N E The hour around 6.00pm before retiring

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PALIMPSEST READINGS

In my periods of optimism I dream of a computer generation which, compelled to read a computer screen, gets acquainted with reading from a screen, but at a certain moment feels unsatisfied and looks for a different, more relaxed, and differently-committing form of reading.

UMBERTO ECO 1996:300

Introduction Reading the book in this an age of computer mediation is now, without a doubt, a different reading experience to that of William Morris. For Morris, who said, “I should mention that ever since I could remember I was a great devourer of books" (Naylor 1996:15) the act of reading was assuredly a ‘more relaxed, and differently- committing form of reading,’ one that an avid modern reader like Umberto Eco most obviously shares today. But when, as Eco laments, a generation is compelled to read a computer screen, the book is freed too take on a new significance as an art form, an object of contemplation, a site of reflection and an object of desire. Designers who are conscious of how new media technologies will realize that the computer screen is fast becoming “new cognitive paradigm” of contemporary culture (Birkerts 1994:153). This investigation into the effects of new media technology on the architecture of the book, set out to establish a Conceptual Framework in response to this new cognitive paradigm, from which innovative, and possibly even daring, design solutions might be derived for books as material objects in the New Media Age.

A Design Palimpsest : Research Results The research began by asking, what effects have new media technologies had on the architecture of the book? How do these effects impact on the future of book design, and how will the book maintain its cultural value as a material object? In answering these questions the study revealed how new media technologies, from the folding of the scroll to the invention of printing and digital imaging, had a significant effect on the design and production of the book, to the extent that these

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technological effects are deeply embedded in the history of book design. Beginning with the idea of the book in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, and manifested in the illuminated manuscript form of the codex, an historical analysis disclosed how the structural basis of the book, dictated by the technology of parchment and pen, formed the foundation of the book’s architecture. Gutenberg took the model of the illuminated manuscript and emulated it using a hand-operated machine. Mechanical reproduction then dictated the book’s form and design as the book became smaller in size, greater in textual content, black and white colour, and constructed of paper instead of parchment. The design of the Venetian Master Printers of the early Renaissance became the design model for centuries, from the Gutenberg Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, when William Morris, in an attempt to ‘rescue’ the book from declining design standards, was compelled to return to the 15th century model and reinvigorate book design with his works of the Kelmscott Press. Here he utilised both traditional fifteenth century techniques and new nineteenth century mechanical technologies.1

Once again we are in the midst of another revolution, one that claims to do away with the book as an architectonic object and replace it with the architectural, virtual space of digital mediation. However, the findings of this research study revealed that the book will not be superseded by the computer, but will remain as one of two reading sites now inextricably linked by the digital technology of their production. Although a new medium tries to absorb the old medium entirely, the very act of remediation, whether that of print remediating the manuscript, or the screen remediating the page, “ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced” (Bolter & Grusin 2000:47). The book is now measured against the newer reading site of digital technology, as electronic forms of communication redefine cultural values inherited from centuries of print mediation.

1 William Morris, as many have claimed, was not averse to using technology in aiding design, so long as it improved rather than degraded the quality of the work. In his last project he demonstrated his willingness to utilize the new media technology of the time, photography to design and produce new typefaces and in the photographic methods used to produce the engraved illustrations used in the production of the Kelmscott Chaucer.

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The printing press was revolutionary but it transformed the only communication technology of the time-handwriting. The computer on the other hand is transforming all media, including the printing press and as such is a multimodal reading site. It is not replacing the book but it is creating a new reading of it. Lamentations of loss, the loss of orality (Ong1991), the loss of the literacy (Goines 1999), the loss of the book (Birkerts 1994), do not serve us nearly as well as an evaluation of what is gained. As Gary Frost reminds us, the advance of technology is a common human preoccupation but the book arts enable a person to sweep across technologies and appreciate their inter-related and unique qualities, While contemporary digital technologies breed six month cycles of obsolescence, the book arts simply integrate all advances into a much larger source. At the same time the book arts enable the constructive interweaving of technologies that would otherwise be isolated by arbitrary partitions of time and culture (Frost 2002:f).

Researchers must take into account the fact that manuscript and printed books are not merely precursors of future media, they are “the mechanisms of separates knowledge systems” (Frost 2002a:4). The book’s function as a media technology retains much of the protocols, structures and meanings of those precursor media in the reading of the book as a system of signs. The effects of new media technologies on the architecture of the book are deeply embedded in both its design and the cultural memory of Western culture. This is largely due to the constructive interweaving of technologies throughout the book’s history, and an analysis of that history yielded the construction of a Conceptual Framework that interprets the book as a palimpsest reading of design.

The Renaissance manuscripts were evidence of how a technology that becomes outmoded tends to become an artform. Gutenberg’s Bible demonstrated how a new technology proves its worth by imitating the capabilities of the technology it was designed to replace. The illuminators of the manuscript took to imitating some of the attributes of the new media in their old media designs. Once the technology has proven itself, it becomes the dominant technology and new capabilities are explored (West 1990). Throughout this research project we have witnessed a palimpsest of this phenomenon in the design of the book. With the introduction of the new medium of digital technology, the printed book is being

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designed as more of an artform. The iBook, like the Gutenberg Bible, imitates the attributes of the printed page and the printed page responds by imitating the attributes of the screen. As the domination of the new technology changes cultural perceptions of the book, the quality of their design will be a determining factor as to which books will be noticed, read and saved (West 1990).

Books in a New Media Age : Research Implications Today new media technologies are woven into the fabric of the book through the processes used to produce them as a material artefact. In a New Media Age, as Kress and Leeuwen have indicated, the multi-layered communicative practices of new media technology include “discursive practices, as well as, production and interpretive practices, and even design and/or distribution practices”(Kress 2001:40). This can be taken to mean that the introduction of new media into the culture must therefore, according to this theory, have an impact on all other modes and media. By including the electronic screen and new media interactivity in the communication ensemble, new ‘semiotic readings’ are initiated (Kress 2001). The dominance of the written word over the symbolic, iconic language of the image was merely subsumed rather than eradicated. Now, in the new media of world of digital technology, the reading site of popular culture is fast becoming the computer interface, and as the central meeting place becomes the ‘cathedral’ of cyberspace, perhaps the more sacred, contemplative space in our lives, may now be found in the book.

