The Communications Circuit and Fanfiction

Posted on December 16, 2025 by Sierra Beggs

The communications circuit proposed by Robert Darnton flows from author, to publisher, (suppliers also come in at this point) printers, shippers, booksellers, eventually to readers (binders also come in at this point), and right back to the author with the cycle repeating each time a new piece of work is finished (Darnton Figure 1, The Communications Circuit). Within this circuit, things like legal/political sanctions, publicity, intellectual influences, and social/economic conjecture have an effect on all parts of the communications circuit (Darnton Figure 1, The Communications Circuit). But one specific part of the circuit is more difficult than the others to study, as Darnton states, “Reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit followed by books” (Darnton 74). One of the reasons is because, “Reading itself has changed over time. It was often done aloud and in groups” (Darnton 78). Nowadays, reading is seen more as a solitary activity. A person grabs a book, sits down and reads quietly by themselves. If they don’t like to annotate, then of course nobody would know their thoughts on the material. But in a group setting, people can share their thoughts and ideas on the subject material, much like in an English class that utilizes something like the Socratic method. Although, this still does not necessarily make it easy to study, as someone would either need to take notes, or be there in the group to study the readers themselves.

But with the invention of the internet and world wide web, a new medium has evolved that can help uncover the reader to author relationship, turn readers into authors, and the reader’s role within the circuit. Fanfiction is a community oriented medium that allows for readers in the communications circuit to more easily be studied because, it allows for direct discourse from fans to the original creator(s), and fans-turned-author to other fans who decide to read the fanfiction. Inherent to the culture of internet fanfiction is strengthening the reader to author connection and giving fans a voice due to the focus on communicating with others in the fandom, as well as engaging creatively within the fandom. Fanfiction adds another layer to the network. It taps into a previously hard-to-study portion of the communications circuit. And the internet makes it easy to leave one’s footprints for others to read, and react to in their own way. Both Mark Marino’s hypertext “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” and the popular fanfiction site Ao3 (Archive of Our Own) exemplify this continually evolving connection and study of the reader.

In order to start, defining fanfiction is necessary. Bronwen Thomas describes fanfiction as, “refer[ring] to stories produced by fans based on plot lines and characters from either a single source text or else a ‘canon’ of works; these fan-created narratives often take the pre-existing storyworld in a new, sometimes bizarre, direction” (Thomas 1). This can range from putting characters into alternate universes (sometimes even crossing over with other popular work’s worlds) to creating a whole new character to interact within an already existing world. A good example in Ao3 that includes character crossovers is the tag Daminette. The two names smushed together indicates a ship name (romantic relationship within the fanfiction), separating the names gives the audience Damian Wayne and Marinette Dupain-Cheng. Damian Wayne is from the popular DC universe, while Marinette Dupain-Cheng is from the Miraculous Ladybug universe. Fanfiction can be made to criticize the original work, or just because a fan thought of a cool idea within that fandom. What is also important to fanfiction is the community aspect that offers readers and creators a chance to engage directly, often through things like comments (Thomas 2). Fanfiction can also be categorized as Electronic Literature, “Works of e-lit are generally interconnected in ways that are not easily amenable to print publication, and they branch, or importantly perform on request” (Hayles 170). Fanfic ticks off basically all of these boxes, as most fanfiction sites include commenting, sometimes branching links, and are almost instantaneously available.

Now, the question is: Does Mark Marino’s text “Marginalia in the Library of Babel,” count as fanfiction? The answer is yes, it can be categorized as fanfiction. Marino has also essentially inserted his own character into the world of the library. Marino is a reader that has become an author for the sake of communicating with Borges, and others who admire Borges’s work. His work is literally titled after Borges’s short story. His character’s research in tandem with the annotations, and the home page, becomes the fanfiction itself. Marino is letting the readers see his character’s research path as a reader, which clues those who are studying the reader portion of the communications circuit into the character’s train of thought when reading the research his annotations are on. (A little meta in a way, that Marino is writing as a character both reading and writing. He is a reader writing and a writer reading, and I will be a reader writing on his work. So many never-ending mirrors.) Marino’s character also states at the bottom of his hypertext work on the home page, “Fellow traveler, tracking my steps, when you go to these places, you will see my annotations and follow them to other annotations or return here or leave your own annotations and share them with someone else” (Marino). This is a call to action for the readers to get involved in a community where they communicate with each other, and write their own annotations. His annotations are more than just his thoughts, they are often direct statements that intertwine himself with the world of Borges’s library of Babel, and other Borges’s works.

Next, someone trying to research a reader could look at Marino’s story to get a good idea as to what a reader might actually be thinking, and feeling when reading. Marino’s character’s annotations are slices of gold when it comes to studying the reader, because of the immediacy of the annotations. The character writes them as he thinks them. These annotations being online gives access to anyone with an internet connection. It is easy to surmise that the original work—”The Library of Babel”—has had a profound effect on Marino’s character. The first line of his story starts with, “It starts with Borges. It always starts with Borges, the god of our hyperlinked souls” (Marino) He seems to want to communicate with Borges that the internet is the realization of Borges’s own work; that he is in awe of Borges as a person and author, even calling Borges a god. The fact that Marino even makes this work, gives an insight into what Borges’s work means to himself personally as a reader; that it left a mark on him, and with the content in the story, it gives a glimpse into the existential doubt Borges works can induce. Existentialism as a theme runs rampant in Borges’s work. Each librarian searching the Library of Babel is finding one’s own meaning of the library itself and themselves. One of the annotations in Marino’s story read as, “Existential doubt is the archival status of all creations on the web,” and is attached to the highlighted text, “I have no idea what value this document might have” (Marino).

This is on a page concerning another one of Borges’s stories, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” If the internet is the library of Babel, and existential doubt describes the archival status of works on the web, then this is how the reader sees the works in the library, because they are one in the same. It is through these annotations that the character as a reader is trying to find themselves, and getting a grip on life in general, often pondering things such as everyone having a “personal universe,” but also adds a very down to earth note with the addition of talking about a “she” that will not answer the character. The reader is lost without this “she,” stating, “what would it be worth when she doesn’t even open what emails she gets…” (Marino). And this is affecting how the reader character is reacting to the text, which then affects the communications circuit in a visible way because it is added in by the reader. If it wasn’t affecting the person enough to tint their lens, then it wouldn’t have been mentioned. This can be true for readers in general, that what is going on in their own life affects how they perceive a text, and the annotations just give credence to that. One of the annotations mentions him wanting to share a quote with his son from the “Introduction to the Semantic Web, Organizing the Web for Better Information Retrieval,” the quote being “where communication is ‘a personal, intentional, transactional, symbolic process for the purpose of exchanging ideas, feelings, etc,’” but the son is not old enough to comprehend them yet (Suellen Stringer-Hye). And another mentions him telling his daughter to draw a star next to a line in the book “Willy Wonka” that made her laugh. In both cases, Marino’s character wants to pass on this idea of communication and annotation, that comes from his intertwined research of Borges. He thinks of these things when reading, because, again, they are pertinent to how he is receiving the text through his personal reader lens.

Next, it’s time to look at how the fanfiction site Ao3 can be used to study the reader of popular media and reader-turned-author within the communications circuit. Ao3 is a site dedicated to giving a multitude fandoms—including those of literary works, TV shows, bands, manga, anime, etc—a platform to write their own stories on their fandoms. The focus will be on the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, specifically a work under the tag known as “salt.” Even if Miraculous Ladybug is an animated TV show, the fanfiction on Ao3 is written. (And it is a similar feedback loop from original creator to fanfiction writer, but instead of a reader they are a viewer that functions much like a reader in terms of how they react to a popular story.) The reason the tag salt is being used is because it usually refers to the creator of the fanfiction being fed-up with the canon events within a work. This tag is directly tied to a negative reaction to the original work, and a reader then turning to make their own story using parts of the original work they like to satisfy their need for the cannon to be different. This also communicates to other fans this person’s thoughts on the original work. Tags themselves also can be used to give the fanfic’s author’s thoughts on the original work, or even their mindset when writing if they use specific tags made by themselves. An example of this can be seen in a fanfiction titled “Dusk is like a Dagger,” by the user Esilvpio. Two of the tags read as: “I Wrote this Instead of Sleeping,” and “I Can’t Believe I Wrote This.” The first tag indicates that the author was possibly sleep deprived when writing this fic. One thing can be for certain though, is that the author is intentionally talking to the readers through these tags, especially with the use of the first person pronoun. The author wants us to know this information, and how it, then, affected their writing. Either way, this discourse can continue down in the comments where readers of the fanfiction can give their feedback on the fic, and the author can answer back if they so choose within an instant. Authors can also leave notes to their readers about anything they want, whether that be updates on their personal life, or criticisms of the original work. This reads much like Marino’s annotations, which gives the readers an insight to the author’s inner-world.

Lastly, just like with Marino’s text, let’s look at a fanfiction written by the user Kanzakura called “Begin Again.” First let’s look at the tags:

Right off the bat, the author is letting the readers know through the tags that this is set in an “Alternative Universe” (AU for short), that it does have canon compliance for “some of Season 3,” and not compliant for “season 4.” Now some background information on Miraculous Ladybug is needed to fully understand the gripes this viewer turned author has with the original story. Miraculous Ladybug is set in a universe revolving around two teens, Marinette (Ladybug) and Adrien (Chat Noir), who are chosen to become superheroes to fight a mysterious supervillain wreaking havoc in Paris. Their powers, and the supervillain’s powers, are fueled by Gods called Kwami’s that represent different ideas. Marinette’s kwami is named Tikki—the kwami of creation—and Adrien’s kwami is named Plagg who is the kwami of destruction (a yinyang relationship). (I’m the source, because yes, I watched the first three seasons when they came out.) For this specific fic it is also important to know a couple more points. The first being that the character “Felix,” was Chat Noir in the original darker/edgier proposed version of the show that got replaced by Adrien. Second, Lila is one of (if not) the most hated characters in the show who is a compulsive liar. The main reason being her lies were very obvious, and the audience couldn’t believe Marinette’s and Adrien’s class would basically abandon Marinette for Lila’s lies. This can be seen in the “Lila salt” tag above. The salt tag along with a specific character means that the author does not like Lila, and is signaling to the readers that this story will involve Lila getting some kind of comeuppance. This also leads to the “Marinette Deserves Better,” “Marinette Protection Squad,” and “Marinette gets good friends” tags. The author is letting the audience know that this story will ‘do right’ by Marinette, and do what the original creator (Thomas Astruc) did not. This is directly from the disbelief that Marinette’s friends would believe an obvious liar, so to remedy that, this author will implement better friends into the narrative. The last important thing to know is that the character Chloe Bourgeois, is a bully in the original narrative, but the audience really thought that she could have an amazing character arc and become one of the good guys. Astruc chose not to implement this suggestion, and even more recently tweeted on social media that:

So this fan in reply, is writing a story with a “good” and “protective” Chloe Bourgeois because they believe Chloe should get a chance at redemption. In Kanzakura’s notes they state:

This strengthens what was aforementioned, that the author here is changing Chloe and how the characters react, because they find canon absurd. It almost reads as a rant towards the end, so the frustration is evident. All of these points, in addition to Kanzakura’s want for parts of the show to be different, is the impetus for the background of their writing, and thus they become an author themselves to change the characters’ fates. Kanzakura—as a reader— is directly reacting to and criticizing the original work, but is still showing love to the concept, all in order to make it their own story to share. They bounce off of the original creator, and it is obvious from Astruc’s tweet above that he also is in direct communication with the fans. This is all done with the click of a button, and an instantaneous signal sent through the internet.

Now moving on to the fans who read this fanfiction reactions and how the internet enables them to do this with relative ease. One of the first reactions one can take without commenting is by simply leaving a ‘kudos’ for the work. Leaving a kudos allows for readers to directly show that they enjoyed the work of the author. This specific fic amassed 2, 254 kudos. But the real gold is in the comments. The first chapter has 23 comments, many of them being encouragement and affirmations of liking the story so far. Almost all of them have replies from the author, some of the replies being minutes apart. Chapter 2 has 22 comments, and one particular one stood out:

Similar to Marino’s text discussed earlier, this reader’s experience and reaction to the text is influenced by their current real life circumstances. It’s to the point that depending on how they perceive the following chapters’ sad content, they will stop reading the story all together. The author, as an advantage of this format, is able to try and assuage the reader’s fears through a reply to the original comment. This one-on-one direct communication was more difficult in the past before the internet, letters could get lost and could take a long time (although here the author did take a while to get back to the reader). One would also need to know someone’s address to send things like letters, and for telegraphs—while pretty instantaneous—they had to be translated and sent to the person. Or they would have to have the chance to meet in person. But with the internet and world wide web, it is one human directly to another. The only middleman is technology. But it makes it so much easier to have a community like Ao3 where interactions like the above are highly valued. These comments can be made anywhere with a device and internet connection. And the same goes for if you want to study the reader, or even the reader-author relationship in the communications circuit, because these comments are publicly posted and accessible to everyone.

