Author Archives: dan visel

twittering from the past

A couple of weeks ago, Sebastian Mary posted about experiments with sending out literature via Twitter. She found herself disappointed that DailyLit was neither “abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at a time”; instead, texts not built for Twitter were being shoehorned into the Twitter form. Twitter might be the electronic form du jour, but this is a problem as old as electronic writing: the presumption that texts are form-agnostic.
An interesting approach to the problem comes from an unexpected source: the New York Review of Books has begun serializing Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines via Twitter in Luc Sante’s translation. Fénéon was a fin-de-siècle French writer who’s best known as the art critic who coined the term “pointillism”. (Paul Signac’s portrait of him, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of Felix Feneon in 1890, is below.) Fénéon was a man of many talents; while publicly known as an anarchist and the first French publisher of James Joyce, he was secretly a master of miniaturized text. His anonymous feuilletonage in Le Matin in 1906 condensed the news of the day to masterpieces of phrasing:

In a café on Rue Fontaine, Vautour, Lenoir, and Atanis exchanged a few bullets regarding their wives, who were not present.

Fénéon’s hypercompression lends itself to Twitter. In a book, these pieces don’t quite have space to breathe; they’re crowded by each other, and it’s more difficult for the reader to savor them individually. As Twitter posts, they’re perfectly self-contained, as they would have been when they appeared as feuilleton.

signac-feneon.SMALL.jpg

A quotation from Buckminster Fuller (from Synergetics 529.10) seems apropos for thinking about why Fénéon seems so suited to Twitter:

It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

do you remember the first time?

Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Institute’s fellow, is busy writing a book about Google, to be titled The Googlization of Everything. He’s working in public, and right now, he’s interested in hearing stories about how people – that means you! – began to use Google:

Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression?
Please use the comments over on The Googlization of Everything to tell me stories.
As Mudbone (Richard Pryor’s character) used to say, “you only remember two times, your first and your last.”

There are a lot of interesting comments there already . . .

looking at libraries

A few weeks back though the auspices of TED, I paid a visit to a private library. The owner doesn’t want publicity, and I won’t reveal details, but it was a staggeringly beautiful (if idiosyncratic) collection, and I can’t imagine that there are many collections in private hands that rival it in value in the United States. Just about every lavish book imaginable was present: an elephant folio of Audobon along with a full set of John Gould‘s more sumptuous prints of birds; a Kelmscott Chaucer; a page from a Gutenberg Bible; a first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary; countless antique atlases of anatomy and cosmography; the Arion Press edition of Ulysses illustrated by Robert Motherwell; hand-illuminated Books of Hours. There were exquisite jeweled bindings, books woven entirely from silk, and doubtless many more things that couldn’t be seen in a three-hour tour. The collector mentioned in passing that he was thinking of buying a Wyclif Bible for around $600,000 because he didn’t have one yet.

Being no stranger to libraries, I’d seen many of these books before. Generally they’re the sort of books you see in the context of a museum or library, occasionally for sale in a gallery. They’re the sort of books that are generally found safely behind glass, books that one wears white gloves to touch. This was not such a collection: it’s not open to the public at all, only to the collector’s friends. A librarian would also be astonished that this collection of 30,000 books has no catalogue – the owner shelves all the books himself (by height, for which there’s historical precedent) and claims that he remembers where he put things. But what was most striking to me about my visit was how freely the books were handled by the owner, and how freely he allowed his guests to handle his books – not in a cavalier way, but in the way one touches a book one owns. The librarian in me suppressed a gasp when the owner explained how in the summer he opens the bay windows of the library and lets the breeze in. I’m sure that’s not how the Morgan Library works.

The collector can afford to let his visitors touch his books. In a way, the books in his collection are functioning as they are intended to function: as objects to be read and appreciated. They’re also functioning as signifiers of luxury. His collection is a repository of wealth in a way less metaphorical than we usually talk about library as repositories. No library, private or public, exists entirely outside of this economic system; it’s an integral part of the way we consider books.