The implication of this research for the design of the book shows that, by adding content to a message through an engagement with the book’s materiality and the application of a critical and sensitive interpretation of texts, designers can connect the book to a wider field of cultural references, and, in Max Bruinsma’s words, “rescue meaning from the crushing weight of data-avalanche” (Bruinsma 1198:3). Contemporary graphic designers must communicate more than mere messages, because the linking of messages to the rest of the world requires that the designer needs a more editorial point of view, as we have seen with Mark Gowing’s Hopscotch Compendium and John Barnbrook’s design for Damien Hirst’s

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monograph. Today designers need to be aware that although books were once seen as mere containers of texts, they must now be conceived as material objects conveying other texts and systems of signs, a structure consisting of many elements, with one of these being a written text (Kilma 1998:32). Now books requires a different approach to reading for, as this study shows, new media technologies create specific reading conditions. In a New Media Age, a new art of the book must recognise “the ability every man [and woman] possesses for understanding and creating signs and systems of signs” (ibid:43).

New media technologies are enabling the design of future books to become the illuminated reading sites of the twenty first century. Reading from the screen is an active and often participatory activity, where texts are in constant and instantaneous motion, making the screen a reading site of interaction. The book, on the other hand, presents a fixed and unchanging text, one that is a reliable, undeviating and ordered site of contemplation. New media technologies are enabling the designers of future books to create the illuminated reading sites of the twenty first century and palimpsest readings in a New Media Age. Digital technology does not bring an end to the traditional book, it merely ministers to the rewriting of its future.

Electronic Illumination : Future Research The rapid development of digital technology has not only made it difficult to guarantee the currency of this research, but the currency of anything, including the book. The intention of these chapters was to assemble suggestive evidence, and form a conceptual framework for thinking about the book rather than to write a prescription of how the book should be designed. Further research is needed to truly determine the purpose and relevance of electronic’ books’ and rather than imitate the printed book, to develop the medium to its greater potential.2

2 It is the view of this researcher that the graphic potential of computers has not yet developed to take full advantage of the medium, that is, the architectural nature of an electronic environment. As Stephen Johnson argues, “The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they're not tied to the old analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world, of course, but they're also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-

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Computer games like Myst and interactive environments like The Book of Living Senses are examples of this potential. This study has not addressed the materiality of electronic media, but Katherine Hayles brings attention to this potential in her studies on the materiality of electronic texts.3 However, quantitative research into user expectations of the computer as a ‘book’ medium would be useful in determining the worth of the term ‘electronic books’ and even suggest a new and more germane uses for this new media space.

Further research into the relevance of the book’s materiality in the interpretation of texts, will be advanced by graphic designers who are challenged to create books as objects a computer generation will desire, not only as the vessels of knowledge they have been in the past, but once more as valuable artefacts of art craft and design, as sites of aesthetic pleasure and objects of desire. While studies of artists’ books abound, there is scope for further research into the practices of graphic designers like Mark Gowing cross the boundaries between the art, craft, and the design of the book.

Towards a Future of the Book : Conclusions This thesis ends where it began, with the future of the book. The design of the book as a contemporary object is anchored in the past technologies of its production. Far from heralding the end of the book, new media technology is making the design and production of the book object easier and cheaper to design and produce, and thus more available than ever before in history. When Frollo, in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, held the ‘new media’ printed book in his hand in Notre Dame Cathedral and exclaimed, “this will kill that” he was, as we have seen, partly correct. While the book did end the role of the church as the centre of medieval knowledge, it took that knowledge out into the world where it thrives to this day. Now computer technology is the new media we hold world equivalent whatsoever...Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility” (Johnson 1997:61). 3 Hayles argues that we fail to account for the many “signifying components of electronic texts,” such as “sound, animation, motion, video, kinaesthetic involvement, and software functionality” and that this also represents the materiality of a text (Hayles 2002 :20). This statement indicates there is a need for further research into significance of the materiality in computer interface design on the reading of electronic texts.

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in our hands as the centre of post-modern knowledge is rapidly emerging in the architecture of the World Wide Web. The cathedral and the manuscript, the computer and the book, two vibrant and interconnected connected reading sites form a palimpsest in this New Media Age.

At the close of this thesis, forecasts about the end of the book may already seem as outdated as the historical precedents of photography killing painting, or movies killing theatre for these proclamations inevitably lose their currency once the new technology is no longer in control of a privileged few (Nunberg 1995). With most households in possession of a computer the ‘mystery’ of the new media is made known to all. Like Gutenberg’s printing press, the desktop computer has revolutionised the world by giving access to all forms of knowledge, including the printed book, substantiated by the fact that Amazon.Com, one of the most successful sites of World Wide Web, does not deliver electronic books, but physically present, printed books as material objects, that originated with Gutenberg’s ‘old media’ printing press. In the Supplement to the Chronicle in the year 1458, the author, Pilippus Bergomensis extols the virtues of that exciting new media technology when he wrote, Surely there can be nothing on earth more worthy, more laudable, more useful, more divine, or more holy [than the printing press]. In praise of this a certain one of us devised these verses: Oh blessed printing, to be remembered of our century. Both languages are made resplendent by him who invented thee. Nearly everything which thought brought into the world was previously lacking Now at little cost anyone may become learned.

