Category Archives: Week 5: Book as Content- Borsuk Ch. 2 and “In the Beginning was The Word”

Week 5: Book as Content and Commodity

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In Chapter 1, “The Book as Content”, in Amaranth Borsuk’s, The Book, Borsuk walks us through our changing perception of books as content rather than object. Borsuk explains that, “we might generalize the historic moment at which the printed text arises as one of increasing intimacy between individuals and texts, which accounts, in part, for the form of the book as we know it today” (Borsuk, 83). The book, in the form we know it today, reflects the shift of books becoming not only a more intimate experience between book and reader, but also evolving around the needs of the reader. Instead of simply consuming information, actively engaging with the text, a “dialectical relationship” between reader and author became valued. 

This shift in perception allowed for books to become commodities. Borsuk explains that, “these reader-focused elements were just as important to marketing as to book use. They mark the codex as a commodity” (Borsuk, 88). “Authors and publishers activity courted this kind of dialectical relationship”, and began to consider not just the information books contained, but also how the physical design appealed to buyers. Features that we see today like open margins left space for and encouraged “active annotation–a visible and tactile engagement of mind with page”, making books more interactive and personal, and in turn increased desirability and market value (Borsuk, 89). As the needs of the reader changed, the form of the book did as well. The printing press allowed for books to be standardized, mass produced, and more accessible for a widening audience of readers. However, this also made books products to be designed and sold, rather than rare, sacred objects only found in monasteries and universities. The new commercialized market for books, shaped by consumer demand “played a key role in the commodification of the book and in our changing perception of it as content rather than object” (Borsuk, 109). 

The Changing Methods of Creating the Book

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Somehow, I feel that our obsession with the ideas within books restricts us from our understanding of them as commodity. As Borsuk illustrates in chapter 2 of The Book, the actual item of a book gradually morphed from something hand-done by scribes to production on an industrialized scale. Sandcasting has been done since ancient times, and in the renaissance it was utilized to form fonts, you had pressmen organizing and creating spreads of pages. This was a sector of the economies of the times that must have employed a large percentage of the working populace as literacy rates increased and the demand for books became something ravenous.

What really captured me was the realization that these early books were often created without covers. Borsuk writes that prior to “the nineteenth century, the cover [was] certainly part of the codex, but it [was] not, in fact, part of the book,” and the cover was only affixed to the pages as customers ordered books and publishers bound them once the purchase was made (74-76). I think many bibliophiles can conjure up the dream image of their own library, each book on the shelves bound in matching leather covers, as the aristocracy of prior centuries once did. As the book became a more widespread commodity, this fell largely by the wayside, though there are some contemporary bookbinders that will create wonderfully decorated bindings for the pages of your favorite book, like McCall. However, this practice has become a boutique niche well off the beaten path for most readers.

It’s hard to look at any of this and not think of the fears that must have arose from the workers in these sectors, as type became easier to create and set, as the pressing of pages became automated, as covers and bindings became cheaper to produce or changed in some way, these workers must have been terribly worried about the security of their jobs and the livelihoods of their families. I think in no small way that this mirrors many of the same fears we have today with the rise of digitization and the exponential expanse of AI in our world. What will become of us? What are we to do?

If we look to the book and its manufacture, I think there should be some answers that lay to rest the fears many in society now have in regard to this. As the creation of books changed with the values of consumers, so too did the industry. While at one time, bookbinders might have been employed in the thousands, it is now largely automated and a few have continued the practice. I think that the book, and knowledge, or humanity in general, will follow much the same path. The way we arrive to its end might be ever shifting, but there will always be a need for the human hand to mark the world in some way. It might be tempting to agonize over the looming iRobot or Wall-E end of civilization, but given the tenacity of mankind, this is terribly unlikely. As bookbinders faded from the forefront, artists took up the mantle, creating the wonderfully decorated covers we see today. As readers once relied on a few authors to create the vast majority of content, now there are an uncountable number of those laying words to paper. There is an ebb and a flow to all things. I think that no matter how our perceptions or stereotypes of it might shift, the book will always be.

Week 5: Books Are Not Just For Reading

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When I read Borsuk’s second chapter, it left me thinking about how drastically the world’s relationship with books has shifted over just a few centuries. The transition the author describes from medieval manuscripts as precious objects to Gutenberg’s mass produced volumes represents felt more than just technological advancement, it’s rather a fundamental reimagining of what knowledge can be and who gets to access it.

