Tag Archives: Borsuk

Final Project: Traces in Clay

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Books have never been static objects, even though contemporary mass production steers us to see them as uniform vessels for text rather than dynamic, material objects shaped by the environments they inhabit and interact with. My midterm examination of the 1578 A Nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes, located at San Diego State Universities Special Collections, revealed how the book’s physical condition holds a narrative just as compelling as its printed words. In fact, a narrative which would be incomplete by only looking at the words. I found the pages of Dodoens’ herbal discolored around the edges and spotted brown, with a trail of holes book worms have left behind. Before the creation of wood-pulp paper, most commonly used today, book makers used rag paper made from linen and cotton fibers. This material is both resilient, able to preserve itself from 1578 to 2025, but also vulnerable to light exposure, oxidation, and humidity. However, I discovered the “damage” to this copy is what made its story unique, transforming it from one of many identical copies into a rare artifact with its own biography. The narrative of a book is more than just the words inside, but can be found in the physical materiality of the container itself. In our contemporary moment, we are easily disconnected from the material history of the book. It has become easy to think of books as static containers of text, rather than organic artifacts. In order for me to truly read A Nievve Herball, or, Historie of Plantes, I had to look beyond the words, and unto the pages that hold them. This prompted me to explore further beyond the page, to go back in time before the existence of the white, thin, paper page itself. Despite the absence of the “page” we know today, reading and writing still flourished, however, the physical form it took remained closely tied to the natural world which interacted with it, making it easier to view as part of a broader, organic ecology. I have extended my original material investigation, a biography of a special collections book, by creating my own cuneiform inspired clay tablet. In doing so, placing the early modern codex into a broader history of book technology that stretches back to its predecessors in ancient Mesopotamia. This creative critical work demonstrates that the physicality of books, whether clay tablets or codex herbals, are organic, ecological artifacts whose meanings emerge through their material affordances and ongoing interactions with human and non-human forces.

Amaranth Borsuk reminds readers in her 2018 book, The Book, that “the story of the book’s changing form is bound up with that of its changing content” and that each book technology, from tablet to codex, offers its own “affordances” that shape how reading and writing occur (Borsuk, 1). When I examined the 1578 herbal, the bookworms’ holes and the browned rag paper revealed centuries of exchange with light, humidity, insects, and human touch. These marks formed their own ecological biography, evidence that the book has always been part of a larger system rather than a static, timeless container. However, these ideas directly echo the earliest history of writing, specifically the clay tablets of ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia, which were inseparable from their environmental origins. Borsuk explains that Sumerians turned to clay because it was “an abundant and renewable material” and because they already possessed “highly developed techniques for sifting and working with clay to create durable and lasting artifacts” (Borsuk, 4). Just like the rag paper of Dodoens’ herbal, clay was never neutral, it was chosen, shaped, and culturally meaningful because of its ecological availability. The clay had to be collected directly from the ground, worked by hand, and inscribed while still wet, making the material origins of writing almost impossible to ignore. Through this process, reading and writing remain closely connected to the environment, resources, and people from which they emerged, leaving far fewer gaps between the final product and the natural world which provided it. 

