Tag Archives: week 5

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.

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 !

Is that true?

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When I read Borsuk’s line that printing “reframed the book as content rather than object its form a mere vessel for the information it contained,” (p.57) I felt both curious and uneasy. The word mere makes it sound like the physical book is almost worthless, just a container for words. But is that true? When I think about my own reading, I don’t see books as “mere vessels.” I always notice their form. A book’s cover, the texture of its pages, even its size makes a difference. A small paperback I can carry in my pocket feels different from a large hardcover I need two hands to hold. Doesn’t the way a book looks and feels affect how you read it?

On screens, though, every book looks the same. Kindle, Wattpad or any reading app makes text uniform, black words on a glowing background. In some ways, that’s convenient the story is all that matters. But sometimes I wonder, does this sameness flatten the reading experience? Do we lose something when every book feels identical?

Interestingly, digital reading has made me appreciate physical books more. I love seeing a shelf of colorful spines or picking up a book with unusual design choices. Publishers know this too they release special editions with decorative covers or unique layouts to remind us of what makes print special. Isn’t it funny that screens, which were supposed to replace books, have instead made us value their physical form even more?

So I come back to Borsuk’s phrase. Maybe in the early days of printing, the book was treated as a vessel. But today, I think it’s both vessel and object. Books carry words, yes, but they also shape our experience of those words through their form. They are not “mere” anything they are living companions that travel with us, change us, and remind us that reading is always more than just content.

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.

The Press’s Redefinition of The Book As Content

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Amaranth Borsuk’s second chapter, specifically, “The Body of the Book,” delves into the differences between printed books before 1501 and after. The former was known as incunables. A word used to describe the period just before the commercialization and efficient mass production of ‘books’, a time when each ‘book’ was still unique and still handcrafted to an extent. Today, when a new book is published, we have mass printings of it, and each one is identical in terms of content and binding.The process and end result was more intimate as it was a laborious task and there were many ways in which you could personalize the text and there was this idea of the residues of reading. This also created a strange paradoxical effect with the press and it production of ‘the book’. It created a clear distinction and redefined its terms forever.

Today, when a new book is published, we have mass printings of it, and each one is identical in terms of content and binding. Even more so after ISBNs were created, any two copies became interchangeable. This is the main idea in this chapter: today, the book, as a physical object, is just a uniform, mass-produced text. During the incunable period, printing was still very much in its unrefined, rudimentary form: “Scholars of early modern books make a distinction between a ‘book’ and a ‘book copy,’ since each codex produced from a given print run will be unique in its circulation, history, and materiality.”(Borsuk 74).

The printing process back then was even more intimate too. The wealthy would hire illuminators to personalize their prints further with gold or highly elaborate illustrations, therefore, making the ‘book’ a piece of luxury and a sign of wealth/social status. This made each ‘book copy’ a unique and even archeological artifact with its own unique personal history, “In additon 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”(Borsuk 76). The marginalia and what Borsuk brilliantly calls ‘residues of reading’ perfectly encapsulate an incunable copy as a snap shot of the process in that specific moment and how these ‘residues’ “are part of the copy without being part of the ‘the book.'” (76)

A less obvious point is how the mass proliferation and production of printed copies that were nearly identical allowed for the author’s ideas to spread like never before, but it also inadvertently highlighted everything outside of that printed text. The marginalia, residues of reading, provenance marks, and accretions all became important to these highly annotated/illustrated copies, meaning that the identically mass-produced and plain-looking copies lacked. During the manuscript/incunabula era, each text as a whole was unique; ‘the book’ and its contents were one. But the press redefined the terms of the book, it essentially created the distinction between the content and its container. This allowed for us to think of the book as an abstract piece of content separate from its physical body.

The Book. Chapter two

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When reading this next chapter, the first paragraph really caught my eye. We saw a picture of the girdle book at the end of last class and it stuck with me. “Girdle Books, a popular form among pilgrims in the Middle Ages, continued to be made: with an oversized soft leather cover whose flaps could be looped under one’s belt for easy consultation on the go.” (pg.43) This is interesting to think about or imagine. I would have just put my book in a bag, carried it, or even had a kindle in replacement nowaday. The image of the girdle book stuck with me, this little sack that carried the book around seems unnecessary to me. But I guess everything we have now could be classified the same way, accessories more than necessity. Aesthetics more than need. That’s what our world is made up of, items and things that we can consume or own. This has existed forever, and it has progressively gotten worse: I am not immune to this. I love little knick knacks and collecting things I do not need. I am not sure what that says about me, but it makes me feel better that even in the Middle Ages they were doing this aesthetic with books too. The Girdle itself is like many unnecessary things I own, and it’s interesting to think of how this made books more portable than before. In my mind books had always traveled and moved with you, but I guess when I really think about it this isn’t true, they used to live in libraries of the rich. The Girdle is just another example of this aesthetic obession of the book, and with everything else we now consume, that might not be necessary.

Further in the chapter the rise and importance of Codex books also caught my eye. “As codex books became private items, rather than shared objects experienced publicly, copyists simply couldn’t keep up with demand.” (pg. 43) I keep forgetting the fact that books were something that were shared publicly and read aloud. The image of seeing people on the street reading a novel out loud is foreign to me, that would never happen now. But this is how it all started, and as the codex was created books became private, expensive, and a sign of education and status. Rather than stories being shared in pubs or public places they were being read privately in the home. This is how reading has always been for me, rather than when I was little and my parents read to me, so the fact that this was not normal is intriguing. Reading was related to wealth and status rather than community, so when I really think about it that is true still. Reading is a privilege not everyone has access to. Reading is political, as most things are, and reading is something that is meant to be shared and discussed, but usually it is not. I am really enjoying the new perspective this book is giving me on the history of books but also the history of reading as a political, wealth, or status statement of the past.