Walking north on Laguardia Place last week, I was struck by how monolithic NYU’s Bobst Library appears from the south: it’s a hulking red-brick edifice that admits no entrance:

the outside and inside of bobst library at nyu

From inside it’s all windows and light, open stacks to be browsed. But: there’s the matter of getting inside, as admission is reserved to those with an NYU ID card. Those without cards are excluded. This is a necessary condition for the library to function: long ago on this blog I bemoaned the condition of the Brooklyn Library, where it’s almost impossible to find any book you’re looking for, though there’s still the pleasure of browsing. The quality of a collection seems to be inversely related to the number of people kept out. Keeping the books in and the world out is demonstrated elegantly by the thin marble windows of Yale’s Beinecke library which admit a small amount of light but not the viewer’s gaze:

outside and inside the beinecke

What’s inside and outside – who’s inside and outside – are completely separated. The poet Susan Howe inspects this separation in her book The Midnight, a volume which takes as one of its primary subjects interleaves, the sheets of tissue paper that publishers once put next to plates in books “in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing together.” Howe’s work tends to be archivally based: she looks at how manuscripts are read or misread, and consequently has spent a lot of time in libraries. In this prose passage from the book, part of a section entitled “Scare Quotes II”, she looks at the way one enters Houghton, Harvard’s analogue to the Beinecke:

1991. Entering Houghton Library: Harvard Yard, 9:00 a.m., a fine June summer morning. At the entrance to the red-brick building designed by Robert C. Dean of Perry, Shaw and Hepburn in 1940, two single wooden doors with hinges, concealing two modernist plate glass doors without frames, have been swung into recesses to the left and right so as to be barely visible during open hours. The only metal fitting in each glass consists of a polished horizontal bar at waist height a visitor must pull to open. I enter an oval vestibule, about 10 feet wide and 5–6 feet deep, before me double doors again; again plate glass.

Passing through this first vestibule I find myself in an oval reception antechamber about 35 feet wide and 20 feet deep under what appears to be a ceiling with a dome at its apex. I think I see sunlight but closer inspection reveals electric light concealed under a slightly dropped form, also oval, illuminating the ceiling above. This first false skylight resembles a human eye and the central oval disc its ‘pupil.’ Maybe ghosts exist as spatiotemporal coordinates, even if they themselves do not occupy space, even if you’ve never seen one, so what? If the design of the antechamber can be read in terms of power and regimes of library control, and if ghosts ‘presently’ ‘occupy’ papers, you need to understand the present tense of ‘occupy.’

To enter this neo-Georgian building (a few Modernist touches added) with its state of the art technology for air filtration, security and controlled temperature and humidity for the preservation of materials, is to turn away from contemporary city life with all its follies and parasites in search of a second coming for dry bones. When the soul of a scholar has an inward bent and bias for an author in the Kingdom of Houghton, it is never at rest, until here. Perversely, nothing in Houghton awakens security sooner than curiosity.

Here – every researcher can be a perpetrator.

( pp. 120–121) While Houghton isn’t as architecturally ostentatious as the Beinecke, Howe’s scrutiny of the architecture of its entrance reveals it to be just as concerned with control. There’s a pessimistic view of human behavior embedded in library construction and the watchfulness of the sentries who guard them: if we, the public, could get at the books, we would most certainly destroy them.

There was the expectation that the barriers would be torn down with the coming of electronic libraries, that once the book’s spirit left its object, it would likewise escape its economic shackles. Certainly it makes sense: an electronic text isn’t degraded by copying in the same way that every reading is an infinitesimal destruction of a physical book. It’s unclear, however, that the media universe that’s unfolding is following this pattern: while sites like archive.org present a new model, projects like Google Books simply reconfigure the gates.