One more comment that caught my eye was in regards to chapter three:

This reader is able to bring up their qualms with the story thus far. And they also ask everyone in the community if they are feeling the same way. Again, this is an invitation to see what others’ reactions are to the written story, albeit a specific part of the story. It gives this reader’s unique perspective, and again there is a reply from the author. The author then shares their own unique perspective on their decisions. This exchange is very reminiscent of a group reading session, where people are encouraged to engage in discourse.

Overall, the internet and world wide web has opened a whole new plethora of resources for people to better understand the readers’ part in the communication circuits. And it is sites like Ao3, and Mark Marino’s “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” that allow for an insight into this discourse. In a way, they are bringing back the idea of reading together, or at least sharing reactions and ideas in a group-like setting. And because of the internet and world wide web, this is done between people from various backgrounds and places all over the world tied together through a common interest.

Final Project: To Be a “Man of the Book”

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Dakota Goodman

In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published his short story, “The Library of Babel.” This winding labyrinthine narrative details an infinite library in which every possible book written in every conceivable language is stored within the hexagonal rooms. The librarians of Babel wander through the library and dedicate their lives to reading as many of these books as possible. Some rarely leave the vicinity of the hexagons that they were born in while others search for the Vindications, books that detail someone’s entire life. Others devote their lives to finding what Borges describes as the book of all books, which is theoretically the cipher to the entire library. The desire to learn it all fuels their search and they become consumed by it.

This book of all books is the heart of my project and led me to create the impossible through the form of an artist book. Taking inspiration from the artist books we examined in Special Collections and Amaranth Borsuk’s “The Book,” I created an artist book that utilizes tunnel binding to create the illusion of infinity and capture the weight of Borges’ work. Each hexagon slowly became a room in the library, complete with bookshelves that span the walls and a stray librarian wandering through. I used watercolor paints to add depth and dimension before attaching each paper to an accordion folded strip of paper. This allows the reader to pull the pages out and see the illusion of infinity when looking through the cut out. In Borsuk’s “The Book,” she describes tunnel books, “When fully extended and viewed through an opening in the cover, the tunnel book’s superimposed flat planes create the illusion of depth.” This description inspired me to create a tunnel book in order to portray the infinite in a way that was conceivable. Even the title, taken from a quote of the short story, “The Library exists ab aeterno.” On the back of the first panel, I wrote the first few opening lines from “The Library of Babel.” Due to the construction of the artist book, the reader would have to dismantle and possibly damage the book in order to read the quote. This detail alludes to the frantic destruction of the Library of Babel that some of the librarians caused in search of the Vindications. What I hoped to achieve with this project is to demonstrate the fanatic need to pursue knowledge, to pursue more. We live in a time where information is quite literally at our fingertips and we have become oversaturated with new publications. Due to this, Borges’ work remains prevalent even nearly 85 years later as he demonstrates the deep rooted fanaticism that surrounds books and the pursuit of knowledge.

Borges’ narrator is one of the many librarians who explains the unusual inner workings of the library and how different librarians navigate the books and mythos of the library. He recounts the many theories surrounding the library, and how it was determined to be infinite. He states, “when it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem whose eloquent solutions did not exist– in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly expanded to the limitless dimensions of hope.” The overwhelming joy at discovering the library is infinite is similar to the introduction of the internet. There were hardly any regulations on what could and could not be done on the internet. This freedom seizes the librarians and leads them into chaos. At first, having all knowledge at hand seems like a good thing as every single problem would have a solution. However, it creates more problems. Borges notes that the librarians became consumed by the possibilities that the library had to offer and sparked their interest in the Vindications. In their search for these biographies, the librarians were frenzied in their lonely searching, abandoning their hexagons, murdering one another, and destroying books in the process. The pursuit of knowledge becomes a dangerous quest that taunts the seeker.

Further in the short story, Borges introduces the concept of ‘the Man of the Book.” Borges writes, “We know, too, of another superstition of that time: the Man of the Book. In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god.” The concept of the Man of the Book is at the root of my project. The idea of someone discovering and reading the cipher to all knowledge is incredibly moving and it fuels the librarians’ desire to learn more and strive to become a Man of the Book. To read and absorb everything means that they are well rounded in their research and knowledge. Today, readers attempt to read and collect books as fast as they possibly can because there is an incredible influx of media to consume. However it is impossible to read all of it. In Gabriel Zaid’s book, “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” he confronts the issue of the overabundance of books and how it is just not possible to read every book published. In his book, Zaid writes, “When we say that books should be read by everyone, we aren’t thinking. Our simple physical limitations make it impossible for us to read 99.9 percent of the books that are written. Humankind writes more than it can read. If for every book published one or two languish unpublished, then two or three million books are written every year.” Much like the librarians’ work being futile, it is impossible today for a reader to attempt to read everything. In order to become a Man of the Book, we must be more open to conversation and piece together information gathered from other people. Zaid remediates these concerns with the suggestion that readers do not need to read everything. Rather, readers should not focus on reading everything but dabble in anything. The conversations drawn together by various media sparks more connection between people. In order to become a Man of the Book, we must be more open to conversation and piece together information gathered from other people.

In conclusion, Borges’ short story, “The Library of Babel” explores the fanaticism of the pursuit of knowledge. We must be aware of the dangers that go along with the search for more. In a time where the market is saturated with new media nearly everyday, it becomes apparent that everything cannot be consumed. Rather, we should focus on cultivating community and inviting conversation to combat the desire to read everything.

Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Ficciones. 1941. Grove Press.

Borsuk, Amaranth, “The Book.” The MIT Press. 2018

Zaid, Gabriel. “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance.” Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 2003. Paul Dry Press.

Final Project: The Book Helix

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Micaela Macario

Books are often treated as neutral vessels or objects whose value lies primarily in the text they carry rather than the form that carries it. This assumption persists even as digital media increasingly separates content from materiality of the book, reinforcing the idea that the book’s body is secondary to its meaning. However, this view overlooks the significant ways books function as material, embodied extensions of the book owner. Books are touched, carried, marked, shelved, displayed, damaged, lost, and preserved. They archive time and attention, hold the memories of their use, and occupy space within cultural happenings. When one collects books, they have a full archive of who they are. They do not merely reflect identity but serve to form identity as well. My bookwork project argues that personal book collections function as bodily extension and identity through material ownership. Similarly, DNA is a double helix structure that has intertwining nucleotides, like books in a personal library, that hold the genetic information that makes us who we are as individuals. In other words, our identity. To explore this claim, I created a sculptural bookwork that is a double-helix DNA structure composed of pages and covers from my personal library.

The Book Helix is a sculptural bookwork that materializes my argument that books as objects function as extensions of the body and archives of the self. Constructed as a double-helix DNA structure using pages and covers from my personal library, the bookwork visualizes how just as DNA encodes the genetic information that defines who we are. Personal books in a book collection work like nucleotides in DNA helix to encode memories, intimate reading experiences, and material traces like marginalia that collectively shape identity.

The choice of DNA as a formal metaphor is intentional. DNA holds information that determines how a body develops, adapts, and survives, similarly, books encode the ideas, values, and affective experiences that shape who we become. The pages used in the sculpture are not interchangeable. They are taken from books that have marked specific moments in my life such as periods of learning, uncertainty, affirmation, and change. In this sense, the work treats books not solely as commodities but as material traces of lived experience of my life narrative. Each strand represents a trajectory of intellectual and emotional development, while the spiral structure emphasizes continuity, inheritance, and growth over time with each new book added to my collections. By transforming books into a bodily structure, the work insists on the vulnerability and intimacy of reading practices. It asks viewers to reconsider their own libraries.

Susan Stewart’s On Longing explains important ideas for understanding personal libraries as identity forming archives, a concept that is materially portrayed in The Book Helix. Stewart argues that book collections derive meaning from their accumulation, arrangement, and proximity to one another (Stewart, 1993). Objects within a collection become narrative markers, producing meaning through their intimate relationships and proximity to one another and the owner. When applied to books, this idea reveals how personal libraries function as material autobiographies. They are archives that record who we have been, what we have valued, and how we have changed over time.

Books acquire significance through the specific moments at which they enter our lives. We collect books as gifts, during periods of curiosity or obsession, through academia or education, or as part of childhood. Each book marks a particular memory, experience, or emotional context. When books remain in a personal collection, they become fixed points in an evolving narrative of selfhood. The Book Helix materializes this process by using pages and covers from books acquired at different moments in my life, treating each page as a narrative marker rather than as a simple vessel of text. The sculpture portrays a visible accumulation of markers from my personal library, demonstrating how identity is formed through lived experience. Each page functions as a material “marker” drawn from a specific book within my collection, and, like nucleotides within a DNA strand, these fragments accumulate over time forming who I am.

Stewart’s emphasis on accumulation and proximity is central to the structure of The Book Helix. Rather than having individual books on their own, the sculpture intertwines pieces from many texts into a single double-helix form. This reflects Stewart’s argument that collections produce identity through narrative association. The helix structure emphasizes continuity, suggesting that identity is not composed of discrete moments but formed through overlapping experiences that persist over time. Books function especially powerfully within collections because they register time in visible ways. Marginalia, underlining, old post-it notes, cracked spines, and faded covers act as inscriptions of lived experience. These marks transform books into what Stewart describes as souvenirs. These objects matter because of the memories attached to them not because they can be exchanged or replaced (Stewart, 1993). In The Book Helix, these material traces are preserved rather than erased. Pages bearing signs of wear are incorporated into the sculpture highlighting how books are a primary source of meaning. The work insists that these traces are not damage but memory.

The Book Helix also demonstrates how fragile pages are turned into a bodily structure, reinforcing the idea that books function as extensions of the self. Like DNA, which carries information necessary for continuity and survival, personal books store individual experiences and memories that cannot be replaced by another copy. The Book Helix shows how books within a collection operate as material anchors of identity and objects that preserve the past while remaining physically present in the ongoing formation of the self.

While Susan Stewart’s argument explains how personal libraries work as narrative systems of identity, it does not fully account for how the materiality of the book itself actively produces meaning. Stewart shows why books matter within collections, and Johanna Drucker’s work clarifies how books matter as objects. Where Stewart emphasizes accumulation and memory, Drucker turns attention to material structure. They argue that the book is not a neutral container but a performative object whose physical properties shape interpretation and experience (Drucker, 1995). This shift from collection to form is essential for understanding The Book Helix, which does not assemble books as symbolic artifacts but transforms their material bodies into a new structure that is meaning making.

Rather than treating the book as a simple medium, this approach demonstrates how structure and physical presence shape interpretation. Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books argues that books are not passive vessels but performative objects, whose properties actively produce meaning (Drucker, 1995). Artists’ books, in particular, disrupt the illusion that books should disappear in the act of reading. By making books through unconventional structures, like sculptural configurations, artists’ books expose the ideological norms embedded in conventional codex design. The Book Helix pages used in the sculpture cannot be read sequentially. This challenge of linear reading norms redirects attention from textual content to material presence. What matters is not what the books say, but what they have held: personal experience, use, and memory. By transforming books into a DNA structure, the bookwork portrays their role as makers of identity.

Janice Radway’s essay “Reading Is Not Eating” challenges dominant ideas that paint reading as consumption. Radway critiques the idea that texts are passively absorbed by readers, arguing instead that reading is an active, interpretive, and socially situated practice (Radway, 1986). If reading were simply a form of ingestion, books would lose their value once their informational purpose was fulfilled. However, readers routinely keep books they may never reread, preserving them for reasons that exceed utility. These attachments reflect the relational nature of reading. Books are not depleted through use. They accumulate meaning through continued presence. Radway’s argument helps explain why material traces such as marginalia, creased spines, or underlined passages matter. These marks do not indicate consumption but interaction. They show moments of emotion or transformation. Books thus become records of embodied engagement and the formation of identity.

