In 1995 my neighbor James Sachs invented one of the earliest iterations of the ebook in his garage around the corner from my house. Jim was not new to innovative ideas (despite the modest circumstances of his house, he held many patents, including one on the mouse). He was also a dedicated engineer whose intention with his invention, which he named the Softbook, was to develop a reading tablet that didn’t require a computer.
As he worked, he began to develop questions not about the engineering but about the conceptual form of the product: How did the form of the book develop? How is reading affected when there aren’t facing pages? H0w do books feel in the hand as we read? What was the history of printing? (In the process of exploring this he managed to locate a Gutenberg leaf for his personal library.) How much information should go on a page? What is a page?
I thought of Jim’s work and the discussions we had (sadly too few—he died of lymphoma in 2002) as I was re-reading Bonnie Mak’s How the Page Matters (University of Toronto Press, 2011). For years I assigned reading from the book in my graduate seminars. Mak’s specific focus is on a fifteenth-century manuscript on the nature of a virtuous character, hardly a subject for a seminar on the nature of artist books. But what she is really addressing is the conceptual basis of the page as a carrier of content, and why the page has persisted through the many technological changes of the book as a material artifact. In fact, Mak writes that the page is, all at once, “ . . . an expressive space for text and image, it is a cultural artifact; it is a technological device” [1]. To those ends, Mak credits the designer as the point of interface between the page and the reader. For the manuscript she focuses on, that means that designers have responded to the text and images at specific points in time, creating an artifact that is responsive to the particular time in which it is being read.
Mak also acknowledges the critical importance of blank space, which she says, “. . . enhances the legibility and comprehensibility of the page” [2]. She is specifically referring to the “saccadic” pauses between words, which we know from Roman stone monuments evolved over time. (Mak is also of course referencing the way our eye moves across text in a rhythm also called saccadic.)
For students, Mak’s book helps them to theorize their own design work and maintain focus on the importance of taking the reader into account. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that an artist is always meant to create conventionally readable pages; what it does suggest is that the artist needs to be intentional in their work, and that they should understand that they have the support, and the weight, of history behind them.
Where Mak falls down a bit is at the same point where many academics who lack hands-on experience in bookmaking land: not taking the more practical issues of production into account. While Mak considers paratextual elements as a fundamental component of any text, she doesn’t explore considerations of, say, the size of sheepskins, or the limitations on the size of papyrus strips as they are turned into paginae and then scrolls, as having a role to play in the ultimate product of these materials.
When Mak examines the digital page, she turns again to the interface of designer and reader. She sees the digital page as looking back to its very earliest models in parchment and paper while also having its own “distinct materiality” and of course possibilities for new configurations. What Mak is theorizing, Jim Sachs came to through his own exploration. The more he learned about the history of the book and the page, the more he leaned toward creating a new technology based on those concepts. He wrapped his invention in a leather cover so that it would not only look but feel more like a book when it was held (although at almost 3 pounds and 11” tall, the experience was more like holding a coffee table book than a paperback novel). Before he died, Jim served on the National Advisory Council of the non-profit group Reading is Fundamental, the nation’s oldest literacy organization, meaning that not only did he understand the importance of his invention to the history of reading, he saw his work as advancing the cause of literacy and knew his place in that space. The Softbook wasn’t merely an invention; it was a link in the long chain of reading as a fundamental human experience. His work at the cutting edge of technology implicitly recognized the three elements of Mak’s criteria for the page: an expressive space, a cultural artifact and a technological device.
Notes:
1] Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 18.
2] Ibid., 17.
Kathleen Walkup is Lovelace Family Professor Emerita, Mills College (at Northeastern University). She is currently involved in local political work in the Hudson Valley. She will curate an exhibition of Bay Area printing in the 1970s at the Grolier Club, NY, in 2028.