No doubt the same approbation might be found in twenty first century computer magazines, where we also find concerns about the ‘end of print’ and the ‘death of the book’ continue to be pondered. In the latest Australian Macworld, writing about the latest developments in computer technology, the editors admit they still feel unsure about the future of their print media magazine, and remain “intrigued” as to whether indeed print will exists at all in 2015 (Powell, Smith and Iverson 2005:28). This brings us back to the motivation of this research and the ongoing debate about the future of the book. So, when Neil Gershenfeld claims that “story of the book is not coming to and end, it’s really just beginning”

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(Gershenfeld1999:13) I would add that in fact it is really just continuing as a palimpsest reading, where contemporary designers are rewriting this newest text of book design over many old texts erased and rewritten by the monastic scribes of the Middle Ages, the fifteenth century master printers, William Morris and now by graphic designers like Barbara Hodgson and Bruce Mau. The latest new media technology has not brought an end to the book it is helping to rewrite its future. It is not the end of the book it is only and end of this thesis.

Only for you, children of doctrine and learning, have we written this work. Examine this book, ponder the meaning we have dispersed in various places and gathered again; what we have concealed in one place, we have disclosed in another, that it may be understood by your wisdom.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia, 3, 65

UMBERTO ECO 2001: V

223 FIGURES FIGURES FOUNDATIONS

READING THE CATHEDRAL

FIG 1 God as the great architect, measures the world in an illumination from a Bible Moralisee, Riems.

FIG 2 Interior view of the Saint - Chapelle, Paris, featuring the Gothic innovation of diaphanous stone walls designed to draw worshippers towards an apprehension of Suger’s vera lux.

FIG 3,4 Stone tracery enabled a ‘new light’ to saturate the interior of the cathedral through the stained glass window. An ever changing play of light on stonetracery and walls created a “virtual world” space of the heavenly city.

223 FIGURES FOUNDATIONS

READING THE CATHEDRAL

FIG. 5 The tympanum in the West portal of Chartres Cathedral shows Christ surrounded by the four symbols of the evangelists. Beneath their feet are the Apostles and angels and elders watch over the scene in the archivolts. The elongated statues flanking the doorway can be identified as representatives of the Old Testament by an “air of nobility about them (Binding2002). The portals spoke “a language everyone was... capable of understanding” (Duby 1995:119), for grouped together these stone statues and friezes convey a symbolic narrative of the Christian faith.

FIG 6 The logic of the cathedral, built according to Scholastic ideology meant that “the reader is led, step by step, from one proposition to another and always kept informed as to the progress of this process” (Panofsky 1968: 33).

The diagram at left clearly shows the building of an architectural ‘argument’ where the the whole is divided into partes which are then divided into smaller partes; partes into membra, ‘questions or distinctions’, and these divided once more into articuli and so on.

The clearstory of Sainte - Denis displays the innovative of medieval technology, the ‘window wall,’ a pinnacle in the develop- ment of a ‘new medial space’ created in the design of the ‘great book in stone.’

234 FIGURES CONSTRUCTION

READING THE MANUSCRIPT

FIG 1 The painted surfaces of the stone carvings in Sainte-Chapelle indicate the original intentions of the Gothic architects. Although today bare stone is seen as the very expression of masonry art, colour was of paramount importance to the creation of a mystical space reflected in the sacred artefacts and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

FIG 2 The rich and splendid “treasure binding” covers of some illuminated manuscripts, not only protected their parchment pages but also represented the prestige and wealth of their owners. The Gospels of Otto pictured above, survives today due to the fact they these books have always been ‘treasured’.

FIG 4 Striving to achieve the vera lux that brightened the minds of worshippers in the cathedral, manuscript paintings were embellished with gold leaf and which was burnished until it glowed. Gold leaf was laid over a bed of gesso, so that light would be reflected from the raised surfaces of the page. Where the luminosity of stained glass was derived from external light transmitted through it, in an illuminated manuscript the highly polished and reflective backgrounds of gold adjacent to their saturated colours “strive for a similarly brilliant effect” (Kren 1997:41).

225 FIGURES CONSTRUCTION

READING THE MANUSCRIPT

FIG. 3 The Tree of Jesse is a genealogical symbol that made its first appearance in one of the St - Denis windows. This inspired the layout of the page of a 10th century illuminated manuscript in Saint- Matial, Limoges (Kren 1997).

This three-dimensional stone frieze illustrating the crucifixion scene is depicted in the two-dimensional frame of its illuminated counterpart in theBonmont Psalter. These images reflect an intertextuality of symbolic imagery between the architecture of the cathedral and that of the book.

226 FIGURES CONSTRUCTION

READING THE BOOK

FIG 5 The translucent quality of the manuscript parchment meant that the text and images on the back of the sheet showed through, particularly if held to the light. This is a factor that Marshall McLuhan’s would later see as a demonstration of the aura of the ‘light through’ nature of electronic media.

FIG 6 Illuminated in the thirteenth century this manuscript demonstrates the framework of page layout that would determine the design of the book into the present century.

The four columns of script were reproduced in Gutenberg’s 42 Line bible as were the proportions of the page margins. The design of the double spread at left completed the format design that would later inspire William Morris in the19th century. In this way a blueprint for the modern book originated in the illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages.

227 FIGURES CONSTRUCTION

READING THE BOOK

FIG 7 With the invention of the printing press the book was taken out of the hands of the scribes and literally left ‘them in the margins’ of Gutenberg’s Bible. The pages were printed before being hand illuminated and then bound.

FIG 8,9 Below a printed sheet awaits hand decoration and to the right is the emergent print model of the 16th century incunabula.

228 FIGURES DECONSTRUCTION

READING THE SCREEN

FIG 1 The ‘stained glass windows’ of a 21st century electronic ‘cathedral’ shine in the screens of the very personal computer.

FIG 2 Bill Gates displays a seemingly encyclopaedic amount of information now stored on CD ROMs or DVDs taking the burden of information storage from the pages of the book to pixels on a screen.

FIG 3 The landscape orientation of the computer screen, opposes the predominantly portrait format of the book in a new multidmodal reading site.