To understand books as bodily extensions requires a shift away from seeing them as external tools and toward recognizing them as material participants in the formation of identity. This perspective challenges the assumption that the book’s role ends once its text has been read. Instead, books persist as objects that absorb traces of interaction, memory, and affect, functioning in ways that closely resemble the body itself.

Drucker argues that books are performative forms whose material structures actively produce meaning (Drucker, 1995). The codex, with its sequence, binding, and tactility, organizes bodily engagement like how a reader holds the book, turns its pages, or navigates its materials. These physical interactions are not secondary to interpretation. When books are treated as bodily extensions, their material vulnerabilities take on new significance. A cracked spine, a torn page, or water damage is more than aesthetic deterioration. These marks resemble evidence of time, use, and survival. Drucker’s emphasis on material presence allows us to see such damage not as failure but as bodies that age. They accumulate marks that reflect lived histories rather than idealized forms.

Janice Radway’s statement that “reading is not eating” supports that books work as a bodily extension of its owner. Radway challenges consumption-based metaphors that portray reading as a process of ingestion followed by disposal (Radway, 1986). If reading were truly consumptive, books would lose relevance once their informational content was absorbed. Yet readers rarely treat books this way. Instead, they keep them, return to them, and allow them to occupy space in their lives long after the act of reading has concluded. This persistence shows that books function relationally rather than instrumentally.

Radway’s argument reframes reading as an interactive and embodied practice, one that produces long lasting emotions. Marginalia, underlining, bending the corner of a page, and stains are not signs of use in the sense of depletion, but records of engagement. These marks transform books into hybrid objects of part text and part autobiography. In this way, books begin to serve bodily extensions. Books remember where we lingered, where we struggled, and where we returned.

A personal library is not merely a collection of random items but a curated narrative or archive that tells a story about its owner. What matters is not only which books are present, but how long they remain, where they are placed, and which are allowed to coexist. Stewart notes that souvenirs are valued not for their intrinsic properties but for their ability to anchor memory and sustain personal narrative. Books operate similarly. A book kept for years often holds significance because it marks a particular moment in an individual’s life such as a course taken, a period of questioning, a relationship, or a shift in worldview. The book’s continued presence allows that moment to remain accessible, materially embedded in everyday space.

The DNA metaphor at the center of The Book Helix makes this argument visible. DNA encodes biological information that creates growth, development, and continuity. Similarly, books encode the intellectual, emotional, and personal experiences that shape identity over time. By constructing the sculpture from pages and covers taken from my personal library, the work treats books as material carriers of personal history rather than abstract symbols of knowledge. The double-helix structure emphasizes relationality. Identity, like DNA, is not linear or singular but produced through interaction and repetition. Reading experiences accumulate, overlap, and sometimes contradict one another, but together they form an evolving self. The intertwined pages in the helix reflect this process suggesting that no single book determines identity. Instead, meaning emerges through entanglement, through the ongoing presence of many texts within a shared material space.

Ultimately, to think of books as bodily extensions is to acknowledge that identity is not formed solely in the mind. It is shaped through sustained, material engagement with objects that carry memory and meaning. Books become part of the self not because they contain information, but because they participate in lived experience, absorbing traces of who we were at the moment of encounter. The Book Helix invites viewers to reconsider their own relationships with books. What stories do our shelves tell? What parts of ourselves are stored in the objects we preserve? And what does it mean to care for books not simply as sources of information, but as extensions of who we are?

Work Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2018.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

Pressman, Jessica. “Bookwork and Bookishness.” Interview with Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube, 2018.

Pressman, Jessica. “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness.”, 2018.Radway, Janice. “Reading Is Not Eating.” Feminist Studies, 1986.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.

Final Project: Collecting the Collector: A Material Biography in Specimens

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Delinda Souksavath

The transformation of Thomas Moffet’s Insectorum Theatrum from a working scientific reference into a gilded collector’s item reveals how the materiality of books shapes not only their preservation but also their meaning, demonstrating that a text’s physical evolution across centuries creates layers of interpretation that are as significant as the content printed on its pages. My specimen box installation makes this argument tangible by literally treating the book’s material transformations as collectible evidence, turning the collector’s gaze back onto the collected object itself. By arranging fragments of marbled paper, gilded edges, tea-stained pages, and library labels in a shadow box like pinned insects, I’m asking viewers to examine the Insectorum Theatrum the way Moffet examined butterflies and beetles, as an object whose physical characteristics tell us something essential about its place in the world.

The specimen box format creates an immediate visual parallel between Moffet’s entomological project and my own project of studying book history. Just as Moffet collected, classified, and preserved insects to understand the natural world, I’ve collected material evidence of how this book was valued across time. Each pinned specimen in my box (the gilt paper edges catching light, the brown-stained pages showing centuries of handling, the pristine library catalog card) represents a distinct moment when someone decided what this book should be. The handwritten labels mimicking scientific specimen tags force viewers to look at book materials with the same careful attention a naturalist gives to examining a preserved moth. When I write “Specimen E: Marbled calf binding, c. 1780-1820” I’m treating that swatch of marbled paper as seriously as Moffet treated his insects, suggesting that the physical traces of a book’s life deserve systematic study and classification.

What makes this format particularly effective for my argument is how it physically separates material elements that originally existed together in one object. In my midterm, I wrote about how the gilt edges served as a “hinge point” in the book’s biography, marking when it stopped being a scientific reference and became a collector’s treasure. But when you look at the actual Insectorum Theatrum in Special Collections, all these different historical moments exist simultaneously in one bound volume, you can’t really see the 1634 working reference separately from the 18th-century rebinding. My specimen box pulls them apart. The tea-stained page with insect woodcuts sits on the right side of my box, representing the original naturalist use. The gilded edges and marbled paper is evidence of luxury transformation. The library materials cluster on the bottom corner, showing institutional ownership. By isolating each transformation as its own specimen, I’m making viewers experience what I argued in my midterm, that we need to understand each material intervention as a distinct moment with its own meaning and its own community of readers, even though they’re all part of the same object’s history.

Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library” helps me understand what I’m actually doing when I create this specimen box. Benjamin writes about how “for a true collector, the background of an item (its period, region, craftsmanship, former ownership) forms a ‘magic encyclopedia’ of which the object’s fate is the quintessence” (p. 3). When I gilded paper edges myself and created marbled patterns with shaving cream, I wasn’t just making props for an art project. I was trying to understand what Benjamin calls the collector’s way of seeing, where every object carries the weight of all the hands that touched it and all the decisions that shaped it. The act of physically creating these specimens made me think about the labor that went into transforming Moffet’s book. Gilding edges is harder than I expected. Your hand cramps and the gold paint gets everywhere and you realize that whoever did this to the actual Insectorum Theatrum in the 1780s spent hours on something that most readers would barely notice. That invisible labor is part of the book’s biography too.

But here’s where my project complicates Benjamin’s ideas about collecting. Benjamin celebrates the collector’s intimate, almost mystical relationship with objects. He writes that “for a real collector, ownership is the most intimate relationship with objects; it is not that objects come alive in the collector, but that the collector lives in them” (p. 7). The gentleman who paid to have Moffet’s book rebound in marbled calf and gilt-edged definitely had that kind of relationship, he saw the book as worthy of his dwelling, of his personal library that represented his cultivation and taste. But my specimen box argues that this collector’s love actually changed what the book meant. The tea-stained pages I created show a book that was used, consulted, maybe even taken into the field by naturalists. That’s a very different relationship to the object than the one represented by my pristine marbled paper specimens. When the book got gilded and rebound, it stopped being a tool and became, as I wrote in my midterm, “more copy than book, valued for its unique material properties rather than as a reproducible vehicle for intellectual content.”

My specimen box puts these different relationships on display simultaneously, which creates a kind of tension. The working reference specimens look messy and real, I intentionally crumpled them and added coffee stains and torn edges. They’re meant to feel handled, consulted, lived-with in a practical way. The luxury transformation specimens are beautiful and untouchable, with their shimmering gold edges and swirled marbling patterns that took forever to get right. And the institutional specimens are clinical and sterile, just printed labels and catalog cards that reduce the book to call numbers and preservation notices. Benjamin might say the middle phase represents the collector’s deepest relationship to the object, but I’m not so sure. Maybe the naturalist who spilled coffee on page 47 while trying to identify a beetle had just as intimate a relationship with the book, even if he didn’t gild its edges.

The shadow box itself (the glass case that contains all these specimens) performs the same transformation that happened when the Insectorum Theatrum entered Special Collections at SDSU. Benjamin writes about how the collector “lives in” his objects, building a dwelling with books as building stones. But what happens when that private collection becomes a public archive? The glass front of my specimen box literally puts the materials behind a barrier. You can look but you can’t touch, just like the actual book in Special Collections. By mounting my specimens behind glass, I’m showing how institutional ownership changes the collector’s intimate relationship into something more distant and studied. The book that was once part of someone’s personal dwelling is now a teaching object, valuable for what it can tell students about book history rather than for what it can tell naturalists about insects.

In the end, my specimen box argues that books have biographies just like people do, and their physical materials are the evidence of those lives. Each pinned specimen represents a different chapter( working tool, luxury object, teaching resource) and none of these identities completely replaces the others. They all exist simultaneously in the physical object we hold today. By treating the book’s materials as specimens worthy of collection and classification, I’m using Moffet’s own methodology against his book, or maybe for his book, turning the scientific gaze back onto the object that enabled that gaze in the first place. The Insectorum Theatrum collected insects; collectors collected the Insectorum Theatrum; and now I’ve collected the material traces of that collecting. It’s collectors all the way down, each one leaving their mark in gilt and marbling and catalog cards, each one transforming what came before while trying to preserve it.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 59-67.

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2018.

Final Project: Before and After Lorca-A Personal Change in Perspective

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Jacob Suarez

Books have always played an essential role in my life both academically and personally. I remember reading during quiet time and how it slowly changed my feelings towards books, from a task to an enjoyable escape. And my favorite moments have always been the ones where I got lost in the world, in the words, presented to my eyes and accepted by my mind. This was a feeling that I, even now, and most likely for a long time, will continue to chase. I have recently reacquainted myself with this feeling. In the spring of 2023, I found myself completely enamored with the poetry and avant-garde style Jack Spicer used in his book After Lorca. A collection of poems and letters directly addressing Lorca and mimicking his style, while simultaneously adding to his already published work. It was like reading a conversation between a living and dead poet from the grave, and for a brief moment, a seance ensues. To me, it felt like a pinnacle of some point, as if some sort of impossible form of communication had finally been solved. Before reading Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, I understood Jack Spicer’s “translations” in After Lorca as acts of lyrical and creative homage as well as intentional misreading-a postmodern game with authorship. However, Borsuk’s “the book as idea”, provided the crucial framework to see them as acts of bibliographic remodeling: Spicer does not merely translate Lorca’s words; he deconstructs the original, using its fragments as physical material to bind a new one. A co-authored volume that performs its own haunted making and acts as an ephemeral conversation, the connection severed as soon as the last page is turned. In this personal essay I will be focusing on my own personal understanding and relationship with Lorca’s introduction and his ‘dead’ letters to Lorca. As I believe the scope of his poetry becomes far to dense and broad to discuss in a relatively shorter essay, let alone one that sides on the personal rather than academic.

I. Before and After The Introduction

The introduction to Spicer’s is signed as Federico Garcia Lorca himself, somewhere just outside of Granada, Spain, in 1957. Now, Lorca was in fact assassinated somewhere outside Granada in 193,6 so given this context clue, we can already establish an element of ghostly conjuring coming to fruition here. Spicer is almost immediately telling us(the reader) that his book is a recombinant structure. The faux introduction is there to say to us something Lorca wants us to know but only if piecing together that it is in fact him behind the veil. This specific notion of hauntology is further stressed by Daniel Katz, “Spicer’s sense of poetry as dictation and the poet as a ‘receiver’ of a voice which is Other needs to be emphasized, as it goes a long way towards illuminating a notable, and indeed noted, oddity: that After Lorca, the book through which Spicer himself felt he had reached his poetic maturity, was in its conception a book of translations.”(201). In other words, this whole book was merely supposed to translated poetry. How did Spicer come to this conclusion and what can I gain from that insight. Or rather, what am I now to make of it with this new perception of mine. They are haunted words, written by a supposed dead poet, almost chastising Spicer on his endeavor. It was in one of Borsuk’s chapters that this book came to me and specifically this passage: “-because nothing compares to spending several hours holding artists’ books in your hands. They are first and foremost, meant to be activated by a reader, and thus describing them in brief simply does not do them justice.”(Borsuk 149). This book, Seance, transforms the conversation into something powerful; it manifests itself through the reader’s eyes. “Frankly, I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume.” What is now clear to me is that this artist’s book is a special work, more so to Spicer himself. He is letting us peer at his conscience while simultaneously leaving a work unguarded and abstract for hundreds of thousands to read.