My clay tablet artwork emerged from this recognition. To create it, I shaped wet clay into a palm sized slab resembling early cuneiform tablets, then impressed the surface with a stylus, a modern rendition of the original stylus carved from a reed. This process mirrors the ancient method described by Borsuk: “a scribe impressed a corner of the reed into the clay at an oblique angle, using combinations of wedge shapes to make characters” (Borsuk, 6). Shaping the tablet required direct physical engagement with the clay material. The wet clay clung to my hands, refusing to be overlooked. Unlike woodpulp paper, which disappears from our touch the moment we turn the page, the clay insisted to be noticed, making its natural origins, and my own role in shaping it, impossible to forget. Using my clay tablet and the cuneiform writing technique, I inscribed letters and symbols inspired by Mesopotamian signs, however, this is not the focal point of my artwork. A reader able to see past the words will find intentional imperfections; impressions of various leaves and sticks, textures of rocks and dirt, cracks and holes, and even finger prints. These marks reinterpret ancient cuneiform tablets and the deterioration in Doden’s herbal, transforming what might be called “damage” into a representation of the ecological relationship between “book” and the environment. In Johanna Drucker’s “The Virtual Codex: From Page Space to E-Space”, she observes that “a book… is not an inert thing that exists in advance of interaction, rather it is produced new by the activity of each reading” (Drucker). My clay tablet materializes this. Its meaning and history does not rely on the text, but on the reader’s ability to interpret its material surface. It must be “read” like the herbal, by reading the marks, textures, and traces. Its history is entangled with the materials and human and non-human forces that created and shaped it. The leaf impressions, the stylus wedges, and the drying cracks each represent different condensed historical moments in it. In both cases of the herbal and my tablet, these imperfections act as inscriptions of time, environment, and exchange. Just as the herbal pages bear witness to centuries of life, the clay tablet contains a condensed record of its own formation and interaction with the natural world. 

This process of creating my critical artwork reveals that books have always been shaped by their physical materials and environments as much as by the text they contain. By moving back in time from the pages of Doden’s herbal to the cuneiform tablet, I came to understand reading and writing as an organic, ecological process with many participants rather than only a textual one. This art project demonstrates that the book has always been alive, evolving through interaction with the natural world. The clay tablet reveals what modern woodpulp paper can allow us to forget, that every book materializes from the natural world and is never finished with interaction or exchange. This project challenges our modern detachment from the materiality of the book, pushing us to see the “book” as part of a larger, organic ecology, as more than a vessel for information. Reading and writing is more than an encounter with text, but with matter, history, and environment; a process that does not start when you open a book, or stop when you put it down.

Works Citied:

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, 2018. 

“Cuneiform Tablets and Cuneiform Inscribed Other Items.” View Items, Arte Mission, www.artemission.com/viewitems.aspx?CategoryID=91. Accessed 14 Dec. 2025. 

“Cuneiform Tablet: List of Magical Stones.” Achaemenid or Seleucid – Achaemenid or Seleucid – The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Museum, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/321680. Accessed 14 Dec. 2025. 

Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space.” Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, companions.digitalhumanities.org/DLS/content/9781405148641_chapter_11.html. Accessed 14 Dec. 2003.

Borsuk’s Final Chapter, “Book as Interface”

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In Chapter 4, “Book as Interface,” Borsuk presents the book as not just an object, but as something we interact through, an interface which connects us to ideas. She explains that “the book is an idea we have of a bounded artifact… able to take any number of physical forms… It is, essentially, an interface through which we encounter ideas” (Borsuk, 197). I found it interesting how Borsuk sees the book as flexible and adaptable, yet still rooted in the habits we’ve built over centuries of reading. Even when we read digitally, we’re still basing it on “a history of physical and embodied interaction that has taught us to recognize and manipulate it” (Borsuk, 197). Even our digital reading experiences are shaped by how we’ve learned to hold and manipulate the physical, material book.

Borsuk points out that “the book accommodates us, and we accommodate to it” (Borsuk, 198). Borsuk presents the relationship between us and the book as not a one way relationship, but two. We shape how books are read, and they shape how we read. She brings in Lori Emerson’s argument that modern technology often hides its interfaces, “turning us into consumers rather than producers of content” (Borsuk, 198). Despite this, the physical book continues to influence how we think about reading, “the book is a model… for the way we think about reading in electronic spaces” (Borusk, 201). Our e-readers, kindles, and various digital readers still mimic the design and pages of what we view as the classic ‘book’, even though they don’t have to. With modern technology, we have nearly infinite ways to re-imagine reading, yet, the physical, material book still guides us. 