What struck out to me the most is how the printing press didn’t just change how books were made, but completely transformed their social function. In the days when monastic scribes copied texts by hand, books were essentially exclusive, even magical items. Not only were the illuminated manuscripts Borsuk depicts literature, but they were also artistic creations, status symbols, and sources of both worldly power. It showed that reading was a ceremonial activity that was frequently done in groups.

However, Gutenberg’s invention revolutionized writing in ways that at the time likely looked revolutionary (and dangerous). All of a sudden, books could be swiftly and affordably copied. The author became the primary creative authority rather than just one voice among numerous writers. In the digital era, this relates to the current discussions around authorship, who owns ideas when they may be duplicated indefinitely?

I’m particularly intrigued by Borsuk’s discussion of typography and design. The fact that early printers had to literally design and cast their own fonts really goes to show how technical and artistic considerations were inseparable. Every typeface was a deliberate choice that shaped how us readers experienced the text. This made me really think, in this day in age, do we take typography for granted today when we can change fonts with a click?

Additionally, the chapter poses pressing problems regarding physicality. The touch of parchment, the weight of the codex, and the striking visuals of illuminated letters were the first things that medieval readers recognized as books. This material motif survived even in the earliest printed books. However, we are reading more and more on screens, completely replacing the printed book. It seems to me that we are kind of moving on to the next phase that Borsuk mentions and that we might be losing something important. 

This chapter gave me even more questions from when I last read it. What new forms could occur that we are unable to envision yet if books have always been developing technology rather than static objects?

Residuals Form Content

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As Borsuk describes the form of the book which we are most familiar with, the printed codex, she prints in the book, “In addition to minute differences in the binding, each book copy will contain marginalia and other residues of reading that adhere to them thanks to their individual history of ownership and circulation. These are part of the copy without being part of ‘the book'” (76). In advent of the printing press and mass production of books, the idea or thoughts within specific copies of the book are what separated each individually in terms of content.

Now, I know this seems like common sense. But even five hundred years ago, things were the same as they are now. Today, we are bonded by an overwhelming sense of commodification in every single product accessible to us. It extends past books. It extends in the same tools we use: electronics, desks, books, pens, etc. What the book does in its many forms though, is it allows the symbiotic nature of humanity to flow from each person to the open pages. Borsuk writes, “Open margins left space for active annotation– a visible and tactile engagement of mind with page” (89). The most overlooked aspect of the mass printing availability is that it allows books to become a tool that is unique to each person that interacts with it. Print gathered content and disseminated it in an accessible manner, but more importantly it sparked the loop of thinking alongside the machine known as the book. As books became personally owned, it was the marginalia that further separated each copy that was distributed. It is the readers thoughts that work alongside the author and the book to form intuitive ideas and meaning.

Content Over Form/Concept Over Object

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In chapter two of The Book, Borsuk discusses how the commodification of the book, and in turn, the creation of the publishing industry, has led to the book as we understand it today: compact, portable, and personal. I found myself very focused on the sections about copyright. Borsuk points to the first copyright as the legal enforcement of “primacy of content over form” (78). It seems ironic to me that as books become more commercial, publishing industries look to designs and additives that can make the book feel more personal.

I see this reflected in the kinds of book paraphernalia available today, from subscription services, to box sets, limited/special editions (with sprayed edges/illustrations/snippets from the next book), etc. Additionally I think this kind of book personalization can be found in the social media presence of authors today. Even if the physical book itself cannot be personalized, then content can be personalized through interaction with the author in digital spaces. In theses spaces readers can personalize their reading experience by asking questions that inspire para-text from the author. This para-text itself is then commercialized (think Dumbledore is gay discourse). I see this a lot with a authors who are active on tiktok.

The focus on content over form also leads to the author becoming a valued figure. Borsuk exemplifies this with copyright law: “In the United States, publiction is not actually required to secure copyright…If a work has been made ‘for hire,’ then copyright belongs to the employer or corporation that commissioned it” (100). This example made me recall the author of The Vampire Diaries, a work for hire book series from Alloy Entertainment, who was fined from writing her own book series after the first three books because the publisher didn’t like where the author was taking the story. After this her series continued to be ghostwritten. I think it’s interesting that in an age where the author itself is part of what’s being commodified we can see that the physical “object” of the author is not as important as the concept of the author.