I remember picking this book up after writing a quick blurb for it during my internship with Poetry International. I thought I had a finite time with it as I borrowed the book from Professor Alcosser’s library, but to my surprise, she let me keep it. And ever since then, I read and re-read the short yet puzzling collection of “translated” poems and faux letters. It’s a mesmerizing experience and a rewarding challenge. I had thought that much of the goal was to decipher what was what. What part of Lorca’s translations are bastardized poems, and what parts were accurate translations? In other words, where did Lorca end and Jack begin? But now, after having met a completely different perspective and way of thinking of books themselves, in all their shapes and forms, I think finding an answer in that regard is pointless. But my role as a reader completely changed after taking this class: “But books are always a negotiation, a performance, an event:-” (Borsuk 147). My role as a reader changes when engaging this text, and it has also changed since taking this class. Now, I no longer simply look for when one artist begins and the other ends, but instead, when I hold the book in my hands, I ask myself, “What is this object in my hands doing and what is my role in its performance?” Katz weighs in on this notion by saying, “And for Spicer, the task of the translator consists not so much in bringing the dead poet ‘to life’ as in’ hauling the live translator, precisely, into death. Herein lies one of the true values of the act of translation for Spicer and also, perhaps, much of his fascination with

the myth of Orpheus*. In his penultimate letter to Lorca, ‘Jack’ claims that poetry freezes the instant the poet ‘ceases to be a dead man’. The relationship between poetry and death, but also poetry and prose, obsesses the book.”(5) I never really read much into this book beyond its pathos and the emotion that it holds. The words are lonely and finite, macabre, yet delicate, but I think what I can see and understand now is far beyond what I had previously perceived.

The introduction is disdainful in tone, written by Lorca himself, and also acknowledges his own death, “The reader is given non indication which of poems belong to which category, and I have further complicated the problem ( with malice aforethought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written after my death which he has also translated and included here.”(Spicer 4). Having all to do with poetics, as a fiction student myself, the poetics, the idea had gotten lost on me, had become too abstract. And it really wasn’t until Borsuk that I really started to grasp, or at least think differently, regarding the introduction(but much of the volume itself).

Daniel Katz comprehensively dissects this part, both highlighting the strange emulation and also perhaps the reasoning behind the tone of a spectral Lorca:

“That the dead are ‘notoriously hard to satisfy’ points not only to the debt that

the translator may be said to owe to the ‘original’ which he parasites and

exploits – it also recalls the manner in which the dead most classically express

this dissatisfaction, to wit, as truculent ghosts. But the question left open is

whether this act of translation is the transgression for which appeasement must

be made, or the act of appeasement itself, extending as it does the ‘life’ of the

dead poet’s text. In his work on Pound, Daniel Tiffany has stressed how trans-

lation may be seen as a sacrifice on the part of the translator, who would deliver

himself over to the service of the alien ‘voice’. In this way, translation appears

as ‘a process whereby the original author or text is brought to life, resurrected,

through a depletion of the translator’s vitality, or, more seriously, through a

reification, a deadening, of his native language. There is a terrible risk, of

course, in feeding the dead from the store of one’s own vitality’.6 Yet if the ‘orig-

inal’ text may be seen as a ‘succubus’ or ‘parasite’ feeding off the vitality of the

living translator, the reverse is equally true, for the translator is a consummate

‘grave-robber’, as Chamberlain has referred to Spicer in this context, stealing

an alien ‘voice’ through which to speak what is, after all, his own tongue. Thus

the importance of the Introduction by ‘Lorca’: in this book, not only will Lorca

‘speak’ through the ‘voice’ of Spicer, but the blatant forgery of the Introduction

reminds us that Spicer is also always speaking through the ‘mask’ of ‘Lorca’.”(204)

What strikes me now is the provenance of this section. Spicer was a heartbroken poet; he died in the poverty ward of the San Francisco General Hospital in 1965. His last words were, “my vocabulary did this to me.” I remembered this exact line during class, and the quote about words being left unguarded. Its a huge risk, and as Spicer puts it himself, in terms of a poet, there’s an audience for the poet but very rarely one for their poetry. I think this serves well for understanding something, and in this case, a text. Did I, as a reader, do harm, neglect, or harm this text and its voice by not understanding as I am capable of now? Before the words and their arrangement seemed like a game, one where I would pull the tail of an author and find it to be either Spicer or, quite honestly, Lorca himself. The mask was definitely stronger before as well. When reading that introduction on my first read, I was utterly convinced it was Lorca, and I simply chalked up the part about acknowledging his own death to poetic freedom. But learning from my midterm project I began to think beyond the words and more about the text’s provenance. Both Spicer and Lorca were queer men, one dutifully martyred. His beliefs and morals stood firm during the Spanish Civil War, and this led to his assassination somewhere on the outskirts of Granada, Spain. His body was never recovered, yet it is said to most likely be buried in a mass grave. This also gives further context to this line in the introduction, “Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not García Lorca as, indeed, he would if he were look into my present resting place. The analogy is impolite, but I fear the impoliteness is deserved.”(5) The relationship posed by Spicer in this volume is dense to say the least but at its very core has to do with Spicer, a lonesome poet, one who has said that loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, is finding a tether, a connection to a great poet who has now become a ghost; a conjured specter. It has all to do with Lorca but all the more with poetry itself. But now I ask myself, why this route? Why choose the dead over the living? Katz makes another point, specifically through the lens of translation, “As translation becomes the search for ‘correspondences’, on the level of both he signifier and the signified (as the example of ‘seaweed’ rendering ‘lemon’ indicates), it can be effected only through the sort of ‘correspondence’ or exchange of voicings Spicer punningly has in mind in these letters, as he makes clear in closing this one: ‘Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write to each other. Love, Jack’. Translation is literally letter-writing, as Spicer sees each of his renderings as at once a response addressed to Lorca, prompted by his work and also as a correspondence, re-placing that work in another time, language and context. Spicer sees himself as sending Lorca’s work back to him as well as extending Lorca mediumistically.”(205) In terms of the artist’s book, and as the book as ephemeral, Spicer precisely correlates both ideas, creating something akin to a seance. The deconstruction of Lorca’s work becomes the focus of Spicer’s poetry, and the conversation between the two is finite as the reader not only serves at a witness but as an activator.

II. The Dead Letters

Spicer’s letters to Lorca are haunting. Both heartbreaking and entrancing, Spicer laments in almost letters, of his function as a writer and the purpose of his and Lorca’s ghostly ‘meetings’. The very first line of the first letter reads, “Dear Lorca, these letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent.” Spicer immediately confronts the aspect of time in his first letter. He continues further with, “The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry. See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents— poetry discloses.”(Spicer 9). This passage reminds me a lot of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel in what it conveys. This notion of an infinite number of similar stories being told yet never the same is a central theme in Spicer’s exploration of time and poetry. When thinking about the ephemerality of this specific text’s ideas, “Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium. Not only are their physical forms(including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by the ideological and political difference. Some artists’ books embrace this impermanence, inviting us to meditate on our fears that books might go up in smoke.”(Borsuk 179). We can see this concept working throughout Spicer’s letters. In his final one to Lorca he laments and yearns for the relationship to last and not cease but he caves and professes that it was all a “game” birthed out of the necessity for poetry but a game nonetheless. Yet, the poems are still there, the connection was made and the meaning will last as long as we give it one. I will provide the final letter in totality as its a wonderful piece of writing:

“Dear Lorca, This is the last letter. The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of Garcia Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen. It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim. Yet it was there. The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important than my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover. What is real, I suppose, will endure. Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were not less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds a promise and a warning for each of us. It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets. Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, departing will never reappear.

Love, Jack” (Spicer 64).

Maybe loneliness is necessary for pure poetry, but then again, maybe not, what am I to know about any of that? I write prose. To me this text conjured itself in my mind because of this class and the themes of deconstruction of the book as we know it. I had never read a ‘book’ like this. But after knowing the provenance of this volume, the author’s duty to his work, and the book’s function as a text, I think I gained a better understanding of it than I had before our ‘Books!’ class. What seemed to be a passionate yet incomprehensible poetry book turned into an example of this very class’s main idea: the book is an ever-changing medium, fit to take on the form best suited for its time and influenced both by it and by the ones who read it. Much like the feeling this book gave me on a first read, I hope to capture the thoughts and ideas that this class gave me again.

Jacob

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

Katz, Daniel. “‘JACK SPICER’S AFTER LORCA: TRANSLATION AS DECOMPOSITION.’” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 201–06. JSTOR,

Spicer, Jack, and Peter Gizzi. After Lorca. New York Review Books, 2021.

My Final Project: Ethiopian Healing Scrolls and Books as Accessories

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Alexis Curtis

Through a media‑specific analysis of Ethiopian healing scrolls, books become most meaningful when they are worn, carried, and embodied. The scroll’s stitched construction, tailored length, and bold imagery position it within a long lineage of wearable books, demonstrating that portability and customization are not secondary features but central mechanisms through which texts produce identity, mobility, and spiritual efficacy.

Part 1: The Bibliography

At the San Diego State University Library’s Special Collections and University Archives, Ethiopian healing scrolls sit quietly in their boxes, but everything about them suggests movement. They are long, narrow composite objects made from parchment strips sewn end‑to‑end. Each strip is thick and stiffened, lighter on the flesh side and darker on the hair side. The joins are stitched with leather using simple overcast or paired‑hole sewing, forming a continuous roll that can stretch several feet while remaining only a few inches wide. Rolled inward, the inscribed surface is protected, as if the scroll curls around its own meaning.

The vellum is coarse and rigid with age. Edges cockle, some strips crease from repeated rolling, and occasional thinning appears near stitch sites. Despite surface wear, the substantial thickness of each strip keeps the structure sound. The scroll is thick and stiff, wanting to stay curled up due to being unused for years. Text runs vertically in single columns along the length of the scroll. Decorative ruling separates text from pictorial fields, and faint guidelines help maintain margins. The Ge’ez script is written in black ink, with a secondary pink pigment used sparingly to highlight names or details. The consistent hand and occasional corrections suggest a single scribe working directly on the parchment.

Horizontal decorative bands—zigzags, triangles, chevrons—divide sections and frame images. Illustrations appear between these bands and are typically schematic: haloed figures, crosses, protective talismans, or anthropomorphic spirits. Bold outlines and selective color accents emphasize heads, eyes, or symbolic attributes. Marginal talismanic signs and small diagrams inhabit the spaces between text and image.

The scroll’s narrow width and considerable length reflect its purpose as a portable ritual tool. Handling wear appears along the edges and outermost layers, while repeated creasing marks frequent unrolling. The reverse side sometimes contains practice strokes or ingredient lists, suggesting practical use by a healer. Alternating text blocks and pictorial vignettes create a ritual sequence, guiding the practitioner through incantations and protective images.

Ownership marks vary: small inscriptions, seals, or later annotations. Repairs—patched holes, re‑stitched joins, added cloth or leather—demonstrate long-term use and value. As material objects, these scrolls sit at the intersection of manuscript, talisman, and ritual implements. Their stitched construction, combined inks, and clear signs of handling identify them as portable healing tools maintained by practitioners rather than books intended for passive reading.

Part 2: The Analysis

Ethiopian healing scrolls are religious objects designed to move: long, narrow rolls of parchment whose images, texts, and physical form work together as portable technologies for purging illness and restoring mobility. As Amaranth Borsuk notes, a book’s meaning emerges through how it is handled, and the scroll’s form is inseparable from the ritual actions it enables. Tailored to individual wearers, the scroll alternates Ge’ez text with pictorial plates exposed sequentially during rites meant to expel harmful forces.