The Future of Books as a Return to the Origins of Story

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Borsuk’s final chapter on the book as interface had me thinking a great deal about remediation and the process of it. All the history of humanity has really been the history of storytelling, and a book is nothing but a method of transmitting a story. Borsuk writes, “historian Matthew Rubery contends that the medium [of audio books] emerged to both reproduce the printed book and repair its shortcomings” (205). No matter how much we all may love books and the idea of them, there are some things the traditional codex volume simply cannot do. “Literature,” Borsuk writes on page 208, “emerged from an oral tradition that included bards, troubadours, filid, meddahs, and griots, among other literary performers.” If we continue to think about literature in this way, then we can trace the origins of mankind’s and bibliophiles’ obsession with the story and, as a result, the book, to a point some tens of thousands of years ago around a fire where the first fragments of language were being used to weave together tales of imagination. The oral tradition is the absolute baseline of story. It is what we are always striving to replicate. The book is only one point in the long and complex history of human storytelling.

Storytelling has been in a glacial process of change for all of our history, slow and nearly imperceptible, but once the process is complete, or has moved on to a new phase, the landscape is radically changed in ways that we may not have foreseen. I think that what we are living through, when it comes to books and the perceived threat they are said to be under, is perhaps better understood as a shift in the way story is told. If a book is only a nexus for that, then it is of no higher or lower order than a podcast, an audiobook, a video game, or any other current or uninvented method of storytelling. The book has been romanticized so much by those of us who love them that to envision a world without them is terribly frightening, but this romanticization is only a result of the times in which we live. As we discussed earlier in the semester, there was backlash and fear ascribed to reading and what it would do to the minds of the people from the great thinkers of the Hellenic period of our history. So it should come as no surprise the backlash new forms of storytelling receive when they first emerge in our contemporary conversations.

The knowledge of storytelling’s remedial nature should give us some hope that all is not actually lost when it comes to human knowledge and creation and culture. We are merely watching it turn into the next form of itself. An era may be drawing to an end, though the book will likely never go away, the main methods of knowledge dissemination and storytelling may shift dramatically. As Borsuk says in the final paragraph of The Book, “Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Gutenberg parenthesis, rather than the Gutenberg era, suggesting that we are returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way” (258).

E-Lit: Making a Text Sing

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In the final chapter of The Book, Borsuk gives examples of, “contemporary approaches to digital reading that, rather than offering up a crystal goblet, invite us to trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing” (203). This quote encapsulates how I feel about electronic literature. All books are a collaboration between creators and readers, but not all creators and readers are necessarily conscious of this when they’re creating and/or reading books. Electronic literature is necessarily an interactive experience, which makes the collaborative nature of the book impossible to avoid.

One example that Borsuk mentions is Pry, by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. Borsuk says that, “Pry explicitly requires the reader’s interaction to make meaning” (247). The text remains flat, literally and figuratively, if it is read like a normal e-book. The text must be pried apart for the reader to literally see what would otherwise be subtext. The reader gains a greater understanding of the text not just by close reading, but by active participation.

This is not our first encounter with E-Lit in this class. We read Marginalia in the Library of Babel by Marino at the beginning of the semester. To find meaning in Marino’s annotations, we had to interact with hyperlinks, follow rabbit holes, and make connections. While we all might have interpreted Borges’ Library of Babel differently, may have read with different levels of attention or awareness of context, may have skimmed it at different paces, but we probably interacted with the text similarly, based on how we’ve been trained to read these kind of text in school. Marino’s text, however, is not something most of us are trained to read. Many of us would have tried to read it in a linear form, chronologically or in table-of-contents order, but some probably tried to read it like they might explore Wikipedia, clicking on whatever seems most interesting at the time. Some probably skipped most of the hyperlinks and missed all of the story. Each of us truly read a separate text.