The Book as a Body

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Sometimes I forget that a book is more than just words on paper. While reading chapter 2 of The Book, however, I came across Borsuk’s description of the codex as if it was a human body, with a spine, a head, and even a tail (p. 77), which reminded me that books are more than just that. At first this sounded almost funny to me. Why would we talk about a book like a person? But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If you take a closer look, a book is not just a neutral object. It is something we interact with, hold in our hands, and even treat with a certain care, as if it had its own presence.

This made me rethink my understanding of reading. Usually I imagine reading as something between me and the words. But Borsuk makes clear that it is also something between me and the material form of the book itself. The hinge of the cover, for example, gently pulls the first page open, almost like an invitation. That small detail makes the book feel active, as if it greets us which suddenly makes reading look less like purely consuming content.

I also thought about how this comparison points to the life story of a book. Just like people are shaped by their environment, books are shaped by many forces before they even get to us. The author gives them their voice. The publisher and designer choose their appearance. The printer turns them into a physical object. And then, once the book is finally in the world, readers add their own traces. Names on the inside cover, underlined passages, folded corners. All of these leave marks like experiences leave marks on a person.

When I think about books this way, they stop looking like static containers of text. They start to look like companions that carry their own history. Every copy has grown through different stages, passed through different hands, and therefore carries something of that process with it. To read a book is not just to read words, but to meet something that has already lived a kind of life.

In the end, Borsuk’s description made me realize how much more personal reading becomes once you see the book as a body. It is not just information to take in. It is an encounter with another form, one that has its own presence and its own story, waiting for us to open it.

Books as an intimate object

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The Renaissance inaugurated the age of books, at least among the aristocracy, and many of the features we now associate with the codex arose in response to the boom in silent readership” (p. 54). Oral literature originated and refracted from the idea of providing a sense of community—it preserved traditions of the past, and typically there were multiple competing versions. There was no single “correct” version, since stories changed and evolved over time, much like the evolution of the book as an object. The book was no longer viewed merely as an artifact but as a device that contained and spread knowledge. Furthermore, because the Renaissance was a period of academic and intellectual development and curiosity, only the higher orders of society had access to books—and, most importantly, they were the only ones who had access to education, an education that gave them the tools necessary to read. For instance, books were widespread among aristocrats, scholars, and the clergy. Books also served as symbols of status, as noted by their availability “among the aristocracy.” They were not only tools for instruction and learning but also demonstrated social standing and divisions among different classes. If I were to make an educated guess, because there was a social and cultural shift in literature and literacy regarding the modern features associated with the codex, those features might include page numbers, indexes, and tables of contents. Books became tools for study and reference rather than mere amalgamations or compilations of manuscripts, serving a different purpose for a society that had shifted its values. One of the values in question is individualism over the sense of community– books and literature were no longer meant to provide a sense of community but created a space for self-reflection– making our relationship with literature private and, in some instances, spiritual and sacred. 

Week 5: Morph as Content

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Amaranth Borsuk defines the book as “a portable information storage and distribution method” (The Book 1).The History of Reading Working Group (William Warner et al.), part of UC Santa Barbara’s Transliteracies Project, reads these methods across time through In the Beginning Was the Word: A Visualization of the Page as Interface (2008). The Flash animation, now archived as three video simulations, “represent[s] the morphs of the page over the past 1,400 years” through “the first fourteen lines of the Gospel of John.”  I examine the connotations of the term “morph” in the context of Borsuk’s materiality studies.

I was curious about The History of Reading Working Group’s use of “morph” as a noun, which I had only been familiar with in evolutionary biology contexts. The OED lists the meanings of “morph” as “The action, process, or technique of changing one image into another by morphing; an instance of this” (first attested in 1991) or as “An image or character created by morphing”, particularly through computer manipulation (first attested in 1992). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers the additional meaning of “An allomorph” (2022), suggesting the morph as a multiple variation of a linguistic element. The OED’s examples show the morph’s prominence in discourses of computer art and digital literature from the 90s. The term frames digital media’s linguistic and visual transformations as physical metamorphoses, asserting the materiality of digital media and language.

In the Beginning Was the Word presents a sequence of morph, with its own .SWF (“john-morph.swf”) and video files representing more. The biologic connotation that is remediated in digital uses of “morph” – “each of the different forms exhibited by an animal or plant in the course of its life cycle” – presents the digital morph as one “form” in a broader media ecology (“Morph, N. (4).”). Approaching In the Beginning Was the Word as “morphs” characterizes the page, and book technology, as a multiply evolving type of body. Framing books as biological morphs frames books as biologically or ‘naturally’ mutative.