The scroll’s construction emphasizes durability and portability. Thick parchment strips sewn end‑to‑end allow the roll to be tightly wound for transport and repeatedly unrolled for ritual display. Its narrow width minimizes bulk, while the long linear format provides a staged sequence: the healer unrolls to the next image, performs the invocation, then rerolls the scroll. Unlike a codex, which favors stationary reading, the scroll’s rolled format is optimized for motion—carrying, wearing, and field use. Jessica Pressman’s argument that new media revive older forms helps illuminate this contrast: the scroll’s mobility and image‑text hybridity anticipate contemporary portable media that merge functionality with embodied interaction.

Many healing scrolls are bespoke objects made to a client’s height so the unrolled sequence corresponds to body zones. The client’s name often appears, confirming the scroll’s directed purpose. This personalization allows the scroll to be wrapped around the body, converting it into a wearable talisman. Image placement follows a bodily logic: protections for the head appear near the top, those for the torso or abdomen appear mid‑scroll. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole emphasize that books acquire meaning through “the conditions of their use,” and the scroll’s customization demonstrates how its physical form is shaped by the needs of its wearer.

The pictorial program is central to the scroll’s function. Images are schematic and bold—emphasizing heads, eyes, haloes, or geometric talismans—so they read quickly during ritual exposure. High‑contrast outlines and selective color accents highlight operative features. Decorative bands frame each plate and act as tactile markers, enabling quick navigation. The imagery functions as both symbol and instruction, signaling which spiritual agent to invoke and which gesture to perform. Johanna Drucker’s work on artists’ books clarifies this dynamic: material structure shapes how readers navigate and interpret a book, and the scroll’s alternating bands of text and image direct ritual performance.

These scrolls are explicitly religious instruments whose therapeutic mechanism is spiritual. Christian iconography—crosses, haloed figures, archangels—combines with apotropaic geometries to anchor authority and repel harmful forces. The healer’s use of the image—exposure, touch, movement over the afflicted body—constitutes a ritual technology that enacts exorcism and restores mobility. Portability is integral: the scroll must travel to the afflicted, act upon their body, and accompany them back into social life.

Wear patterns and repairs document frequent handling. Darkened edges, creasing, and re‑stitched joins reveal repeated use. Leah Price notes that books often circulate as objects valued for their handling as much as their content, and the scroll’s accumulated wear makes visible its social life. Marginal additions and later hands mark episodes of adaptation for new clients. Mark Marino’s discussion of marginalia as evidence of a text’s evolving social life resonates here: added marks document the scroll’s movement through households and communities.

Mobility is also social and economic. Scrolls circulate as commissioned goods, gifts, or loaned items. Their production and repair involve craft resources and payments, creating ties among clients, healers, and suppliers. Ownership inscriptions and seals trace networks of care. Borges’s vision of an immobilized library contrasts sharply with the Ethiopian scroll, a book designed to circulate and act in the world.

Ultimately, the scroll’s purpose is to restore the patient’s capacity to move. In societies where mobility links to livelihood and social participation, a portable ritual technology that travels to the afflicted is especially significant. Wearing a scroll made and named for you aids reentry into everyday movement, signaling protection and documenting intervention. Viewed through mobility, Ethiopian scrolls appear as engineered objects whose structure, imagery, and repairs make them effective tools for itinerant spiritual care. Tracking scrolls as moving things recasts them not as static artifacts but as active participants in networks of healing, exchange, and movement that sustained religious life in Ethiopia for centuries.

Part 3: Books as Clothing, Books as Accessories: Embodied Reading and the Mobility of Text

Extending this analysis of mobility, Ethiopian healing scrolls also invite us to consider a broader and often overlooked dimension of book history: the ways books function as clothing, accessories, and wearable media. When a book is worn rather than held, its meaning shifts. It becomes not only a vessel for text but an object that participates in the shaping of identity, movement, and embodied experience. The Ethiopian healing scroll makes this dynamic unmistakable. Its form—long, narrow, stitched, and tailored to the wearer’s height—transforms it from a manuscript into a garment of protection, a piece of spiritual equipment designed to inhabit the body as much as accomExtending this analysis of mobility, Ethiopian healing scrolls also invite a broader reconsideration of what books are and how they inhabit the world. Their stitched parchment bodies, tailored lengths, and bold image‑text sequences reveal that books do not merely sit in hands or on shelves—they inhabit bodies. They wrap, touch, travel, and accompany. They are worn as much as they are read. When a book becomes something that can be carried on the body, wrapped around it, or displayed upon it, its meaning shifts. It becomes not only a vessel for text but an object that participates in shaping identity, movement, and embodied experience.

Amaranth Borsuk’s claim in The Book that books are “mutable interfaces” becomes especially resonant here. The Ethiopian scroll is not an interface between reader and text alone; it is an interface between body and world, mediating spiritual danger and physical vulnerability. Its portability is not incidental but essential: the scroll must move with the wearer because its power is activated through movement, wrapping, and bodily proximity. In this sense, the scroll is not simply read—it is embodied. Its meaning emerges through touch, motion, and the intimate contact between parchment and skin.

This embodied quality places Ethiopian scrolls within a much longer history of books as wearable objects. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole remind us that book history is shaped by “the conditions of [books’] use,” and those conditions have often included being worn, displayed, or carried on the body. Medieval girdle books hung from belts; miniature prayer books were tucked into pouches or suspended from rosaries; locket‑books held tiny devotional texts worn against the chest. In each case, the book’s portability shaped its function and its social meaning. A girdle book signaled piety and literacy; a locket‑book signaled devotion and intimacy. Ethiopian healing scrolls similarly signal protection, vulnerability, and spiritual identity. They are not merely texts but accessories of faith, designed to be seen, touched, and carried as part of the wearer’s daily life.

Understanding why people might want to wear books requires recognizing that books have always been more than repositories of information—they are objects that confer identity, intimacy, and agency. Wearing a book transforms it from a tool of reading into a tool of self‑fashioning. As Leah Price argues, books often circulate as objects whose value lies in their handling and display as much as in their textual content. While Ethiopian scrolls are not fashion accessories in the modern sense, they participate in a similar logic: wearing a scroll is a visible declaration of one’s spiritual needs and protections. It communicates vulnerability, faith, and the presence of ongoing ritual care. The scroll is not hidden away but worn, displayed, and recognized. Its presence on the body is itself a form of communication.

This is where individuality and customization become crucial. Ethiopian healing scrolls are bespoke objects: their length matches the client’s height; their inscriptions include the client’s name; their images are arranged to correspond to the wearer’s body. This degree of personalization is not decorative—it is essential to the scroll’s function. A scroll tailored to a specific body asserts that healing is not generic but individual, that protection must be fitted to the person who needs it. Levy and Mole’s emphasis on the “social lives of books” helps clarify this: the scroll’s life is inseparable from the life of its wearer. Customization becomes a form of recognition. The scroll acknowledges the wearer’s singularity, their embodied experience of illness, and their desire for protection that is literally made for them.

The scroll’s design reinforces this wearable, individualized function. Its narrow width, stitched joins, and rolled storage make it easy to carry on the body, slip into a case, or wrap around the torso. Its images—bold, schematic, high‑contrast—are optimized for quick recognition during ritual exposure. Its decorative bands act as visual and tactile markers, enabling navigation even in dim interiors or crowded marketplaces. These features are not ornamental; they are ergonomic. They allow the scroll to function as a wearable tool, a piece of spiritual equipment that moves with the healer and the patient. The scroll’s portability is therefore inseparable from its religious purpose: it must travel to the afflicted, act upon their body, and accompany them as they reenter the social world.

Johanna Drucker’s work on artists’ books helps articulate why this matters for understanding the scroll as a medium. Drucker argues that artists’ books challenge conventional assumptions about what a book is by foregrounding materiality, structure, and reader interaction. They make the reader aware of the book’s physical form and the ways that form shapes meaning. Ethiopian healing scrolls participate in this tradition long before the term “artists’ book” existed. Their form is their argument: the scroll’s healing power depends on its portability, its tactility, and its ability to be worn. Its material design is not an aesthetic choice but a theological one.

Mark Marino’s discussion of marginalia as evidence of a text’s evolving social life offers a final point of connection. The scrolls bear repairs, stains, creases, added talismans, and ownership notes. These marks are not accidents; they are evidence of movement. They show that the scroll traveled, was handled, was worn, was used. They are the physical equivalent of digital marginalia—traces of a book’s social life. Marino’s framework helps us see the scroll not as a static artifact but as a dynamic, evolving object shaped by the bodies that carry it.

Taken together, these perspectives reveal that Ethiopian healing scrolls are part of a broader history of books that move with the body, act upon the body, and become part of the body. They are wearable books whose portability is inseparable from their religious function. They are accessories that signal identity and vulnerability. They are garments that protect and heal. And they remind us that books have always been more than texts—they have been tools, companions, ornaments, and extensions of the self.

By reading the scroll through the lens of media‑specific analysis—and by engaging Borsuk, Levy & Mole, Price, Drucker, and Marino—we see that the scroll is not an anomaly but a reminder: books have always been bodies, and bodies have always been books.

Taken together, the Ethiopian healing scroll and the broader history of wearable books reveal that media are never neutral containers but active participants in the lives of the people who carry them. The scroll’s stitched construction, tailored length, bold imagery, and accumulated repairs show how a book can become a garment of protection, a tool of healing, and a record of movement across bodies, households, and generations. Its portability is inseparable from its purpose: to travel to the afflicted, to act upon the body, and to restore the very mobility that illness threatens. By reading the scroll through media‑specific analysis—and by situating it alongside traditions of girdle books, locket‑texts, and other wearable forms—we see that books have always been shaped by the conditions of their use, and that those conditions often involve touch, movement, and embodiment. The scroll ultimately reminds us that literature is not only something we read but something we inhabit: a medium that wraps around us, moves with us, and becomes part of how we navigate the world.

The Creation of a Personalized Healing Scroll

This handmade scroll functions as a wearable book—an individualized, portable, and spiritually charged media object that connects Baptist Christian heritage to the Ethiopian healing scrolls studied in class. Through stitched structure, symbolic imagery, and personalized inscriptions, the scroll enacts a media-specific theology of protection and identity, showing how books can be worn, embodied, and lived.

The scroll opens with an angel: afro‑textured hair, a halo, and a green eye on her dress. She stands at the top like a guardian, but also a witness. Beneath her, the inscription reads: “For her, Alexis Naomi, for whomst God gave his only begotten son.” The phrasing echoes John 3:16, in the King James Version, but shifts the tone toward intimacy and direction. Naming the recipient transforms the scroll into a personal object, much like Ethiopian healing scrolls that include the client’s name to anchor the work in a specific life.

The next section contains the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13), written in full. These familiar lines—often recited in church pews—take on a different presence when placed on a scroll meant to be worn. Surrounding the prayer are geometric patterns and symbolic drawings: a cross, a sun, a moon, and two open hands. These images form a visual grammar similar to the pictorial logic of Ethiopian scrolls, where symbols guide ritual action as much as text does. The hands suggest offering or surrender. The celestial symbols mark rhythm and divine order. The cross anchors the scroll in Christian iconography, while the surrounding elements expand its meaning beyond doctrine.

Further down, two closed eyes wearing makeup appear above the phrase “See no evil, child.” This line blends apotropaic logic with personal instruction. Ethiopian scrolls often use eyes, nets, and geometric traps to repel evil; here, the eyes are stylized and adorned, suggesting discernment rather than blindness. The phrase carries both protection and reassurance.

The final sections shift into prayer: “Please, protect this sinner as she is merely lost. But she will find herself at her destination, wherever that may be. Guide her safely, on the journey.” And then: “Remember your roots,” written above a tree. The tree grounds the scroll, connecting spiritual journey to ancestry, place, and growth. From angel to tree, the scroll moves vertically—heaven to earth, spirit to body.

The scroll is stitched with green thread, chosen for its personal significance. Black ink carries the words, with green highlights woven throughout. The material itself—lined notebook paper—reflects a practical truth shared across cultures: people make do with what they have. Ethiopian scrolls were made from parchment because that was available; this scroll uses notebook paper for the same reason. The choice underscores a continuity between past and present: sacred or meaningful books do not require rare materials, only intention and care.