229 FIGURES DECONSTRUCTION

READING THE IBOOK

FIG 4,5 The iBook laptop computer utilizes to the codex form of the book seen here in the highly successful promotional collateral and packaging design. Large full bleed images demonstrate the computer being treated as a book, hel under the arm, opening the cover to read the content, with a brand name taking advantage of a long established relationship between the object of the book and its meaning. Here we see a new technology to taking on the guise of the old, reminiscent of the design strategies used by Gutenberg when he printed his 42 line Bible.

FIG 6,7 Project Gutenberg seeks to make all texts available to everyone through the ‘new’ media stained glass windows’ of the personal computer interface and access to the World Wide Web.

230 FIGURES RECONSTRUCTION

READING SITES

FIG 1 Print imitates the web pages of screen in the paper ‘interface’ of USA Today.

FIG 2 Gold foil, embossing, matte and gloss varnish and full colour pictures can now even be found in the ubiquitous paperback, highlighting a trend towards embellishment that sees the aesthetic of the medieval illuminated manuscript returning to the design of the contemporary book. Design UK uses debossing to add ‘feel appeal.’

231 FIGURES RECONSTRUCTION

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

FIG 3 The Sensualist, authored and illustrated by a graphic designer, draws on historical references, contemporary design practices and a new media turn towards the the image, in the creation of a palimpsest reading in the vis-verbal narrative of a “new media” book. Sensuality is made apparent in the design of the book with its soft cream pages, sensitively constructed imagery and satin paper jacket. This book has been designed to appeal to the senses.

FIG 4 One of the significant features of the book’s design is the use of past print media practices, such as the tipping in of folded layers of anato- mical diagrams that adorned many pre-war ecyclopaedias. Hodgson’s book also contains a metafiction of the book in her depictions of old books altered to hide potions, torn pages used in collage illustrations and old 16th century texts draw on the material qualities of the book as being essential to its reading adding another rich layer of interpretation to the narrative.

232 FIGURES RECONSTRUCTION

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

FIG 5 Gould’s Book of Fish carries the mark of traditional marbling,16th century page design and traces of the manuscript in the translucent revelation of the ghost of a fish printed on the other side of the page. The book’s traditional quarter binding (the spine covered in cloth, the boards covered in paper), is given a contemporary context by the radical departure of the text alignment of the title running vertically up the cover. The varied colours of the text are the first hint of the changing colours of the texts within.

233 FIGURES PALIMPSEST

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Fig 1 Bruce Mau’s design and research interests are evident in his design for the book, S.M.L.XL., a large and weighty volume in both its physicality and its content. Designed with Rem Koolhaas for his architectural practice, Mau excels in mastering the art of the visual essay in this extraordinary visual epic of provocative images.

234 FIGURES CASE STUDIES

DESIGNERS’ BOOKS

The appeal of a small hand illuminated book of prayers, the medieval Books of Hours, made it one of the first books to have a popular following and inspired an expanding and profitable market. They were not official Church service books but compendiums made by secular booksellers to suit the whims of their buyers. Small and intimate, they were designed to delight the senses. The examples represented on this page are representa- tive of 21st century ‘Book of Hours’.

FIG 1. I Ching; the perfect companion.

FIG 2. Made in France in 1500, a Book of Hours is artfully wrapped in a velvet chemise. Felt ; a more contemporary book , also comes wrapped its own “chemise.”

FIG 3. Skin ; a contemplation on the surface of things.

241 FIGURES CASE STUDIES

DESIGNERS’ BOOKS

FIG 4. Body Piercing juxtaposes paper ‘leather’ skin and a metal ring in a book about piercing the body, fully engaging the materiality of the book in an image that appears to pierce the page.

Fig 5. Spoon uses metal to shape the body of the book in a silver wave of stainless steel. As a material with industrial connotations, it it announce the industrial designer content.

FIG 6 The rich, decorative, enigmatic books of Nick Bantock, hark back to those of the Renaissance illuminators as Bantok makes an artform of the book.

242 FIGURES CASE STUDIES

BARNBROOK & HIRST

FIG 7 The three-dimensional architectural space of this book and the density of information, in fold-outs, pop-ups, pop-outs, constructed spaces and vivid imagery make for constant surprise and anticipation that could place the book in the genre of the game. Reading this book is a truly “multimodal interactive” experience.

Image is text and text is image in the large full bleed displays throughout the book. Every turn of the page reveals yet another startling, amusing, intriguing encounter. Like a computer game, it tempts the reader through the book,with ever increasing layers of visual and verbal discourse. The textual narrative can be read by following a linear path but any path can be taken through the ‘rooms’ of this book. Hirst enjoys this active participation in his art, whether in the architectural space of the gallery or the architectonic space of the book.

243 FIGURES CASE STUDIES

MARK GOWING

FIG 8 The Hopscotch Compendium is “stuffed” so full it is “bursting at the seams.” The materiality of this book is obviously quite literal but in ‘reading’ the content an engagement with the narratives of the films represented in this way, are experiential interpretations of their essence rather than a mere intellectual view of their form. The disassembled pop-corn container at the beginning of the book, sets the book in context. A seamstress’ story told through fabric, a bird’s through a feather, ticket stubs, “bullet” holes, a plastic flag, a map, all relay the content of these films through an arrest of the eye, the ear, the nose, and of course, the hand.

In this unusual solution to a fairly usual graphic design problem, Mark Gowing assumes the role of content editor, informa- tion gatherer and interpreter. Taking one form of media, film and translating it into another form,print, Mark Gowing has recognised the intrinsic contribution the materiality of the book makes, by creating a reading experience that leaves an impression beyond words.

244 FIGURES FIGURES PALIMPSEST

PALIMPSEST READINGS

FIG 5 PALIMPSEST READINGS HANDMADE PAPER, PORCELAIN, ACRYLIC, ALUMINIUM MOUNTS 250 X 250 X 20 MM

FIG 6 READING MATERIALS MUSLIN, WOOD, PORCELAIN, METALMESH, POLYPROPYLENE, VARIOUS TAPES AND THREADS 125 X 125 X 50 MM

236 FIGURES PALIMPSEST

PALIMPSEST READINGS

FIG 7 ARIADNE’S THREAD 200 X 200 X 300MM STAINLESS STEEL MESH, RUBBER, SILVER WIRE, GOLD METALLIC THREAD.