a return to orality

I’ve been making my way through Robert Bringhurst’s The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, which came out a couple years ago in Canada, but which is now getting an American release from Counterpoint. Bringhurst is probably best known to the readers of this site as the author of The Elements of Typographic Style, though he’s well-known as a poet and translator of Native American languages in Canada. This book is a collection of essays looking broadly at oral, written, and visual language and culture through an ecological lens, a viewpoint not dissimilar to the gatherings of wood s lot, the work of his fellow Canadian Mark Woods.
Much of The Tree of Meaning looks at Native American literature of the Pacific Northwest and how that was gathered by the followers of Franz Boas who gathered and disseminated native stories in songs. I know painfully little about anthropology; perhaps that’s why Bringhurst’s words on the problems inherent in transcribing oral literature seem evocative:

It is true that writing changes literature. It changes it, first of all, by leaving things out. A transcript of an oral poem never captures the fullness of a living performance tradition. And this is where writers become more deviant still. As they take their own dictation, they begin to try to use the resources of writing to patch up the holes and mend the tears they cannot help but make in the fabric of literature as they slip from the oral tradition.

(p. 178 in “The Humanity of Speaking: The Place of the Individual in the Making of Oral Culture”.) The idea of the printed word as being what’s left behind isn’t one we commonly think about, but it instinctively makes sense – perhaps more than ever in a world where a book can be simmered down to a text file constrained to the 127 ASCII characters. Looking to return closer to the original poetry, Bringhurst investigates John R. Swanton‘s typographic transcriptions of Haida myth and finds that document to be more complex than we commonly give it credit for:

The typescript, like the photograph, filters and compresses features of reality. We have to learn to read it – and I don’t just mean we have to learn the language. Learning to read transcriptions of oral literatures is something like learning to read historical photographs. The depth and the color, the sounds and the smells, the coughing and spitting, and a lot of the rest of the nitty-gritty is missing. Through informed imagination, much of that can be restored. And it’s like learning to read music. The point is not just to grasp the grammar and the syntax but to envision, and maybe re-create, a genuine performance.

The typescript looks at first to be plain prose, which is a form designed to minimize the outward individuality of any human voice. Almost no one speaks in genuine prose, but the form is often used – by journalists, linguists, and court reporters alike – for transcriptions. The typographic form we associate with prose makes speakers look like writers.

Swanton went looking for what he couldn’t see, and his typewritten texts are the result. I went looking, in the typescript, for what I couldn’t hear: the oral art, the form and meaning hidden in the flattened landscape of the page.

(p. 188 in the same essay.) He reproduces a portion of the typescript, demonstrating his point:

illustration from p189 from the tree of meaning

There’s a lot to think about here, especially now. Each technology in its own way dictates a Procrustean bed, though we’re often not attuned to what the constraints of our technology are. The high-bandwidth networked screen creates possibilities: more can be passed along in the transmission of stories than was before. But constraints dictate form: we know how to read the print book perhaps because that extra information has been sheered away. Learning to read electronically may be complicated.

thinking about tex

Chances are that unless you’re a mathematician or a physicist you don’t know anything about TeX. TeX is a computerized typesetting system begun in the late 1970s; since the 1980s, it’s been the standard way in which papers in the hard sciences are written on computers. TeX preceded PostScript, PDF, HTML, and XML, though it has connections to all of them. In general, though, people who aren’t hard scientists don’t tend to think about TeX any more; designers tend to think of it as a weird dead end. But TeX isn’t simply computer history: it’s worth thinking about in terms of how attitudes towards design and process have changed over time. In a sense, it’s one of the most serious long-term efforts to think about how we represent language on computers.
TeX famously began its life as a distraction. In 1977, Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, wanted a better way to typeset his mammoth book about computer science, The Art of Computer Science, a book which he is still in the process of writing. The results of phototypesetting a book heavy on math weren’t particularly attractive; Knuth reasoned that he could write a program that would do a better job of it. He set himself to learning how typesetting worked; in the end, what he constructed was a markup language that authors could write in and a program that would translated the markup language into files representing finished pages that could be sent to any printer. Because Knuth didn’t do anything halfway, he created this in his own programming language, WEB; he also made a system for creating fonts (a related program called Metafont) and his own fonts. There was also his concept of literate programming. All of it’s open source. In short, it’s the consummate computer science project. Since its initial release, TeX has been further refined, but it’s remained remarkably stable. Specialized versions have been spun off of the main program. Some of the most prominent are LaTeX, for basic paper writing, XeTeX, for non-Roman scripts, and ConTeXt, for more complex page design.
How does TeX work? Basically, the author writes entirely in plain text, working with a markup language, where bits of code starting with “” are interspersed with the content. In LaTeX, for example, this:

