User:Megan Hoogenboom/bibliography2

Marshall Mcluhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

He begins the chapter with the understanding that the written word, as it transfers or translates the audio-tactile space of “sacral” non-literal man into the visual space of civilized or literate or “profane” man. The invention of typography, he calls an example of the application of the knowledge of traditional crafts to a special visual problem. The invention of printing on the other hand “marks the line of division between medieval and modern technology.” Print gradually made reading aloud pointless. Print was the first mass-produces thing, so it was the first uniform and repeatable “commodity.” Print is the extreme phase of alphabet culture that detribalizes or decollectivizes man in the first instance. Print raises the visual features of alphabet the the highest intensity of definition. Thus print carries the individualization power of the phonetic alphabet much further than manuscript culture could ever do. Print is the technology of the individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism will also be modified. At last he quotes that printing broke the library monopoly.

Johanna Drucker, A Century of Artists' Books

The chapter begins with a strong quote: A book is a highly complex organization of material and conceptual elements. Made from a set of bound leaves, the codex is a very restrained form. A book is an entity. Though the codex is the dominant book form there are various shaped books which have found their way into the world of artists' books with faithful regularity – polygons and fold-up works, boxes and accordion folds, scrolls, pop-up structures and tunnel books. The parameters of the codex form can be defined by stretching its basic elements to two extreme poles. At one extreme, the codex is a set of uniformly sized pages bound in a fixed and intentional sequence. At the other extreme it is an accumulation of non-uniform pages in an unintentional and unfixed sequence which is barely recognizable as a book. She gives a lot of examples of special artists' books, where she also discusses the different approaches. Such as structures and bindings, who are not the same, but are related to each other. However, her discussion will center on form, not mechanics, with an emphasis on structure as an organizational apparatus rather than a crafr of production. Variations of the codex can be created by changing the way the binding structures the sequence or acces to the pages as in fan or blind books. Further variations on the codex involve changing the structure of signatures into folds such as: accordion, concertina, frech door, dos-a-dos, and other folded or opening forms. And at last books within books. Non-codex books include scrolls. The form is so rigid as a means of access and sequencing that it has rarely appealed to artists. Other works that go beyond the codex or scroll form include box books or archives of documents, and works which have a geometric form which pushes them toward object status. She ends with that there are several major ways that electronic media reorganize access to the conventional features of books as information. One of these is the book as an archive. Another form of electronic manipulation os the book as a hypertext. In hypertext formats elements of the ongoing linear text are points of access to another area of the text base. The last electronic book is the book as a field, a floating matrix of information not linked by hierarchical diagrams or by story strings. The paths through such fields have to be imagined in a spatial/dimensional model, though that is a merely a visual abstraction. It is clear that certain conventions of the codex form will find their simulacral equivalent in the electronic “book.” It is also evident that there will be new paradigms and parameters to the ordering, structuring, and experiencing of books as technologies facilitate new patterns of thought and creativity. Whether these forms will be so different from present-day books that it becomes impossible to envision them as new versions of an old idea or whether they become radically new, it's clear that electronic and conventional media are forging new forms and definitions of the books as we know it.