FIG 8 A STITCH IN TIME HANDMADE PAPER, RIBB LINEN AND METALLIC THREADS 25 BOOKS 60 X 45 X 10MM,

FIG 9 CODEX : FORM I CARDBOARD, BOOK CLOTH, PAPER, LINEN THREAD 250 X 250 X 10 MM

237 FIGURES PALIMPSEST

PALIMPSEST READINGS

FIG 10 CODEX : FORM II ACRYLIC, RUBBER, LINEN THREAD, CORRUGATED CARDBOARD 300 X 350 X 100MM

FIG 11 BOOK JACKET : CODEX 1000MM X 1000MM HANDMADE PAPERS, GOLD LEAF, MUSLIN, METALLIC THREAD, FOUND OBJECTS

FIG 12 BOOK JACKET : CODE X WATERMARKED PAPER, METALLIC THREAD, COMPUTER COMPONENTS, METALLIC PAINT 1000 MM X 1000 MM,

238 FIGURES PALIMPSEST

PALIMPSEST READINGS

FIG 13 READING SITE I : THE ROSE FOUND OBJECTS, GOLD LEAF, LUCITE, LASER ETCHING, STAINLESS STEEL 4 CODICES 130 X 126 X 70 MM

FIG 14 READING PATH CONCERTINA BOOK, DIGITAL PRINT 150 X 3000 MM

239 FIGURES PALIMPSEST

PALIMPSEST READINGS

FIG 15 READING SITE II : THE PENDULUM MOULDED ACRYLIC, LASER ETCHING 7 SCREENS VARYING SIZES,

FIG 16 SITES OF CONTEMPLATION ACRYLIC, HANDMADE PAPER, DIGITAL PRINTS, FOUND OBJECTS 8 X 150 X 125 20 MM,

240 B I B L I O G R A P H Y

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University Press, Baltimore & London. McCourt, A. (2004) A Digital Reality Check, Print 21, p20. McEoin, V. S. E. (2003) A Massive Change. The brave new world of design? Vol.182, p034-035. McLuhan, M. (1965) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. McLuhan, M. (1996) The Medium is the Massage, Hardwired, San Francisco. McLuhan, M. (2001) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, reprinted by Routledge, London. McMurtrie, D. C. (1989) The Book. The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, Bracken Books, London. Meadows, S. (2002) Pause and Effect: The art of Interactive Narrative, New Riders, Indianapolis. Meagher, D. (1999) On the Cutting Edge, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald, Consolidated Press, Sydney, pp4,5,8. Meggs, P. B. (2000) A History of Graphic Design, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York. Mermoz, G. (2003) Beyond Looking: Towards Reading, Baseline, Vol. 43, p33-36. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1986) Iconology: image Text, Ideology, University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Chicago and London. Mitchell, W.J.T. (1995) City of Bits, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England Moore, T. (1992) Care of the Soul, Piatkus, London. Naughton, J. (2000) A Brief History of the Future:The Origins of the Internet, Phoenix, London. Naylor, G. E. (1996) William Morris by Himself: Designs and Writings, Little, Brown and Company, London. Nix, K. (2004) National Artists’ Book Form, Textile, Vol.23, p40. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1975) Meaning in Western Architecture, Studio Vista, London. Nunberg, G. E. (1996) The Future Of the Book, University of California, Berkley Los Angeles. O'Donnell, J. (2000) Avatars of the Word. From Papyrus to Cyberspace., Harvard University Press, Cambridge. O'Donnell, K. (2003) Postmodernism, Lion Publishing, Oxford. Ortoll, D. B. S. (2002) Schoeffer & Gutenberg Mind the Map Conference paper, Istanbul, pp1-12. Osbon, D. K. (Ed.) (1991) Reflections on the Art of Living; A Joseph Campbell Companion, HarperCollins, New York. Owen, W. (1998) A Connoisseur Among the Critics, Eye, Vol.7,pp75-76. Panofsky, E. (1968) Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Meridian Books/The World Publishing Company, New York & Cleveland. Papadakis, A. C. (ed) (1987) The Post-Modern Object, Art and Design, 3. Paul, A. (2000) Girlosophy: A Soul Survival Kit, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Peterson, W. S. (Ed.) (1982) The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Art of the Book, University of California Press, Los Angeles. Pare, R. (1996) Tadao Ando:Colours of Light, Phaidon, London. Petroski, H. (2003) The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Faber and Faber, London, Boston.