frac{1}{4}

results in something like this:

onequarter.gif

The “1” is the numerator of the fraction; the “4” is the denominator, and the frac tells LaTeX to make a top-over-bottom fraction. Commands like this exist for just about every mathematical figure; if commands don’t exist, they can be created. Non-math text works the same way: you type in paragraphs separated by blank lines and the TeX engine figures out how they’ll look best. The same system is used for larger document structures: the documentstyle{} command tells LaTeX what kind of document you’re making (a book, paper, or letter, for example). chapter{chapter title} makes a new chapter titled “chapter title”. Style and appearance is left entirely to the program: the author just tells the computer what the content is. If you know what you’re doing, you could write an entire book without leaving your text editor. While TeX is its own language, it’s not much more complicated than HTML and generally makes more sense; you can learn the basics in an afternoon.
To an extent, this is a technologically determined system. It’s based around the supposition of limited computing power: you write everything, then dump it into TeX which grinds away while you go out for coffee, or lunch, or home for the night. Modern TeX systems are more user friendly: you can type in some content and press the “Typeset” button to generate a PDF that can be inspected for problems. But the underlying concept is the same: TeX is document design that works in exactly the same way that a compiler for computer programs. Or, to go further back, the design process is much the same as metal typesetting: a manuscript is finished, then handed over to a typesetter.
This is why, I think, there’s the general conception among designers that TeX is a sluggish backwater. While TeX slowly perfected itself, the philosophy of WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – triumphed. The advent of desktop publishing – programs like Quark XPress and Pagemaker – gave anyone with a computer the ability to change the layouts of text and images. (Publishing workflows often keep authors from working directly in page layout programs, but this is not an imposition of software. While it was certainly a pain to edit text in old versions of PageMarker, there’s little difference between editing text in Word and InDesign.) There’s an immediate payoff to a WYSIWYG system: you make a change and its immediately reflected in what you see on the screen. You can try things out. Designers tend to like this, though it has to be said that this working method has enabled a lot of very bad design.
(There’s no shortage of arguments against WYSIWYG design – the TeX community is nothing if not evangelical – but outside of world of scientific writing, it’s an uphill battle. TeX seems likely to hold ground in the hard sciences. There, perhaps, the separation between form and content is more absolute than elsewhere. Mathematics is an extremely precise visual embodiment of language; created by a computer scientist, TeX understands this.)
As print design has changed from a TeX-like model to WYSIWYG, so has screen design, where the same dichotomy – code vs. appearance – operates. Not that document design hasn’t taken something from Tex: TeX’s separation of content from style becomes a basic principle in XML, but where TeX has a specific task, XML generalizes. But in general, the idea of leaving style to those who specialize in it (the designer, in the case of print book design, the typesetting engine in TeX) is an idea that’s disappearing. The specialist is being replaced by the generalist. The marketer putting bulletpoints in his PowerPoint probably formats it himself, though it’s unlikely he’s been trained to do so. The blogger inadvertently creates collages by mixing words and images. Design has been radically decentralized.
The result of this has been mixed: there’s more bad design than ever before, simply because there’s more design. Gramsci comes uncomfortably to mind: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” If TeX comes from an old order, it’s an order with admirable clarity of purpose. Thinking about TeX points out an obvious failure in the educational system that creates the current environment: while most of us are taught, in some form or another, to write, very few are taught to visually present information, and it’s not clear that a need for this is generally perceived. If we’re all to e designers, we have to all think like designers.

against reading

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
          all this fiddle.
     Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
          discovers in
     it after all, a place for the genuine.
          Hands that can grasp, eyes
          that can dilate, hair that can rise
               if it must, these things are important not because a