This is why I love E-Lit. It encourages close reading, exploration, and collaboration. It doesn’t just enable readers to make the text their own, it forces them to do so. The authors/designers/coders who create electronic literature must also understand our medium. We need to be able to, as Borsuk puts it, “[draw] attention to the interface to explore and exploit the affordances of the digital” (203). We must know what a reader expects to see and the different ways a reader might interact with the form so that we might subvert those expectations. We must be okay with the idea that most people won’t read every bit of text. The average reader won’t even find every page. However, the culture of electronic literature practically demands that someone will, if you leave it out there long enough to float around in cyberspace.

Ways of Seeing

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My interpretation of the book has shifted—not only is it a materialistic characterization of the physical qualities of the book itself, but also a vessel that reveals society’s underlying values, whatever those may be at the time it is written or read. The book is ever-evolving, adapting to social trends; in the 1600s, it was viewed as a symbol of status, power, and control, as only those of the higher orders of society were able to read and interpret texts. Those views have greatly shifted—people rarely read today, and those who do often romanticize it for the prestige that has become intrinsic to the book—echoing that the book is dependent on our values. Therefore, the book is not merely a physical object but a cultural artifact that responds to and acts in accordance with our needs. It is a material form that reflects our values and technological advancements, a medium that can serve as a weapon, a sacred text, or simply the bread and circus for a society too self-centered to recognize the value and worth of words. Therefore, the book cannot be a fixed object but one that embodies our social structures, operating from within rather than independently; the book allows us to engage with the world in alternate ways. We are all interconnected, sharing the same experiences, collectively challenging our ideas and beliefs, encouraging critical thinking and awareness. As Amaranth explains, “we might examine the book as what scholar N. Katherine Hayles calls it a “material metaphor”, through which we interface with language and which in turn alters how we can do so” (Borsuk 141); language is not static, it bounces between different signifies/signifieds, it allows us, the readers, to mediate between, word, text and meaning– in a manner, the book not only represents our social values as I previously mentioned but also redefines our ways of thinking– influencing how language is transformed through an amalgamation of social-cultural apparatus that interjects in our relationship with words and text.

The Book as Interface – Completing the Circuit

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Over the past weeks, my thoughts about the book have slowly shifted. From body, to space, to page. Each chapter of Borsuk’s The Book has opened a new way of seeing what it means to read. This week, reading Chapter 4, I realized that all these ways were already connected by something larger: the book as interface.

Borsuk reminds us that the book is not only an object we hold, but a surface where meaning happens. It stands between us and the text, turning thought into touch, paper into feeling. What struck me most was the line “The book accommodates us, and we accommodate to it.” (p. 198) It captures exactly what I have been circling around all along. Reading is not just something we do, but something that also shapes us. We lean toward the page and the page leans back.

In earlier chapters, I imagined each page as a room, a space to walk through. With Borsuk’s idea of the interface, that room now has a threshold, which is the moment where we cross from our world into the book’s. The interface is that invisible border, one that feels natural only because we have learned not to see it. When she describes how modern devices try to make the interface “transparent”, I think back to Mak’s observation that we have been trained to treat the page’s edges as the limits of our thinking. Both show that what feels natural is often the product of design. A quiet space built around our attention.

What makes Borsuk’s idea powerful is that it reintroduces the body. Touching, turning, swiping, each is a way of thinking through movement. The gestures may have changed, from paper to glass, but the intimacy remains. Reading becomes a circuit that includes us. The author, the text, the page and the reader’s hands all connected in one loop of attention.

Looking back, I have really enjoyed this journey through The Book. Each chapter felt like walking a little further inside it. From its body, to its rooms, to the very surface that connects us to it. What is most interesting to me is how much my own perception has changed along the way. I began by thinking of the book as something to look at, but now I see it as something to move through. The book is not a fixed thing, but a living relationship. A body that greets us, a space that invites us in, and finally, an interface that completes itself only through our touch. Every time we turn a page or brush a screen, we close that circuit. In the end, the book is not what stands between us and meaning. It is the place where we meet it.