The decision to make a scroll rather than a codex came from a desire to see whether personal beliefs could be expressed not only in words but in physical form. A scroll invites movement. It unrolls, wraps, and extends. It becomes something that can be worn, not just read. This aligns with Amaranth Borsuk’s description of books as “technologies that invite certain actions and discourage others.” The scroll is not meant to sit on a desk. It is meant to be carried, touched, and activated through motion. Ethiopian healing scrolls were tailored to the client’s height; this one is tailored to the torso, designed to be worn like a sash. Its meaning is inseparable from its physicality.

Michelle Levy and Tom Mole’s emphasis on the “material conditions that shape how books are produced and used” also resonates here. The scroll’s use is devotional, but also archival. It documents spiritual history, aesthetic preference, and emotional state. It is a record of belief and doubt, stitched together with thread and memory. In this sense, it belongs to a tradition of wearable media—girdle books, locket‑texts, and the Ethiopian scrolls studied in Special Collections. Each of these objects gains meaning not only from what is written on them, but from how they are carried and by whom.

Leah Price’s observation that books often function as “objects that circulate socially, not just texts that are read” offers another layer. This scroll is not about status in the conventional sense, but it is a declaration. It says: faith matters. Protection matters. Personalization matters. It is a visible, material sign of spiritual care. Not hidden away, but displayed, worn, and recognized. The scroll becomes a way of carrying belief outward, making it part of daily movement rather than private contemplation.

The scroll also reflects the course’s emphasis on media-specific analysis. This class taught that books are not just texts—they are technologies, objects, artforms, and archives. The scroll embodies all of these roles. It moves, protects, remembers. It is a wearable archive of Baptist upbringing, aesthetic choices, and evolving relationship to faith. It demonstrates how form shapes meaning, how material choices matter, and how books continue to matter as physical objects in a digital age.

In the end, the scroll is not perfect, and it is not traditional. But it is deeply personal. It carries meaning in its words, its images, its stitches, and its paper. It shows that interpretation does not require expertise—only attention, curiosity, and a willingness to ask why. And it proves that belief can live not only in the mind, but in the hands, the body, and the objects we choose to make.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2018.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, New Directions, 1964, pp. 51–58.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

Levy, Michelle, and Tom Mole. “Introduction.” The Broadview Introduction to Book History, Broadview Press, 2017, pp. 9–28.

Marino, Mark C. “Marginalia in the Library of Babel.” markcmarino.com, https://markcmarino.com/diigo/..

Pressman, Jessica. “Old/New Media.” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 318–323.

Price, Leah. What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading. Basic Books, 2019.

Windmuller-Luna, K. Ethiopian healing scrolls. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015

Final Project- Remediation and User Interaction between Apple Digital Tech and Tablets

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Janesa Brosnan

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” (Apple Marketing Brochure 1977) Technology is in a constant feedback loop, changing and melding into new and old forms in a non-linear timeline. With the introduction of new portable digital, instead of continuing in new futuristic physical forms, designers went back to the literal board, the historical tablet. New digital technology references their form heavily to the wax tablet. Humans have used writing tablets such as wax and clay for centuries, encoding in people an intrinsic knowledge use. This intrinsic knowledge was used by new tech companies, and heavily by Apple, to make an easier transition from old media to new media. By making the form and interface already familiar to new users, the company creates an easier learning curve to new tech. Through this, the feedback loop is alive, referencing both new and old historical human habits within new digital media.

The foundation of technology development is in constant relationship with each other. In Jessica Pressmans, Old Media/New Media, “Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops. “What is new about new media,” Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write, “comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (1999: 15) (See REMEDIATION). “Remediation” is evidence of how new media impact old media.” (Pressman 1) The new digital interface of the ipad or the tablet is seeing a physical example of remediation. The historical rectangular form with content displayed inside the outer blocked borders is the same with the interior replaced with a screen. While the manufactured medium of circuit boards now encapsulates the ipad inside, the old and new tablet have a working system of nerves that allow knowledge to be displayed on an interface, whether electrical currents or wood fibers. The use of the writing tablet for centuries set up the inevitable evolution of the object through historical human reliance. The digitization of the tablet was the next step of the transition of the tablet, having previous transitions like stone to wood or clay to wax.

Steve Job’s company focus was making his products accessible and familiar. His products weren’t new inventions, but recrafted objects. He stated in a recalled past interview with Walter Isaacson, “The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.” (Isaacson 10) Job’s emphasis on intuitive knowledge goes back to the feedback loop and intrinsic knowledge use. Making an intuitive interface creates a simpler experience interacting with new tech. By basing his company on this, it forms a trend of basing the new on the old and a successful tactic that makes a popular company. By keeping the Apple products as raw as possible, interference between the process of intrinsic knowledge and action from it is minimized. This is shown in all Apple products, from iPads, macbooks, and iPhones. Clay tablets were very portable, having a rounded base and edges that suggests it fit in the scribes palm. (Borsuk 13) This resembles the sleek rounded edges of a basic iphone model. The First Generation iPhone is significantly bigger than the rest, having a thicker shape which can be both attributed to the early development of a full screen interface with an encoded keyboard and the attempt to replicate the portable clay tablet and its importance on being held in the palm. Macbooks can be tied to the wax version of the tablet. In Chapter 1 of How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak writes“ that a physical structure was devised to match and help circumscribe the intellectual unit of the pagina materially…multiple frames were often hinged together with a strip of leather or ring to increase the writing surface.”(Mak 12-13) The macbook was created as a way to maximize the availability of knowledge and writing through making a portable computer. Again, the designers of Apple drew on the historical form of the tablet by attaching two tablet models, but with one digital tablet and one keyboard and a physical locked connector instead of a removable, deteriorable, binding.

Old media and new media constantly circle each other in their development. By creating anew, it cannot be created without contributing to the old. In the era of the 20th Century, the sleek digital technology and its allure had taken foothold, but its grasp on the collective cannot be attributed to the aesthetic of futurism, but the nostalgia of the past. The creation of the most popular portable technology company was based on the emphasis of building from what already was. The usage of intrinsic knowledge systems and relatable technology made Apple flourish because of their understanding of simplicity and familiarity. By remediating a historical object, Apple created a simple transition between physical to digital because of creating the basic form with modern elements. The form and the usage never changed, just the evolution of its parts from wooden fiber nerves to circuit nerves.

Close Reading

My creative project is a homemade wax tablet. It is first made with two rectangular wooden tablets with rounded edges. The interior is filled with layers of melted beeswax which has been dyed with yellow pigment to show a brighter canvas instead of a natural beeswax’s white or translucent color. I connected the two tablets with drilled holes and wire as they were too small to put weaved thread into. I have attached a carved wooden stylus that I made from a wooden dowel which I shaved the end into a point with a knife. This technique of a carved wooden interior and rounded edges go back centuries. It was used as an early writing tool as it was accessible and relatively simple to make, though it took time to chisel and dye the wax. This taught me about the physical form of the interface and its development. We can see almost exact forms through different time periods, through the clay and wax tablets, to blackboard/chalkboard tablets, to digital tablets like iPads. I have attached a photo of a chalkboard set I found at Old Town Historic Park as a comparison to my wax tablets. This shows that while the parts to make the tablets are different, the mechanics, outer shell, and interface, still relatively take the same form outline. Through centuries, our use of this important tool is constant, but also how we make its mechanics. Through this object, we connect to humans, past, present, and future, because of our past down knowledge of a reliable object. This object, though may seem insignificant, is a marker of our connection to and evolution as a species.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press. May 2018.

Isaacson, Walter. “How Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Fueled a Design Revolution.” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 2012, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/.

Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. University of Toronto Press. 2011.

Pressman, Jessica. Old Media/New Media. Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality. 2022. www.jessicapressman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/13.01.22-Pressman_essay.pdf.

Tetzeli, Rick. “Why Jony Ive Is Apple’s Design Genius.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2017. www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/jony-ive-apple-design-genius-180967232/.

“Krokodil” and its Role in the Mass Distribution of Political Propaganda in Soviet Russia

Posted on December 14, 2025 by JJ Rezaei

Krokodil Download

Historically, political cartoons have been a common form of communication through which readers could be swayed, humored, or upset. Krokodil was a highly influential and popular Soviet satirical magazine which ran from the years 1922 to 2008 and circulated over 5.8 million copies at its peak (East View). This essay will use analysis from a physical copy of the 31st edition of the 1957 volume from San Diego State University’s Special Collections library to argue that by creating and distributing politically dense magazines which are inexpensive and easy to read, Krokodil’s accessible nature makes it able to be highly present in the public eye, making it an ideal form of distributing political propaganda. Drawing from the concept of the communication circuit in Robert Darnton’s What is the History of Books? and key bibliographic analysis concepts from How the Page Matters by Bonnie Mack, I study Krokodil in a holistic manner by going beyond the contents of the text on the page so as to study this edition of Krokodil as an object.

The parts of Darnton’s communication circuit which to be discussed in this essay are authors/illustrators, publishers, readers, and political/legal sanctions. Given that “images took up 50 percent more space in Krokodil than text,” I have decided to merge the categories of author and illustrators together (Waterlow 6). As demonstrated in Darton’s diagram below, this is only a few sectors of his communication circuit. Any further discussion would be of interest, however, it is outside of the scope of this essay.

Krokodil was a magazine that received reader submissions regularly and often published it (Waterlow 7). This creates a dialogical nature between the author/illustrators and readers of Krokodil. This plays a role in what is considered by many scholars to be “a positive role of popular humor in the USSR… to vent dissatisfaction and obviate political opposition (Etty 23). By being provided the opportunity to send in material, readers feel that they have a say in criticism regarding local or federal level politics. This implicit quieting of dissent, as will be further explained in this essay, played a positive role in maintaining the accessibility of Krokodil in the face of broader media censorship.

It is important to understand the role of political satire as a whole in the Soviet Union and the readership for Krokodil. As Jonathan Waterlow writes, “leading Soviet figures considered humour, and satire in particular, to hold significant power to effect social change” thus leading to the creation of a sector of government in 1930 called the Commission for the Study of Satirical Genres in Art and Literature (5). This is no small feat, as in the 1920’s there were around 250 magazines similar to Krokodil but by the early 1930’s only Krokodil remained due to a variety of issues which “combined to privilege Krokodil’s position after the extension of state control over cultural production” (Etty 8). It was decided with the creation of the Commission for the Study of Satirical Genres that satire would be allowed, however, only if it fell in line with Soviet policies (Waterlow 6). This was a major advance in terms of accessibility, as it meant that Krokodil can be distributed legally. It is important to note that Krokodil would not have existed if it were not for luck and its editors who had “inside knowledge of Central Committee priorities” (Etty 8). In other words, the magazine from the beginning had the advantage in remaining legally accessible.

As Krokodil succeeded as one of the only remaining satirical magazines and Krokodil’s publisher Pravda became increasingly influential on its contents, the jokes in Krokodil became “almost exclusively toward the capitalist West” (Etty 102). The fact that it no longer targeted even lower level Soviet bureaucrats made it ever safer of a satirical magazine to engage with as a citizen. Soviet Union residents were able to buy copies of Krokodil without any concern of punishment from the state.

Bibliographic Analysis

I am doubtful about the order of pages presented to me in Special Collections because what I believe to be the cover of the magazine was on the second page and the cover presented to me seems to be the last page of a different edition.

It is very difficult to find digitized copies of Krokodil online and many which are accessible do not have the full pages thus it is difficult to cross reference the magazine that was available in Special Collections. Since I could not find any online reproductions to cross reference, I was nervous to analyze the order of pages in the magazine. Upon further examination of the order of pages, however, it is plausible that the back cover of another edition was simply picked up with this magazine. This would not compromise the order of any other pages. For this reason, I will not be analyzing what was the first page of this codex when I received it, however, I will be analyzing the rest in the order it was given to me. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focuses primarily on the cover and first two spreads as they demonstrate the most political relevance.

The cover of this edition displays an American (demonstrated by the dollar on its hat) dropping down egg-shaped weaponry. The Russian written on it translates to “U.S. base”. The cover is the first thing the reader sees before they decide to buy the magazine. It, with little to no words, describes what will be the contents, theme, and general perspective of the interior of the magazine. Thus, immediately, Krokodil tells its audience that this magazine will be criticizing American militarism.