I picked up Mikita Brottman’s The Solitary Vice: Against Reading from the shelf of the St. Mark’s bookstore hoping that it was a different book than it turned out to be. After needlessly explaining the innuendo in her title, Brottman starts out with a promising premise: she’s tired of the piety that reading is good for you. I am too: I’d like somebody to explain exactly why reading is good for you. We’re prepared from youth (Fahrenheit 451, firmly entrenched in the high school canon) to defend against the enemies of literacy who’d like nothing more than to burn our books in the name of the future. These barbarians haven’t yet arrived. Like the battalion guarding the frontier in Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, it’s possible that we’re guarding nothing while life slips away. Somebody, in the name of contrariness if nothing else, should be making the argument against reading.

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
          they are
     useful. When they become so derivative as to become
          unintelligible,
     the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
          do not admire what
          we cannot understand: the bat
               holding on upside down or in quest of something to

Brottman’s not that contrarian; perhaps it’s foolish to seek such a champion in the written word. She’s not arguing against reading; instead, she’s arguing against reading novels. Her book is something of an inversion of Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies, a book not about the impending demise of print books so much as about how the novel shapes character, an argument he moves into the territory of memoir in his more recent My Sky Blue Trades and Reading Life. The predictable arguments are brought into play: Socrates wasn’t sure about poets. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey shows up on cue to demonstrate how novels set up unrealistic expectations for the real world. The novel blinds people to the real world; the solitary act of reading makes the reader less social. Books read in school are boring; the classics are moldy and old and the worlds they depict often bear little resemblance to our own. Reading novels won’t make you a better person. Probably Hitler read books.

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
          wolf under
     a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
          that feels a flea, the base
–
     ball fan, the statistician—
          nor is it valid
               to discriminate against “business documents and

What best to do? Like Birkerts, Brottman trots out her reading history that it might serve as an exemplar for our redemption. “A man’s work,” remarked Camus, “is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Brottman finds one of those images in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, which led her down the garden path of true-life tell-alls, eventually to find heaven in true crime tales. From these, Brottman reasons, we can learn more than from all the Gothic fiction every written. She might be right. We should read what we like: to the pure, all things are pure, and nuggets of truth can be found in the garbage of celebrities. “Life is worth while,” Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts writes before he gives up, “for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and ecstasy, and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.”

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
          a distinction
     however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
          result is not poetry,
     nor till the poets among us can be
          “literalists of
          the imagination”— above
               insolence and triviality and can present

My problem with Brottman’s argument is that it’s not a particularly difficult one to make. Critics worry about a general vogue for memoirs rather than fiction; journalists worry about fiction sold as memoir. It’s no longer daring to claim that a film can be just as rich as the written word. The staid gray pages of The New York Times regularly review video games. Maybe the New Criterion‘s still fighting these battles – I haven’t checked lately – but my sense is that Brottman’s tilting at windmills.

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
          shall we have
     it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
     the raw material of poetry in
          all its rawness and
          that which is on the other hand
               genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Not much poetry is cited in Brottman’s twenty-page bibliography, but the omission of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” (grotesquely interpolated with my text) surprises me. Moore’s cross-examination of her art says more in less space than The Solitary Vice; it’s not, perhaps, a fair fight, but this is, after all, the Internet. “Poetry” begs to be re-made: now more than ever, the value of reading needs to be interrogated. Brottman’s book doesn’t quite get there; we still have Moore.

from work to text

I spent the weekend before last at the Center for Book Arts as part of their Fine Press Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers. There I was taught to set type; not, perhaps, exactly what you’d expect from someone writing for a blog devoted to new technology. Robert Bringhurst, speaking about typography a couple years back, noted that one of typography’s virtues in the modern world is its status as a “mature technology”; as such, it can serve as a useful measuring stick for those emerging. A chance to think, again, about how books are made: a return to the roots of publishing technology might well illuminate the way we think about the present and future of the book.

