Housekeeping:
- Next week we begin thinking about the beginning of recorded texts! Kehinde leads discussion.
- If you have time, you might begin making your way through S, which we’re due to start discussing in two weeks.
- I’m curious if folks would be interested in/able to do a visit to the NYPL at some point to look at some artists books, or rare books in general. Give it some thought, I’ll come back to this!
Book History Introduction (slides)
Discussion
- Value of books is arbitrary –> does a book lose or gain value when it’s in a different medium?
- Attention economy: various media competing for our attention
- How and where we consume information has also expanded
- Making the commitment to engage with a book has become more difficult
- We have to resist teleological approaches to technological evolution
- There’s something about being able to pace ourselves and control the reading experience that is unique to books
Sources for today’s discussion:
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, Remediation. MIT Press 1999.
Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, pp. 65–83. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024803. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.
Ozment, Kate. “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography.” Textual Cultures vol. 13, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 146–176. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/textual/article/view/30076 .
The Booksellers. Directed by D. W. Young. Greenwich Entertainment, 2019. https://booksellersdocumentary.com/
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