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Phillpot, C. and Lauf C. (1998) Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books, Distributed Art Publishers Inc., New York. Pierard, S. (2004a) Conversation at Sabine Pierard’s Bindery, Sydney, 10/10/04. Pierard, S (2004b) Bookbinding Exhibitions Australia, Landscape exhibition catalogue. Poole, L. (2001) Print: How and When You Want It, Tecprint, pp44-46. Popper, K. (2002) The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge, London & New York. Postman, N. (1987) Amusing Ourselves to Death, Methuen, London. Postman, N. (1993) Technolopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books, New York. Poyner, R. (1999) The Designer as Architect, Eye, Vol.8, pp40-43. Poynor, R. (1998) Design Without Boundaries. Visual Communication in Transition, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London. Poynor, R. (2004) W.G. Sebald: Writing with Pictures Design Observer, accessed 12/3/05. http://www.designobserver./com/archives/000181.html Project Gutenberg (2002) Official Website, accessed 25/6/2002. http://www.gutenberg.org Puglisi, L. P. (1999) HyperArchitecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age, Birkhauser, Basel Boston Berlin. Research Buzz (2005) Google planning to Index Entire Libraries, accessed 7/2/05. http://www.reserach buzz.org/google_planning_to_index_entire_libraries.shtml Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (1998) Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large Office of Metropolitan Architecture, The Monacelli Press, New York. Rexer, L. (2002) Revisioning Visionaire, Graphis, 342, Nov/Dec, pp110-127. Robinson, D. (1982) William Morris Edward Burne-Jones and the Kelmscott Chaucer, Gordon Fraser, London. Rowley, S. E. (1997) Craft and Contemporary Theory, Allan & Unwin, Sydney. Sarno, E. T. (1996) Hypertext, The Weekend Australian, ‘Syte’ section, October. Schmitt, G. (1999) Information Architecture: Basis and Future of CAAD, Birkhauser, Basel Boston Berlin. Schubert, V. (2002/03) Spicers Paperpoint School, Desktop, pp6,12. Schwemer-Scheddin, Y. (1999) From Notebook to Hyperbook, Eye, Vol.8, pp57-63. Seaward, J. (2003) Labyrinths and Mazes: The Definitive Guide to Ancient and Modern Traditions, Gaia Books, London. Sebestyen, G. (2003) New Architecture and Technology, Architectural Press, Oxford. Sellers, M. R. S. (1998) The Museum of the Ordinary, Eye, Vol.7, pp32-35. Shaughnessy, A. (2000) Not Browsing but Reading, Eye, Vol.9, p59. Smeijers, F. (1996) Counterpunch: Making type in the sixteenth century, designing typefaces now, Hyphen Press, London. Smith, K. A. (1994) Structure of the Visual Book, Smith Books, New York. Smith, K. A. (1997) Non-Adhesive Binding Vol 1, Smith Books, New York. Smith, K. A. (1997) Non-Adhesive Binding Vol 3, Smith Books, New York. Smith, P. (1996) The Whatness of Bookness, or What is the Book, The Book Arts Web, accessed 6/9/04, http://www.philobiblon.com/bookness.htm Sorzano, R. (2005) Nurturing the Handmade, Artlink, Vol 25 No 1.

232 B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Stappmans, V. and McEoin, E. (2003) A Massive Change. The brave new world of design? Desktop Vol. 182 June, p 034-035. Stoicheff, P. (2005), The Body of the Page: Material Dimensions, accessed 11/3/05. http://www.lights.com/~/muri/pages2/contents/parchment.html Snyder, J. (1988) Medieval Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 4th -14th Century, Harry Abrams, New York. Sonesson, G. (2004) The Internet Semiotics Encyclopaedia, Department of Semiotics, Lund University, accessed 16/3/04. http://www.arthist.lu.se/kultsem/encyclo/visual_semiotics,html Sontag, S. (Ed.) (2000) A Roland Barthes Reader, Vintage, London. Spool, J. M. (1999) Web Site Usability: A Designers Guide, Morgan Faufmann, San Francisco, SanDiego, New York, Boston, London, Sydney, Tokyo. Strauss, A. and Corbin ,J. (1998) Basics of Qualitative Research. Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi. Steinberg, S. H. (1996) Five Hundred Years of Printing, The British Library & Oaknoll Press, London. Stewart, S. (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham and London. Stokstad, M. (1988) Medieval Art, Harper & Row, New York. Strachan, G. (2003) Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space, Floris Books, Edinburough112gh. Swanson, G. (Ed.) (2000) Graphic Design and Reading, Allworth, New York. Sweet, F. (1998) Alessi: Art and Poetry, Thames & Hudson, London. Tafuri, M. (1987) The Sphere and the Labyrinth, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, London. Tawney, R.H.(1978) History and Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Taylor, A. (2005) The Legacy of the Medieval Ordinatio, accessed 11/3/05. http://www.lights.com/~muri/pages2/contents/medieval_ordinatio.html Taylor, M. C. & Saarinen, E. (1994) Imagologies. Media Philosophy, Routledge, London, New York, Thackara, J. (Ed.) (1988) Design after Modernism: Beyond the Object, Thames & Hudson, London. Thomas, K. (Ed.) (2000) Felt, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stutttgart. Throsby, M. (2001) Throsby/Flannagan radio interview, Australian Broadcasting Commision, accessed June 8, 2004, Sydney. Toffler, A. (1979) Future Shock, Pan Books, London. Toose, D. (2004) Staring Role, Sydney Morning Herald/Icon, Consolidated Press, Sydney, February, p14. Tosh, J. (1991) The Pursuit of History: Aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history, Longmans, London and New York. Toshiba (2004) Do You Prefer to Think in Ink? Sydney Morning Herald, Consolidated Press, Sydney, March, p37. Travers, M. (2000) Progamming with Agents: Theories of Metaphor, PHD Thesis, http://mevard.mit.edu/people/mt/thesis/mt-thesis-2.html accessed 1/6/00. Trumbo, Jean (1997) The Spatial Environment in Multimedia Design: Physical, Conceptual,

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Perceptual, and behavioural Aspects of Design Space, in Design Issues Victor Margolin (ed) MIT Press, Massachusetts. Tschichold, J. (1995) The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design, Hartley & Marks, London. Turner, G. W. (Ed.) (1989) The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Turner, S. (1998) The Book of Fine Paper, Thames & Hudson, London. Valance, A. (1986) The Life and Work of William Morris, Studio Editions, London. Vision, A. (2000-2004), Digital Watermarking, AlpVision, accessed 7/9/04 http://www.alpvision.com/watermarking.html Vitruvius (1960) The Ten Books on Architecture, Dover Publications, New York. Wardell, S. (1997) Slipcasting, G&B Arts International, London. Wang, L. G. D. (2002) Architectural Research Methods, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York. Weiner, D. (2001) Twist and Turn, I.D., Vol.48, p96. Wertheim, M. (1999) The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Doubleday, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto, New York, London. West, S. (1990) Working with Style. Traditional and Modern approaches to Layout and Typography, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York. Wenz, Karen, Cybertextspace, http://65.107.211.206/cpace/ht/wenz/ accessed 17/05/03. Williams, N. (1993) Paperwork, Phaidon, London. Wilson, E. B. (1976) Bibles and Bestiaries, Oxford University Press, New York. Wolfe, R. J. (1991) Marbled Paper, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Wozencroft, J. (1994) The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, Thames and Hudson, London. Zelman, S. (2001) Graphic Design and Reading, Allworth, New York. Zorozoli, U. E. G. B. (1961) A Pictorial History of Inventions: from plough to polaris, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London. Zurbrugg, N. (1993) The Parameters of Postmoderism, Routledge, London.