*     *     *     *     *

I’ve been involved with various aspects of making books – from writing to production – for just over a decade now. In a sense, this isn’t very long – all the books I’ve ever been involved with have gone through a computer – but it’s long enough to note how changes in technology affect the way that books are made. Technology’s changed rapidly over the last decade; I know that my ability to think through them has barely kept up. An arbitrary chronology, then, of my personal history with publishing technology.
The first book I was involved in was Let’s Go Ireland 1998, for which I served as an associate editor in the summer of 1999. At that point, Let’s Go researcher/writers were sent to the field with a copious supply of lined paper and a two copies of the previous year’s book; they cut one copy up and glued it to sheets of paper with hand-written changes, which were then mailed back to the office in Cambridge. A great deal of the associate editor’s job was to type in the changes to the previous years’ book; if you were lucky, typists could be hired to take care of that dirty work. I was not, it goes without saying, a very good typist; my mind tended to drift unless I were re-editing the text. A lot of bad jokes found their way into the book; waves of further editing combed some of them out and let others in. The final text printed that fall bore some resemblance to what the researcher had written, but it was as much a product of the various editors who worked on the book.
The next summer I found myself back at Let’s Go; for lack of anything better to do and a misguided personal masochism I became the Production Manager, which meant (at that point in time) that I oversaw the computer network and the typesetting of the series. Let’s Go, at that point, was a weirdly forward-looking publishing venture in that the books were entirely edited and typeset before they were handed over to St. Martin’s Press for printing and distribution. Because everything was done on an extremely tight schedule – books were constructed from start to finish over the course of a summer – editors were forced to edit in the program used for layout, Adobe FrameMaker, an application intended for creating industrial documentation. (This isn’t, it’s worth pointing out, the way most of the publishing industry works.) That summer, we began a program to give about half the researchers laptops – clunky beige beasts with almost no battery life – to work on; I believe they did their editing on Microsoft Word and mailed 3.5” disks back to the office, where the editors would convert them to Frame. A change happened there: those books were, in a sense, born digital. The translation of handwriting into text in a computer no longer happened. A word was typed in, transferred from computer to computer, shifted around on screen, and, if kept, sent to press, the same word, maybe.
Something ineffable was lost with the omission of the typist: to go from writing on paper to words on a screen, the word on the page has to travel through the eye of the typist, the brain, and down to the hand. The passage through the brain of the typist is an interesting one because it’s not necessarily perfect: the typist might simply let the word through, or improve the wording. Or the typist make a mistake – which did happen frequently. All travel guides are littered with mistakes; often mistakes were not the fault of a researcher’s inattentiveness or an editor’s mendaciousness but a typist’s poor transliteration. That was the argument I made the next year I applied to work at Let’s Go; a friend and I applied to research and edit the Rome book in Rome, rather then sending copy back to the office. Less transmissions, we argued, meant less mistakes. The argument was successful, and Christina and I spent the summer in Rome, writing directly in FrameMaker, editing each other’s work, and producing a book that we had almost exclusive control over, for better or worse.
It’s roughly that model which has become the dominant paradigm for most writing and publishing now: it’s rare that writing doesn’t start on a computer. The Internet (and, to a lesser extent, print-on-demand publishing services) mean that you can be your own publisher; you can edit yourself, if you feel the need. The layers that text needed to be sent through to be published have been flattened. There are good points to this and bad; in retrospect, the book we produced, full of scarcely disguised contempt for the backpackers we were ostensibly writing for, was nothing if not self-indulgent. An editor’s eye wouldn’t have hurt.