Week 7: Book as Idea

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In Chapter 3, “The Book as Idea,” in Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, Borsuk explores how the physical appearance of the book, along with content, has continually changed alongside human culture and technology: “as the history of the book’s changing form and its mechanical reproduction reveal, it has transformed significantly over time and region” (Borsuk, 110). This transformation not only reflects materials or printing methods, but the shifting relationship between readers, creators, and the physical objects we hold. The book’s form has always mirrored values, artistic or commercial, and tells us about the world that produces it. 

In our current moment, the relationship between material and meaning has become more estranged, “as contemporary publishers seek to embrace digital technology, we find ourselves at a moment in which the form and content of a work bear little relation to one another. Amazon offers us the same ‘book’ in paperback or Kindle edition…” (Borsuk, 112). As books become interchangeable across various platforms, they increasingly lose their physical identity. “When books become content to be marketed and sold this way, the historic relationship between materiality and text is severed” (Borsuk, 112). The book, once a tangible object reflecting human touch, becomes purely information, designed for easy consumption, lacking the once physical and intimate engagement.

Borsuk brings in Romantic poet William Blake, who “undertook every stage of their production”, resisting the industrialization of books and “‘dark Satanic Mills’ of eighteenth century London that emitted toxic fumes, employed the poor and children in horrendous conditions, and made books into mass-produced commodities” (118). Instead, returning to “an earlier idea of the book—one steeped in mystery, beauty, and visionary language that bears the marks of its creator’s hand” (Borsuk, 118). Borsuk brings in Blake to show that books can be both a vessel for creativity, and “a means of spreading social justice” (Borsuk, 124). The meaning of a book can be found in how it presents physically, an aspect that we often lose today. The form a book takes can reflect care, individual artistry, and even resistance to commodification. 

At the end of chapter 3, Borsuk concludes that “defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form. Our changing idea of the book is co-constructive of its changing structure” (Borsuk, 195). Blake’s work demonstrates this, his books were both personal artworks and social justice statements, shaped by not only how they were meant to be read, but experienced. In today’s digital age, Borsuk reminds us what we lose when books are no longer able to be held, with physical pages to flip. 


Week 7: Carrión’s Bookworks

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In a section titled, “The New Art of Making Books,” in this week’s chapter of The Book, Borsuk discusses Ulises Carrión’s concept of the bookwork. Borsuk gives a few definitions of such a work. Bookworks “refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form” (145), while encouraging authors and readers to pay more attention to both, and pay more consideration to the whole object. This definition was not entirely clear to me until I began digging in the Notes.

Borsuk mentions a video of Carrión speaking at The Evergreen State College in 1986. In the quoted section of the video, Carrión calls libraries, museums, and archives “perfect cemetaries for books” (145). This idea intrigued me, so I went looking for the rest of the video. While the link in the notes no longer works, I was able to find the video on YouTube.

This isn’t just a video of Carrión lecturing at a college class, though. According to Carrión’s own title cards, it is also, “A selection, both limited in scope and quite arbitrary, but nevertheless of great significance, of bookworks from Ulises Carrión’s Other Books and So Archive.” In the video, between brief clips of Carrión speaking, we get to watch him flip through bookworks from his personal archive.

In the video, Carrión describes his selection process for works entering the Other Books and So Archive. He says, “In order to present only bookworks, we have been forced to exclude a lot of artist books which don’t embody a statement on books in general” (31:33-31:51). This gave me a clearer understanding of bookworks. They’re not just artist books or non-traditional books or some ephemeral message of mindfulness. A bookwork is an object which specifically embodies a statement on books.

Borsuk, paraphrasing Carrión, says that, “Bookworks take on greater importance when the codex itself seems to be imperiled.” (145) The codex certainly seems to be imperiled today. If you look at BookTok, it seems like people would rather speed through stories than spend a lot of time deeply reading one book. If you look at Amazon, it seems like people would rather buy cheap, AI-generated “slop” than books written by humans. It’s a rough landscape to be looking towards as an aspiring book maker, but the challenges of this zeitgeist are also opportunities. In this era of AI slop, over-consumption, and the growing feeling that books are worthless, book artists are tasked with creating new bookworks which can embody a meaningful statement on these “worthless” objects.