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F I G U R E R E F E R E N C E S

Chapter 2 Figure 1. Binding, G. (2002) High Gothic, Taschen, Koln, p28. Figure 2. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p163. Figure 3. Binding, G. (2002) High Gothic, Taschen, Koln, p103. Figure 4. Binding, G. (2002) High Gothic, Taschen, Koln, p48. Figure 5. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p163. Figure 6. Binding, G. (2002) High Gothic, Taschen, Koln, p117. Harris, C.M. (ed) (1977) Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture, Dover, New York, p257.

Chapter 3 Figure 1. Binding, G. (2002) High Gothic, Taschen, Koln, p53. Figure 2. Hamel, C. D. (1997) A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Phaidon, London, p43. Figure 3. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p33. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p31. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p184. Duby, G. (1995) Medieval Art: Europe of the Cathedrals 1140-1280, Booking International, and Geneva, p180. Figure 4. Kren, T (1997) Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts, Thames and Hudson, California, p42. Figure 5. Kren, T (1997) Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts, Thames and Hudson, California, p115. Figure 6. Hamel, C. D. (1997) A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Phaidon, London, p126. Figure 7. Eisenstein, E. (1979) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne, Front Cover. Hamel, C. D. (1997) A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Phaidon, London, p230. Figure 8. Meggs, P. B. (2000) A History of Graphic Design Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, p114. Figure 9. Meggs, P. B. (2000) A History of Graphic Design Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, p114.

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Chapter 4 Figure 1. Johnson, M. (2002) Silicon Valley, National Geographic, Vol.126 No 4, p459. Figure 2. Johnson, M. (2002) Silicon Valley, National Geographic, Vol.126 No 4, p448. Figure 3. Australian Macworld (2002) Apple Mac laptop advertisement, January. Figure 4. Apple Computer, Inc. (2001) iBook Package image, photograph 2002. Figure 5. Apple Computer, Inc. (2001) iBook Package images, photograph 2002. Figure 6. Composite image, Penelope Lee 2002. Figure 7. Australian Macworld (2002) The only thing we have a monopoly on is confidence, inside front cover, Mac OSX advertisement, January.

Chapter 5 Figure 1. USA Today (2002) http://pqasb.prarchives.com?USAToday/search.htm accessed 12.12 02. Figure 2. Eco, U. (1996) The Name of the Rose, Minerva, London. King, R (2003) Brunelleschi’s Dome, Vintage, London, cover , colour plate. Figure 3. Hodgson, B. (1998) The Sensualist, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, covers, endpapers. Figure 4. Hodgson, B. (1998) The Sensualist, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, pp26,122. Figure 5. Flanagan, R. (2001) Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, Picador, Sydney, cover, endpapers, pp139,140.

Chapter 7 Figure 1. Mau, B. (1995) S.M.L.XL. Monacxelli Press, Monacelli Press, New York. Figure 2. Sabine Pierard, Three Books, photograph, Penelope Lee 2002 . Figure 3. Adelle Outeridge and Vim de Vos, Awakening 2004 , engraved Perspex panels, sewn into a book (single sheet Coptic binding). Focus on Artists’ Books 2, Conference brochure front cover. Figure 4. Diagram drawing, Penelope Lee 2004. Figure 5 –15 Photography, John Lee 2005.

Case Studies Figure 1. Melyan, G.C. & Chu, W. (2003) I Ching: The Perfect Companion, Black Dog Publishing, New York, cover, p158. Figure 2. Hamel, C. D. (1997) A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Phaidon, London, p169. Thomas, K. (Ed.) (2000) Felt, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stutttgart, cover. Figure 3. Lupton, E. (2002) Skin, Laurence King, London. Figure 4. Lahn, A. & Dunbar, A (1998) Body Piercing, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, cover, double spread unnumbered.

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Figure 5. Arad, R. et al (2002) Spoon, Phaidon Press, London. Figure 6. Bantock, N (2001) The Gryphon. In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Is Rediscovered, Chronicle Books, San Fracisco, cover, double spread unnumbered. Figure 7. Hirst, D. (1997) i want to spend the rest of my life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always, forever, Monacelli Press, New York, Cover, pp - cccxxiv,122,38,100. Figure 8. Lum, T & Cox, F. (2003) Hopscotch Compendium 2003, Mark Gowing, Sydney, cover, double spreads unnumbered.

Often from a word or a surviving image I could recognize what the work had been. When I found, in time, other copies of those books, I studied them with love, as if destiny had left me this bequest, as if having identified the destroyed copy were a clear sign from heaven that said to me: Tolle et lege.

UMBERTO ECO 1996:500

237 E P I L O G U E

It’s my first attempt at writing…and ever since I wrote it I have carried it like an amulet. After I had filled many other parchments, sometimes day by day, I felt I was alive only because in the evening I could tell what had happened to me in the morning. Then I was content with those monthly ledgers, a few lines, to remind me of the main events… it takes time, you have to consider the events, arrange them in order, find the connections, even the least visible ones.

UMBERTO ECO : BAUDILINO pp11-12 P U B L I C A T I O N S

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS, PUBLICATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS

CONFERENCES

2001 ABP PUBLISHING CONFERENCE Australian Business & Specialist Publishers Sydney, Australia

Paper Presentation: Winning Design

2002 MIND THE MAP 3rd International Conference Design History and Design Studies Istanbul Technical University Istanbul, Turkey

Paper Presentation: Graphic Illumination in a Brave New Media World.