*     *     *     *     *

And so after a not inconsequential amount of time spent laying out books, I finally got around to learning to set type. (I don’t know that my backwardness is that unusual: with a copy of Quark or InDesign, you don’t actually need to know much of an education in graphic design to make a book.) Learning to set type is something self-consciously old-fashioned: it’s a technology that’s been replaced for all practical purposes. But looking at the world of metal type through the lens of current technology reveals things that may well have been hidden when it was dominant.
While it was suggested that the participants in the Emerging Writing Seminar might want to typeset their own Emerging Writing, I didn’t think any of my writing was worth setting in metal, so I set out to typeset some of Gertrude Stein. I’ve been making my way through her work lately, one of those over-obvious discoveries that you don’t make until too late, and I thought it would be interesting to lay out a few paragraphs of her writing. Stein’s writing is interesting to me because it forces the reader to slow down: it demands to be read aloud. There’s also a particular look to Stein’s work on a page: it has a concrete uniformness on the page that makes it recognizable as hers even when the words are illegible. Typesetting, I though, might be an interesting way to think through it, so I set myself to typeset a few paragraphs from “Orta or One Dancing”, her prose portrait of Isadora Duncan.
Typesetting, it turns out, is hard work: standing over a case of type and pulling out type to set in a compositing stick is exhausting in a way that a day of typing and clicking at a computer is not. A computer is, of course, designed to be a labor-saving device; still, it struck me as odd that the labor saved would be so emphatically physical. Choosing to work with Stein’s words didn’t make this any easier, as anyone with any sense might have foreseen: participles and repetitions blur together. Typesetting means that the text has to be copied out letter by letter: the typesetter looks at the manuscript, sees the next letter, pulls the piece of type out of the case, adds it to the line in the compositing stick. Mistakes are harder to correct than on a computer: as each line needs to be individually set, words in the wrong place mean that everything needs to be physically reshuffled. With the computer, we’ve become dependent upon copying and pasting: we take this for granted now, but it’s a relatively recent ability.
There’s no end of ways to go wrong with manual typesetting. With a computer, you type a word and it appears on a screen; with lead type, you add a word, and look at it to see if it appears correct in its backward state. Eventually you proof it on a press; individual pieces of type may be defective and need to be replaced. Lowercase bs are easily confused with ds when they’re mirrored in lead. Type can be put in upside-down; different fonts may have been mixed in the case of type you’re using. Spacing needs to be thought about: if your line of type doesn’t have exactly enough lead in it to fill it, letters may be wobbly. Ink needs attention. Paper width needs attention. After only four days of instruction, I’m sure I don’t know half of the other things that might go wrong. And at the end of it all, there’s the clean up: returning each letter to its precise place, a menial task that takes surprisingly long.
We think about precisely none of these things when using a computer. To an extent, this is great: we can think about the words and not worry about how they’re getting on the page. It’s a precocious world: you can type out a sentence and never have to think about it again. But there’s something appealing about a more altricial model, the luxury of spending two days with two paragraphs, even if it is two days of bumbling – one never spends that kind of time with a text any more. A degree of slowness is forced upon even the best manual typesetter: every letter must be considered, eye to brain to hand. With so much manual labor, it’s no surprise that there so many editorial layers existed: it’s a lot of work to fix a mistake in lead type. Last-minute revision isn’t something to be encouraged; when a manuscript arrived in the typesetter’s hands, it needs to be thoroughly finished.
Letterpress is the beginning of mechanical reproduction, but it’s still laughably inefficient: it’s still intimately connected to human labor. There’s a clue here, perhaps, to the long association between printers and progressive labor movements. A certain sense of compulsion comes from looking at a page of letterset type that doesn’t quite come, for me, from looking at something that’s photoset (as just about everything in print is now) or on a screen. It’s a sense of the physical work that went into it: somebody had to ink up a press and make those impressions on that sheet of paper. I’m not sure this is necessarily a universal reaction, although it is the same sort of response that I have when looking at something well painted knowing how hard it is to manipulate paint from my own experience. (I’m not arguing, of course, that technique by itself is an absolute indicator of value: a more uncharitable essayist could make the argument could be made that letterpress functions socially as a sort of scrapbooking for the blue states.) Maybe it’s a distrust of abstractions on my part: a website that looks like an enormous amount of work has been put into it may just as easily have stolen its content entirely from the real producers. There’s a comparable amount of work that goes into non-letterpressed text, but it’s invisible: a PDF file sent to Taiwan comes back as cartons of real books; back office workers labor for weeks or months to produce a website. In comparison, metal typesetting has a solidity to it: the knowledge that every letter has been individually handled, which is somehow comforting.