The Book as Space – Walking through Rooms of Language

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In the last few weeks, I have often looked at how we move through books. From the ancient scroll to the modern codex, I kept thinking about reading as a kind of motion. Something that happens across pages, screens, and feeds. But looking back, all of these movements were still two-dimensional. They took place on flat surfaces, even though the books themselves and the devices we read on exist in a real, four-dimensional space. This week, Chapter 3 of The Book suddenly brings that missing dimension into play. Ulises Carrión’s idea that “a book is a sequence of spaces… a sequence of moments” (p. 148) opens up a completely new perspective. The book is not just something that opens before us, it opens around us.

Carrión’s line suddenly brings a sense of real space into play. It makes me see reading not as an act of moving from page to page or from chapter to chapter, but from room to room. And just like rooms in real life, every room has its own function and its own decoration. Some rooms are bright while others are narrow or silent. The same goes for chapters and pages. Each one feels unique in its own way and is arranged differently, but none of them are meaningless. When Carrión uses the word “sequence,” it already carries a sense of rhythm. The rhythm of one space leading into another, one moment following the next. “Spaces” then opens the page outward, turning reading into something we can step into. And with “moments“, Carrión adds a sense of time, reminding us that every act of reading happens only once and never in exactly the same way again.  

If we think of a page as a room, then the words become its furniture, objects carefully placed by the author. Every word sits somewhere for a reason. For me, Carrión’s idea creates the picture of the writer as an interior designer, arranging language so that the reader can walk through it. Reading, then, is not only about following a line of text. It’s about entering and walking through spaces, that slowly shape the meaning of the book.

Looking back on my earlier reflections, this feels like the next step in a larger journey. I began with the scroll, thinking about the linear movement of reading, then moved to the codex as a flexible form and later to the book as a living body. Now Carrión adds a completely new layer. The book as space. What used to feel flat suddenly gained depth. Each time I turn a page, I am not just moving forward in text but stepping into another room. It makes every act of reading feel like walking through a house built out of language, with new doors that keep opening as you go.

Chapter 3: The Book as an Idea

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This chapter was really interesting to read, learning about all of the different aspects of the book and how its evolution affected different aspects of the book. Animation, spacing of texts, digital realism, forms, spatiality of a book and etc. What initially caught my attention was the first line of the chapter “The thing we picture when someone says ‘book’ is an idea as much as an object” (pg. 69). I did not realize (or think about) that I think of books this way too, as stories and pretty objects that look good on my shelves. Books as ideas as much as objects, in my opinion, is the best way to describe a book. Yes, they are aesthetic objects that hold meaningful ideas and stories, but I had never thought to define them that way myself. I think if you put the word book in front of people, everyone is going to have a different description of definition. This definition adds more of a deeper and broader of the meaning of a book. I feel like this allows everyone to have their own personal definition of a book but also the same basis. This definition adds value to every aspect of a book, crediting the similarities but also the differences of all books.

Another aspect of this reading I enjoyed was the discussion of the ebook or the kindle. “When books become content to be marketed and sold this way, the historic relationship between materiality and text is severed.” (pg. 69) I thought this was a great connection to my first point about the definition of the book. That definition highlights the importance of the book as an object itself and an idea- but the ebook doesn’t apply to this. The physical object and aesthetic is gone, which brings as much value to the book as the content itself does. This is then severed and the book has an entirely different definition now. This gave me a new aspect on kindles and ebooks, and I have a kindle and love the portability of it, but I realize my definition of a kindle versus a book is entirely different. This changes the book industry as a whole, the idea of a book being a work of art different in this context, as is the definition. I did not think about how the medium in which a book is presented changes is definition, something this chapter made me think about.