2003 BOOK CONFERENCE 03 The Future of the Book Common ground RMIT University Cairns, Australia

Paper Presentation: Through Looking Glass Windows. The Future of the Book Reflected in the Stained Glass Windows of the Past, and Projected through the Electronic Windows of the Present.

Published in Conference Proceedings: Book 03:The Future of the Book 2003

EXHIBITIONS

2002 A PASSION FOR PAPER Primrose Paperwork’s Retrospective Group Exhibition Mosman Regional Gallery Group exhibition

Codex : Code X 2 handmade paper ‘book jacket’ hangings

Codex : Transition Series of 5 handmade paper and acrylic ‘pages’

238 P U B L I C A T I O N S

2003 A IS 4 ART International paper exhibition Australia, Austria, America and Argentina Group Exhibition

A is for Alchemy: Iosis, Melanosis, Leucosis, Xanthosis 4 digital images on handmade paper with gold leaf and machine stitching.

2003 BOOKS OF IMAGINATION 03 Artists’ Book Exhibition Noosa Regional Gallery Group exhibition

Ariadne’s Thread Metalmesh Book Object

2004 BURSTING AT THE SEAMS Eco gallery Dank Street, Waterloo Group exhibiition

Signs of the Time Case binding book object

2004 BEA @ KINOKUNYA The Galleries Victoria George Street, Sydney Group exhibition

Signs of the Time 2 case bound book objects

Code X : Form I Moulded acrylic book object

2005 PALIMPSEST READINGS Ivan Dougherty Gallery Selwyn Street, Paddington Solo exhibition

Master of Design (Hons) Book Works

239 press space bar to Xadvance slides Appendix I SX T U D I O P R A C T I C E i l illl u m i n ua t i minato n s i ons A visual synopsis of papermaking, printmaking bookbinding Xand new media studio interrogations pr act i c e The hand is the cutting edge of the mind p r a c t i c e Jacob Bronowski A selection of practical research studies in the studios of pr act i c e PAPERMAKING : PRINTMAKING : BOOKBINDING p r a c t i c e NEW MEDIA-CERAMICS

and the development of a Concept Model

towards the design of the book

as a material object. p papera p e r p papera p e r

1 beaten rag pulp

2 pulp suspended in vat of water

3 lifting pulp onto mould

4 couching pulp onto felts p papera p e r

1 beaten rag pulp

2 pulp suspended in vat of water

3 lifting pulp onto mould

4 couching pulp onto felts

5 pressing water out of pulp

6 brushing sheets on glass to dry

7 paper after drying b bii n d i ndi n g ng Drawing on the methods of fifteenth century bookbinders, b bii n d i ndi n g ng this study was concerned with the production of the hand bound book. b bii n d i ndi n g ng

1 page sections stitched together

2 binders scrim glued to spine manila card fitted to spine

3 cover boards attached to manila card

4 covering fabric applied to the cover boards

5 text block secured to finished cover with end papers

6 completed book

new medi a n e w m e d i a Drawing on print and ceramic methods of reproduction, this study was concerned with the development of “porcelain c cere r a m i am c s ics parchment pages” as an interpretation of the old media of the printed page in the New Media of the screen. new medi a n e w m e d i a 1 underglaze ‘inks’ with solar plate

2 underglaze printed on to handmade cotton rag paper

3 printed paper coated with slip and fired, paper burns out and the print remains

4 final text printed onto cotton rag paper, coated with slip and fired the old media is now captured in the new new medi a n e w m e d i a 1 ceramic pages made with porcelain paper-clay rolled out on a plaster using card template to maintain consistency of page forms

after firing, pages assembled into sections joined together with bookbinding scrim

sections assembled and stitched together onto string and bookbinding scrim tape ceoptenmc old c o n c e p t m o d e l Drawing on the findings of the research theory and practice, ceoptenmc old this study was concerned with the production c o n c e p t m o d e l of a Concept Model for the design of the contemporary book. ceoptenmc old c o n c e p t m o d e l 1 scored and curved cardboard sheets

2 book form dampened, curved and formed around mould

3 moulded book form stands as 3D object unsupported

4 painting of moulded book covers ceoptenmc old c o n c e p t m o d e l 1 cardboard models of curved form

2 book form curved and formed around mould

3 moulded book form

4 painting of moulded book covers

5 acrylic being heat formed on moulds

6 final curved acrylic, laser etched pages Each of these studio interrogations informed o outu t c o m co e me the conceptual development and design of books as a material objects for the exhibition, Palimpsest Readings X penelope lee masterX of design (honours) 2005 press space bar to Xadvance slides Appendix II A XN E X H I B I T I O N p palimpsest a l i m p s e s t

r e a d i n g s An exhibition of design research interrogating the book as a material object in a new media age

IVAN DOUGHERTY GALLERY 2005 This exhibition presents the research interrogation and design development of three-dimensional concept models derived from the theoretical and practical research findings.

This semiotic matrix of forms represents a conceptual framework for the design of the book in a New Media Age. SPACE A : Interrogating the Book as a Material Object

A visual articulation of the Four Studio Investigations and the development of Conceptual Models towards the design of the book as a material object. Fig 5 XPalimpsest Readings

Fig 9 XCodex : Form I

Fig 6 XReading Materials

Studio Interrogations PaperX : Print : Binding : New Media

Concept Models : Fig 7 A Stitch in Time Fig 8 Ariadne’sX Thread, Fig 9 Codex : Form II

SPACE B : Reading the Book as a Material Object

The presentation of of book object concept models that visually articulate the research outcomes of the thesis, designed as a ‘reading site’

Codex : The Rose >> Code X : The Pendulum Fig 11 Book Jacket : Codex Fig 13X Reading Site I : The Rose

Fig 15 XReading Path SOUTH S t M a r y ’ s C a t h e d r a l

NORTH A u r o r a P l a c e Fig 13 Book Jacket : Code X Fig 14X Reading Site II : The Pendulum

Fig 16 XSites of Contemplation

X penelope lee masterX of design (honours) 2005