This edition was published on November 10, 1957. The Sputnik 1 landing–where the U.S.S.R. successfully sent a satellite into space happened on October 4, 1957, and Sputnik 2–where the U.S.S.R. sent Laika the dog into space happened on November 3rd, 1957 (NASA). Despite the recent (and massive) cultural successes of the Soviet Union, Krokodil’s cover page makes no mention of the space race and chooses to focus on anti-Western propaganda. This decision will be analyzed in depth later in this essay.

The pages of Krokodil have a significant amount of variation in the amount of ink utilized. High ink productions draw the reader’s eye and encourage an increased amount of time spent examining the meaning of the art.

The first spread of the magazine is filled with art of different styles and vibrant colors–almost all of them about space or space satellites. As Bonnie Mack writes in How the Page Matters, “the placement of images on the page… is a sign from designers about the value of the illustrations and how they are meant to be read. Illustrations may be designed to displace or replace letter forms” (17). These eye-catching illustrations displace and replace words.

The borders, drawn in pink, remove the need for a page number. This pink border has the added effect of highlighting the importance of the first spread of the magazine. Since no other spread has this border, it is demonstrably eye-catching and important. The pink border then bleeds down into an image of what looks like Sputnik 1 being launched into space. The border bleeding down complements the Sputnik satellite being launched up, immediately drawing the reader’s attention.

The amount of page space and color which is given to the first spread demonstrates its importance yet remains fairly simple. Most images will take up a quarter of the page (if not more) and rarely have intricate scenes. This has the effect of being easy on the eyes and mind–it does not take a significant amount of extra effort to decide what to look at and decipher the message behind it.

These artworks leave less room for interpretation and more for an explicit message. In regards to Soviet newspapers explicitly writing “(laughter)” in speeches to demonstrate the appropriate response readers should have when reading, Waterlow writes “This is instructive: the response was directed rather than naturally evoked; laughter was here a didactic tool as well as an offensive instrument” (7). Similarly, satire which leaves little room for interpretation and is clearly intended to be humorous like the illustrations in Krokodil contain an implicit monological communication with the reader teaching them what is and is not funny. In other words, it is in addition to how “images can propose an interpretation that is complementary, supplementary, or even contradictory” that images can be didactic (Mack 17). The clear-cut messaging of these satirical images would have played a critical role in preserving the legality (thus accessibility) of Krokodil in the face of media censorship.

On the spread on the following page, there is a larger image on the left side of the spread which is a black and white caricature of a man in the American military with bloodied hands. The dark red ink draws even more attention than the image–which is already the largest on the spread–does. This is the final image regarding the Sputnik moon landing, gradually bringing the reader into less overtly space-related topics. This brings an end to the theme of the images regarding the Soviet success in the space race

The man, dressed in an American military uniform, is protesting loudly at the radio. The message coming from the radio translates to “the Russians launched a satellite with a dog” and the title and caption read “Compassionate Colonizer” and “Oh barbarians! You’ve offended the poor dog!” respectively.

Images which use less colorful ink and smaller images may not be as immediately noticeable, however, they have a significant impact on the reader’s experience. Mack describes empty space on a page as giving readers the opportunity “to pause and consider the thoughts that they have encountered” (17). Illustrations which do not have much diversity in color, are small relative to the text, or even stylistically simple have a similar effect. Mack writes further that “images can propose an interpretation that is complementary, supplementary, or even contradictory” (17). In this case, small images beside large amounts of writing would serve a supplementary effect to the reader, aiding their understanding of the text. A prime example of this phenomenon would be the spread on page 5 of the magazine, where small black, white, and pale yellow illustrations are accompanied by many paragraphs of text.

These drawings are some of the smallest present in this magazine edition, an important thing to note when images (in total) take up more than 50% of the magazine (Waterlow 6). This stands in direct contrast to the previous spread on page 3, where various art styles and colors take up most of the page.

The see-saw-like relationship between images and text creates a balance which makes the reading experience all the more palatable. In other words, no single spread holds significantly more or less information than the other. This creates an experience which does not bombard the reader with information. Rather, information is neatly organized in a manner which encourages leisurely reading.

The decision to make the first spread of the magazine about the space race and not the cover is an interesting one. The first spread of the magazine implies extreme pride in the Soviet’s win in the space race, yet does not flaunt it on the cover. The emphasis on deriding opponents as opposed to flaunting successes demonstrates a desire from Krokodil’s editors to uplift messages which demonize the West more so than uplifting the U.S.S.R. The strong themes present in the cover and other spreads creates an easily digestible linear storytelling method. This linear storytelling method has an effect which is similar to a grocery store putting milk at the back of the store. In pursuit of milk, the customer goes through at least one full aisle. The customer is much more likely to buy something they did not initially want as they are forced to look at other groceries while in pursuit of milk. Similarly, any person who is interested in reading Krokodil must go through the first few pages of nationalist propaganda to engage in less overtly propagandized entertainment. This has the effect of entrenching propaganda into the magazine. Similar to how the average person does not get upset at the latent marketing of milk placement in grocery stores, it goes to say that the average person reading Krokodil would not be upset at latent propaganda in their weekly magazine. Thus, nationalist messaging in the first few pages of Krokodil make for a form of propaganda dissemination while at the same time being a pleasurable read for the residents of the Soviet Union.

Though this edition of Krokodil was published over 85 years ago, it still provides a lens through which to analyze society today. Various factors indicate that Krokodil was a magazine which emphasized easy to read messages by presenting it through a medium which encouraged leisurely reading. This includes but is not limited to the fact that it was one of the only legalized (which did not carry risk of punishment) political satire magazines. Additionally, it spread propaganda in a more covert and less obtrusive way by employing a linear progression of themes, allowing clearly messaged propaganda to be dissolved without causing much frustration to the reader.

This curated reading experience closely resembles the role social media plays in society today. Leisurely, digestible, and often highly politicized, social media platforms like Instagram, Meta, and X provide millions of people bite-sized and easily digestible forms of content. Similar to how the ease of reading Krokodil makes it an ideal medium for political propaganda, the ease of access of social media content makes it a prime breeding ground for political propaganda and thus radicalization. In many ways, the medium has not changed as radically as some may believe. Many similarities exist between the “read and swipe” culture of modern social media and the “read and flip” culture of Krokodil. As stated in Jessica Pressman’s “Old Media/New Media,” “Media do not replace one another in a clear, linear succession but instead evolve in a more complex ecology of interrelated feedback loops” (2). What I hope to emphasize here is not the relevance of old media or new media in isolation, rather, identifying and acknowledging old media as the architectural basis to new media. Even though technology and propaganda takes a different form today, Krokodil should not be seen as something of antiquity but rather a method through which to understand our modern forms of propaganda. Ultimately, by dissecting and analyzing old forms of technology, it is possible to gain a unique lens through which to examine modern forms of technology, communication, and potentially most importantly, propaganda.

Thank you for the wonderful semester!

Works Cited

Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83. JSTOR.

Dawn of the Space Age – NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/history/dawn-of-the-space-age/. Accessed 14 Dec. 2025, NASA History.

Etty, John. Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbj7g8s.

“Krokodil Digital Archive.” East View, http://www.eastview.com/resources/journals/krokodil/. Accessed 14 Dec. 2025.

Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Pressman, Jessica. “Old Media/New Media.” John Hopikins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality.

Waterlow, Jonathan. “Sanctioning Laughter in Stalin’s Soviet Union.” History Workshop Journal, no. 79, 2015, pp. 198–214. JSTOR.

Book Spines and Shelving

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Allea Exum

Fig. 1 Books on display and filed on shelves
Courtesy of Barnes & Noble

When perusing a library or bookstore, after admiring the initial books displayed on tables, one is often met with shelves of books. More often than not, these books are filed with their spines out, giving readers minimal information like the book’s title, author, and a sliver of the book cover’s aesthetic. Though today we might not think twice about this organizational choice, or perhaps even think it’s the most logical filing option, this method of storing and labeling books is relatively new. Historically, books have been stored in various positions: horizontal, fore-edge out, open on lecterns, among other ways, but rarely vertically with the spine outward, as is seen commonly today. Though the spine is essential to the book, as it binds the codex together and is central to how books are identified, its history is overlooked. Tracing the evolution of book storage, from tablets to codices, chained lecterns, and early shelving systems, reveals how the spine gradually transformed from a structural necessity to an integral aspect of the book.

Fig. 2 The library of the temple of Nabû at Dûr-Sharrukîn, G. Loud & C. B. Altman, Khorsabad Part II. The Citadel and the Town, OIP 40, Chicago, 1938, pl. 19c.
Source: https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2023-09-13.html

Before the side-bound book, written information took on different forms, notably tablets and scrolls, requiring varying ways of storage and showing the beginning of book-storing methods. Marking the start of book history is the clay tablet from the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia. Here, the earliest recorded written language, cuneiform, was born around 3100 B.C.E. Cuneiform physically manifested onto clay tablets that Amaranth Borsuk describes as, “generally rectangular with a slightly convex bulge” and ranged from “the size of a matchbook to that of a large cell phone — and could rest stably on a flat surface for storage or consultation” (Borsuk 7). In the article, “How did the ancient Mesopotamians archive their cuneiform tablets?” Assyriologist and professor at the University of Hamburg, Dr. Cécile Michel, discusses the various ways in which clay tablets were stored depending on their classification and purpose. For scholarly texts, like medical texts, literary narratives, poems, mathematical texts, etc, Dr. Michel notes that “tablets were often stored in niches in walls built of unbaked clay bricks.” For royal and official documents, e.g., administrative texts, accounting texts, treaties, and more, Italian archaeologists discovered a room in the palace of Elba containing over 17,000 clay tablets and fragments that had been arranged by content on wooden shelves that had since rotted. Some royal and religious texts were also either displayed for people to read or stacked and buried in the foundation of buildings to invoke divine favor or preserve knowledge. Regarding private documents, Dr. Michel discusses how “private individuals, for their part, kept dozens, hundreds and sometimes even more than a thousand cuneiform tablets in one or more rooms of their homes, making up their private archives.” She also notes that tablets have been found in baskets and boxes with labels as a means of storing and organizing them.

Fig. 3 Scrolls being stored on shelves
Source: Christoph Brouwer and Jakob Masen, *Antiquitatum et Annalium Trevirensium* (Liége: Jo. Mathiæ Hovii, 1671), vol. 1, p. 105

While the Mesopotamians developed their clay tablets, the Egyptians used papyrus from the Nile River to create scrolls, which became the primary method of recording information in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman culture. Scrolls were continuous rolls of papyrus, or later, parchment, that allowed for continuous reading. In these early forms of books, there was no equivalent to a spine that could bear identifying information, making the storage systems reliant on containers, tags, or spatial memory rather than visual labeling. In Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf, he explains how scrolls were then kept in various ways, from being upright in boxes to laid flat on shelves that were further divided into pigeonholes. When bound manuscripts, or codices, are developed and introduced to differing societies, these varying methods of organization would affect how codices, which later become the familiar bound books of today, are stored.

As books were being introduced into early societies, they existed alongside scrolls and tablets, making for an interesting transitional period of storing multiple book forms while the codex simultaneously evolved into the bound book familiar today. Though scrolls were a popular book mode, a disadvantage of the scroll was its clunkiness while reading. Due to the scroll’s rolled form, they required something to weigh down a side of it, whether it be two hands holding either side or paperweights weighing down a side while a hand held the roll. Not to mention, scrolls were long and would take up a considerable bit of room. These inconveniences needed a solution. In China, the solution was folding scrolls back and forth, creating an accordion fold and form. Unlike the scroll, this accordion-folded book allowed people to access any part of the book, a convenient and welcome change that Borsuk says “play[ed] a key role in…establishing the codex in China” (36). This format represented a crucial step toward the codex, which continued to evolve across different cultures. In Greece, the codex took form after the Assyrian tablet and was a bundle of folded pages sewn together. This meant spines existed on books, as pages were sewn together, but only served as a functional feature rather than a decorative one or a directly informative one. Roman poet Horace suggested that these grouped, folded pages provided a lightweight alternative to the wax tablets used. This convenient and easy-to-make form of book would then be produced alongside scrolls.