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Nostalgia ineluctably works its way into any argument of this sort, and once it’s in it’s hard to pull it out. There’s something disappointing to me in both arguments blindly singing the praises of the unstoppable march of technology and those complaining that things used to be better; you see exactly this dichotomy in some of the comments this blog attracts. (Pynchon: “She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?”) A certain tension between past and present, between work and text, might be what’s needed.

a serious shot at screen reading

Another new online magazine: Triple Canopy (noted by Ed Park). Unlike Issue and Rosa B. this isn’t a design magazine – although the content is very interesting – but like them, it’s a serious attempt to construct a new kind of magazine for the screen-reading environment. While Rosa B.‘s design uses the affordances of dynamic layering, Issue concentrates on reader annotation, Triple Canopy simply does away with the scroll bar.
Removing the scroll bar is an obvious idea for improving screen reading that’s only rarely implemented: when you read text with a scroll bar (like this blog), the reader is forced to remove their concentration from the text to scroll down and then to find where the reading left off. It’s something we’re all quite used to, but that doesn’t mean it’s an advantageous reading behavior; we put up with because we rarely have a choice. Triple Canopy reverts from the scroll bar to the paged model of the codex book: if you click on the “+” sign to the right of the page, a new page slides in. It’s obvious where to resume reading. The text itself is well-cared for: it’s presented in columns of legible width, another lesson of print design that’s too often ignored in the online world. Worth noting as well is the way that images are integrated into some of the texts; again, there’s a clear and understood model for how reading works. Video can be slotted into some of the pieces without causing a disturbance or overwhelming: it appears on a page by itself, meant to be the primary focus of attention.
It’s not entirely perfect: while the “+” sign always advances a page, “–” sometimes goes back a page and sometimes goes to the previous article (if clicked on the first page of the article). I wish clicking the “triplecanopy” at the bottom took you back to the issue’s table of contents and not the magazine’s front page. Because the site’s made in HTML, the design breaks if you increase or decrease the font size in your browser. And the Powerpoint-style wipe when the pages change quickly grows tiresome. But these are minor quibbles with a design that’s overwhelmingly successful. I’ll be curious to see if this is sustainable over more issues.

issue magazine

Hot on the heels of Rosa B. (mentioned last week) comes Issue Magazine, another new web-based publication looking at the changing world of publishing and design. Issue #0, edited by Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie Vilayphiou, is undergoing a slow rollout this week, culminating in a live chat with Arie Altena, Jouke Kleerebezem, and Harrisson on Friday. Currently they’re featuring an essay and an interview with David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister and Dot Dot Dot on the idea of open-source design and publishing; an interview with Kleerebezem and a piece by Roger Chartier will be up before the end of the week.
What’s particularly interesting about the format of Issue – and one area in which it differs from Rosa B.  – is the way that commenting has been integrated into the articles: after units of the text, there’s the opportunity for the reader to add comments. It’s a bit like CommentPress in conception, but the prompts to comment in Issue appear less frequently than every paragraph. This makes sense: paragraph-level commenting is invaluable for close-reading, but less necessary for the general discussion of an essay. Because it’s early, there don’t seem to be any comments yet, but it’s a promising model of how the readers can be more immediately integrated into a publication.

rosa b.

A quick note to point out Rosa B, a new online publication in French and English from the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art Bordeaux and the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts. Their first issue, online now, is about contemporary publishing and edited by the very interesting Thomas Boutoux. More of an art slant than a business one, but the features would probably interest readers of this site: an interview with Stuart Bailey of dot dot dot and Dexter Sinister about his publishing and design-related activities; novelist and critic Matthew Stadler talks about the social space of reading; and a nicely excerpted bit of Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which has been out in English translation for a while but could stand more readers.
Worth noting as much as the content is the form: Rosa B. is clearly designed for online reading, and takes advantages of the affordances of the web; it’s nice to see texts on reading that have been designed by someone who thinks about how they’ll be read. Texts overlap and intersect with other texts and illustrations; long filmed interviews mix with text amiably.