The “natural”, though, is defined through contemporary natural science’s own morphs of Enlightenment codifications. If we approach the page through a natural science framework, we need to grapple with the politics of that framework, or we risk “naturaliz[ing]” the book’s political imbrications (Borsuk 109, 1). As Borsuk writes, typography mediates “the legacy of othering embedded in language’s form” (93). Following Borsuk’s definitions, we must read the page’s morphs not simply as “content,” but as “objects.” When approaching objects in Special Collections, I’ll pay closer attention to design, including typography, as signifiers of sociopolitical contexts.

Post is no good this week as I feel like I’m under two feet of municipal hard water & I think the other 600 words made no sense. Vaxx up & mask up !

The Book as Content

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Throughout this class, and especially while reading The Book, I realize how lucky we are as reader’s of today’s books. Reading through how books and the presentation of their content has changed has taught me how much of how we expect to read is actually new, and it makes me a bit sad to realize which practices have been lost in favor of ease of access and consumption.

Until the mid sixteenth century were shelved with inward facing spines, with their edges facing out, each distinguished by designs on their edges (Borsuk 81). What a lost art! Of course anyone could go into a book store and find books with sprayed edges making them look beautiful and rare, but those books would likely be few, or part of some special edition only sold for a set period of time. Books with distinct and decorated edges are not common enough today, if I were to flip all the books on my shelf backwards I’d only be looking at column of papers, risking a papercut anytime I wanted to pick one out. However, ss Borsuk describes, this change from out facing edges to out facing spines came out of necessity, “readers became collectors whose ever-expanding libraries served as displays of both intellect and wealth, that books were shelved with their spines outward to showcase their bindings…a feature of the codex we now take for granted.” (81). The progress of the book is the progress of the reader, instead of their fore-edges book spines become detailed in order to showcase information relevant to a reader who now owns a multitude of books, as the needs of the reader change, the book must change. The book evolves and becomes portable to, “show off one’s literacy and wealth,” the book changes and becomes a gift as “a symbol of great kinship,” and the book explodes into a catalyst of transformation to change readers, “by what [they] have read.” (82, 84).

The changes of the book has undergone have resulted in the book being amazing devices, being of reasonable weight and size for transportation featuring informative and pretty spines, and featuring plenty of room in their margins for annotations. But they are not perfect yet, they will undergo more changes and adaptions for the needs of readers now and readers of the next generations. In the future perhaps books will all be made from recycled paper, to support sustainability, or there might finally even be mass produced glow-in-the-dark books for readers who would like to read in the dark but not from an illuminated screen, only time and the desires of readers will tell how the book’s presentation of it’s content evolves.

Book as Content

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As we have grown up in a modern world where the most common book is cheap paper bound together by glue beneath a cheap cover, it can be challenging to undo our orientation to what qualities we expect to be “normal” of the codex and typical to the reading experience. Before this class, I was aware of “book history” as a field of study, however, knowing little, I never anticipated how our interactions with and expectations of a book reflects and constructs meaning. Though these biases may be unconscious, they reflect Borsuk’s observation that “Our conception of the book and access are intimately shaped by the shape it takes.” (Borsuk 89). With content, form, and format being inseparable entwined with each other, Borsuk acknowledges how the material form of the book as an object influences our interaction with the book as a form of content that contains information within its vessel. 

Something I had not recognized within my own perception of the codex was addressed in Chapter 2 of The Book as Borsuk makes note of how we often consider books that are larger as more valuable. Reflecting on our visit to Special Collections last week I can now recognize how in handling the archives I did view the Torah scroll and the very large book with the wooden cover (I am drawing a blank on what the book was called) as more valuable or as deserving more care than some of the smaller books like the artist books. Intrinsically, I felt the size and more elaborate nature of their materials like wood and metal deserved more reverence. In contrast, the small nature and more common materials used in the other books felt more casual and approachable because of their similarities to the modern book, which is why they didn’t feel as significant. 

Through this experience, I better understand my orientation to the book and Borsuk’s emphasis on the importance of shape. Without knowing or understanding the contents or histories of these different artifacts, my mind followed social and historical constructions that larger items demand more authority and legitimacy partially due to taking up more space. Therefore, form and format impact content as our instinctual need to judge a book by its cover provides the framework for how a work’s meaning is interpreted and the medium is integrated into the book’s message.