Though the codex had its advantages and seems like the better design choice, this did not mean scrolls simply disappeared in production within the next decade. Instead, scrolls and codices were stored together, as previously mentioned. In this time, codices and scrolls were stacked and tucked away into closed cabinets or piled into trunks, keeping everything safely concealed. Reasons for the closed cabinets varied as Petroski mentions that a “clash of forms may have been what drove the widespread adoption of the closed closet,” or perhaps book owners “might have worried about the moisture accumulating, or dust collecting on the rolls, or vermin crawling into them, ” or maybe even “trouble with thievery or unauthorized borrowing of their scrolls” (34) caused book owners to opt for enclosed shelves. This approach of closed cabinets contrasts with contemporary book storage practices, in which books are usually out on open shelves or behind glass to emphasize visibility and aesthetic value. Though scrolls and codices coexisted for a significant amount of time, between the third and fourth centuries, archaeological evidence shows that the number of scrolls decreased while codex books increased in production. This shift in increased codex book production would consequently change how books would be stored and displayed.

Fig. 4 Jean Mielot at work, surrounded by both scrolls and books
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Scribe_at_Work.jpg

As book production developed and expanded in the West, due to the rise of Christianity with monastic manuscripts, books became increasingly valued, leading to storage practices, such as chaining books, that emphasized protection and control of knowledge. Up until the thirteenth century, monasteries essentially had a monopoly on book production due to systematic influence like St. Benedict of Nursia issuing a rule requiring Benedictine monks to read daily, complete a book by Lent, and carry books while traveling, which emphasized literacy, having financial support for supplies, and having dedicated infrastructures, like a scriptorium, to concentrate on hand-copying texts. With these resources and rules in place, some monks became dedicated scribes, calligraphers, correctors, and rubricators for book production and trade or sale. In The Book, Borsuk describes how monks who served as scribes “spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps, all while wasting away the daylight,” showing how tedious, time-consuming, and miserable the task of creating books was. Considering all the time and labor that went into crafting books, protection was warranted.

To work around these concerns of theft and destruction, monasteries initially used locked chests and later, libraries. As Petroski mentions, chests were “not much to protect the books from wholesale thieves — for those were to be kept off the monastery grounds — as to secure the books from surreptitious borrowers” (44). Though chests were convenient for transportation and a familiar way of storing books, the number of chests increased as more books were being produced or bequeathed to monasteries from deceased owners, like bishops. To accommodate the growing collections, books were placed next to each other in chests “with one of their edges facing up” (Petroski, 57). From there, chests were upended and fitted with shelves, creating an armarium. Armariums with fitted shelves made book care and retrieval easier, thus more apt for keeping a larger number of books. As collections grew in monasteries, and later universities and churches, separate rooms — libraries — became dedicated to housing books. Having dedicated rooms for books meant that books could be displayed more openly on tables or with unlocked armariums while also being protected behind the single locked door of the library, reflecting a shift toward centralizing control. Though there was more security from the library, this didn’t solve the issue of books disappearing occasionally.

Fig. 5 Chained library in Hereford Cathedral Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chained_library

With separate lockable rooms for books, there was a natural evolution toward more efficient and protective bookcases. Armaria, though useful for storage could not just be crowded into rooms as it would obstruct one’s light source or conceal the acts of book mutilation one might perform. A solution to this problem, then, was to not keep books in armaria, but to put them out on display on lecterns, which was eventually done. Lecterns had sloped surfaces for books to be displayed cover up and side by side. To prevent books from disappearing, books were chained to lecterns, or later, horizontal shelves above lecterns, with fore-edges out either stacked horizontally of filed vertically, reinforcing the idea that books were meant to remain stationary and open for consultation. In this way, the spine of a book became an anchor, and still, not an essential identifier of the book. The addition of chains to books was a logical step for the Middle Ages’ libraries that also symbolized the Church’s gatekeeping of knowledge, as books were not allowed for further reading outside of their libraries. Not to mention, the lack of obvious visual identifiers, like titles or authors, would force a person to be somewhat familiar with the collection or rely on someone with that knowledge. As time continued to on and more books came to fruition due to the printing press and moveable type, storing books with chains became a difficult task, prompting the chained shelving system to eventually change.

Fig. 6 Hereford Cathedral chained library Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hereford-cathedral-chained-library

The medieval lectern storing system developed into the stall system as the lectern system became increasingly difficult and frustrating to navigate, prompting a necessary solution. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the lectern storage system was still in use, but its usability became increasingly difficult and alarmingly expansive. This expansiveness can be attributed to Gutenberg’s printing press, which made books easier to produce. The Book on the Bookshelf notes that “when Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester was petitioned by Oxford University in 1444 to help with the building of a new library…. ‘according to the petitioners, ‘should any student be pouring over a single volume…he keeps three or four students away on account of the books being chained so closely together,'” (Petroski 72). This illustrates how the lectern system demanded substantial space, as Oxford University was petitioning for a new library, since existing facilities could not accommodate students’ needs for reading and work, while chained books further limited access by restricting movement, thus keeping “three of four students away” (Petroski 72). A temporary solution included installing shelves either above or below lecterns with books stashed away horizontally, which inevitably involved chains tangling. The more sustainable solution: the stall system. In the stall system, books were stored vertically on the shelves. Even though this was a step toward the contemporary style of shelving, books were filed with their fore-edges out, spines inward to the shelf, and still chained. In order to navigate this new structure in libraries, a bookcase would have a table of contents framed at the end of the case with books listed in order, as can be seen in the Hereford Cathedral’s chained library. To find a book, one would have to reference and remember a book’s number on a bookcase’s table of contents to find its position on a shelf. But, sometimes, a book’s fore-edges, clasps, ribbons, or other devices that held the book closed would be labeled with distinguishing words. In this way, spines were no more meant to be perceived than the underside of a desk or the back of a computer is.

Fig. 7 Antique books with similar binding
Source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/286191489165

It was during the sixteenth century that a shift to shelving books with their spines out and labeling spines developed as bookbinding methods changed to include less three-dimensional ornaments or designs, making it easier to file books vertically, and allowed bookbinders and book owners to experiment with decorating the spine. Prior to the sixteenth century, it was common for books to be bound in elaborate fashions, with their boards covered in leather or fabric and sometimes decorated with metal bosses, carvings, and jewels. These three-dimensional decorations made it virtually impossible for books to be filed vertically, hence another reason for books to have been filed horizontally. As time passed, and tooled leather bindings became more fashionable than repousse or other three-dimensional ornaments, filing books vertically became a viable option for organization. With this shift toward tooled leather bindings also came an opportunity for bookbinders to decorate book spines to a degree similar to the front and back covers. This did not mean that books were then suddenly filed with spines out, just that bookbinding was changing in a way that would make the shift to books being stored spine out possible. In this time as books increased in numbers and came to have a more standardized look, with book owners finding it fashionable to have the book collections bound to match, marking spines with some identification of the book’s content was necessary. The identifying markings were the book’s title and/or author, and date of edition, though the format of which these appeared was not standardized. Petroski notes “that is not to say that all books in a library would yet have been shelved with spines out, as demonstrated by the fore-edge-painted books of the Pillone library, which date from about 1580” (107).

Fig. 8 Antique illustration pre 1900 – library in house from 1800’s with books filed spine out. Source: https://www.istockphoto.com

Stepping into the eighteenth century, as books became more standardized in binding and size, the spine’s new role was not just as the backbone of books, but as an essential communicative component of the book. In The Book on the Bookshelf, Petroski focuses on Samuel Pepys’ book collection in the early eighteenth century, which featured books “shelved spine out, as had come to be the fashionable thing to do” (134). This indicates that the practice of filing books fore-edges out had shifted to favor filing books with their spine’s out over some time. As previously mentioned, books started to don titles, the author, and the edition date on the spine, which became a more common practice as time continued. From the eighteenth century and on, filing books spine out, became a method of storage practiced still in the twenty-first century. As this way of storage became more standard, book owners and books spaces, like libraries, could experiment with different organization systems, like the Dewey Decimal System developed in the nineteenth century.

The history of the book spine in relation to book storage and organization is a relatively long and significant one that is often overlooked. The history of the spine reveals how contemporary book spines were products of changing book technologies and attitudes. For centuries, book spines were stored in a way that concealed them and rendered them irrelevant to readers. Being filed this way reflected how systems of authority restricted, preserved, and controlled access to knowledge. It also echoed previous methods of filing tablets and scrolls, which were often stacked. As books increased in production, standardization, and were more widely available, the spine’s function no longer became one of pure structural functionality. The spine became a communicative device on a book. This transformed book spaces, like libraries, into places that could foster curiosity, as one could peruse book sections and look at titles, rather than going in knowing exactly what one was looking for. The shelving practice of spine out that we are familiar with today was not an immediate solution to book storage problems in the Middle Ages, but one that developed from evolving material technologies and cultural priorities. By examining the history of book spines and storage, one comes to understand that the modern shelf is not just an organizational convenience, but a reflection of how knowledge came to be seen, accessed, and shared.

Works Cited

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

Michel, Cécile. How Did the Ancient Mesopotamians Archive Their Cuneiform Tablets?, University of Hamburg, 13 Sept. 2023, www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/publications/mesopotamia/2023-09-13.html.

Petroski, Henry. The Book on the Bookshelf. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010.

Stumble! Moving with the Media Network of Rufus Butler Seder’s “Gallop!”

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Raine Porath

The book is a mobile technology which moves across media and time. Following these movements was the collaborative exercise of the under/graduate “experimental” course BOOKS!!, taught by Dr. Jessica Pressman and Anna Culbertson at San Diego State University (“About/Class Info”). In visits to SDSU Library’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA), I wrote my first bibliography of Rufus Butler Seder’s toy book Gallop! (2007). I now narrate the traversals through creative project design which directed me back to the materiality of Gallop!, situating my embodied learning in what Alan Liu (2018) terms the “media network” through which the book and its sister text Swing! (2008) move. Seder’s “Scanimation” books mediate the colliding movements of intermedia histories between the book and screen media in relation to the physical reading processes of human bodies and their media network. Examining the media networks of Seder’s books necessitates examining the bodily movements of their readers – including myself – and models how materiality and network studies might be used in bodywork like disability studies.

Watch My Project Demo Here

(Captions forthcoming.)

Stumble! My Project Prototype

In reading Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s augmented reality book Between Page and Screen (2012), Pressman describes how its “network of animate and inanimate actors”, “one of whom is you . . . , work together [to] produce a literary performance that highlights simultaneously the thingness of the book and also the book’s capacity to participate in a digital circuit” (Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age 70-1). Scanimation books enact a parallel networking in which the “thingness of the book” – extending to its reader’s physical acts of reading it – embodies the book’s “capacity to participate” in an intermedia audiovisual circuit. This circuit model expands through the lens of Alan Liu’s network archaeology, in which “a ‘work’ [is] not . . . an item to be transported or linked in a network but instead as itself a micro-network.” By “treating works as internally networked structures”, a network archaeologist might trace a constellation of interactions and histories which ripple through time and place. When we consider a book as “dynamic, event-driven information”, we reveal the significance not only of its immediate material body but of that body’s movements, interactions, and convergences across “events.” In this paper, I rehearse how the design of Gallop! and Swing! act on the bodily movements of Seder’s readers – myself and others – to hypermediate the reading of the book as an intermedia network event.

Gallop! hypermediates reader activation: movements of the reader incite and parallel the movement of the book’s illustrations. I expand on my earlier bibliography of Gallop! to examine the Scanimation book’s materiality in the pages below.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

BOOKS!!

ECL 596. Fall 2025. Professor Jessica Pressman with Anna Culbertson

Category Archives: Final Project

The Communications Circuit and Fanfiction

Final Project: To Be a “Man of the Book”

Final Project: The Book Helix

Final Project: Collecting the Collector: A Material Biography in Specimens

Works Cited

Final Project: Before and After Lorca-A Personal Change in Perspective

My Final Project: Ethiopian Healing Scrolls and Books as Accessories

Part 1: The Bibliography

Part 2: The Analysis

Part 3: Books as Clothing, Books as Accessories: Embodied Reading and the Mobility of Text

The Creation of a Personalized Healing Scroll

Final Project- Remediation and User Interaction between Apple Digital Tech and Tablets

“Krokodil” and its Role in the Mass Distribution of Political Propaganda in Soviet Russia

Book Spines and Shelving

Stumble! Moving with the Media Network of Rufus Butler Seder’s “Gallop!”