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Our Stories / Day 6

Leafing through Books: Challenges of Working on Texts in the Time of Covid-19

By Veronica Peselmann (USC Dornsife). Response by Malachai Bandy (USC Thornton)

Originally posted

topics: books, ourstories, reading, tactility

Leafing through a book usually means letting it slide through the hands, touching the book cover, measuring the format, considering the volume, perceiving the materiality of the paper, as well as thumbing through the pages. The verbal phrase leafing and its associations of a tree’s leaves is a general expression, which is also common in other languages, for example in French feuilleter, or in German blättern. In all three languages the term connotes a brief run-through or inspection to get a rough idea of the book’s content. In a nineteenth-century German dictionary “leafing through something” determines “to briefly get acquainted with a content”[1] or in a more recent definition of an English dictionary the phrase is described as: “you turn the pages without reading or looking at them very carefully”.[2] The focus of leafing through is therefore primarily on the activity of handling the material and less on the actual close reading or the intellectual examination of its content. Such emphasis applies to both the tangible leafing through a book and scrolling through a digitally mediated text on a screen. How long do I have to scroll until I reach the final line, and what do the font size and the thickness of the book’s paper might speak about its probable reading time? In common understanding, handling the format and looking at text formatting thus allows us to roughly estimate the content and the required reading effort.

A digital text document demands the hand to navigate a cursor up and down along the screen; a book, however, is a three-dimensional object with multifaceted surfaces, hidden pages and paper bound in individual or industrialized formats. A book, first of all, must be handled in order to be read. Its material specificities and structures are perceived through physical handling and in the very moment of actual usage.[3] One famous example is Stéphane Mallarmés poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), which became an icon for typography and for Concrete Poetry in the 20th century. Meticulously, Mallarmé gave instructions on the typesetting, on the mise-en-page, on the placement on the page of the words of his poem, and on the format of the publication.[4] His extensive attention to the layout, with lines transgressing the edges of a single page, guide the reading pace and impact the optical and intelligible perception as an act of handling his poem. The perception can fail, if a page does not open as expected. While leafing through the book, readers are simultaneously irritated and intrigued. Have they failed to leaf through the lines and pages correctly or did the poem transgress beyond the leaflet?

Digital reproductions of books and texts, even an animated representation of how the object should be used, does not replace the experience of failure in the moment a page does not turn the way we expect it would. Failing to handle a digital text document rather implies that the reproduction halts, the mouse might not follow our directives, and ultimately the program needs a reboot. The physical handling of the medium is therefore unique to books. Handling is irreplaceable for examining books, and unfortunately exactly that is hardly feasible in the present day. Digital alternatives are currently being sought for many events and familiar routines. As long as the archives and special collections of museums and universities are closed, it is important to continue researching the media possibilities of the digital. However, it is even more important to not consider digital alternatives an equivalent substitution to see art but rather as an additional option. Research times in archives as well as museum visits, with discussions in front of originals are unique and no digital reproduction may replace the on-site observation of the art works’ materiality.

For researching books, a video that digitally conveys the operation of the book would certainly be a way of seeing it, but it does not adequately substitute exploring the object and its tactile handling. A remote-handling session, however, could add to a self-reflective understanding of how we perceive books. In one conceivable option for such remote handling the absent party may give live-instructions to the archivist: “Fold over the upper corner of the right page, please. Or, if that doesn’t work, please roll up the page and then gently fold the upper corner.” Such an altered process of examining the book corresponds to a shift from non-verbal tactility to verbal instructions. What books usually communicate non-verbally through their format or materiality would then require precise verbal expressions. Everything that usually happens unconsciously and habitually, e.g. that fine tissue paper demands a different handling than thick parchment, an accordion folding another tactile finesse than map folding, needs a detailed verbal description. Such modification may contribute to a heightened awareness, that handling practices are a methodically underestimated key approach for examining textual content and books.

Veronica Peselmann (USC Art History), 1.6.2020

[1] Entry: Blatt. In: Sanders: Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, 1865, p. 155.

[2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/leaf-through

[3] Peselmann, Veronica: Die Handhabung dynamischer Skalierungen, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (2020), pp. 187-202

[4] https://www.bnf.fr/fr/mediatheque/stephane-mallarme-jamais-un-coup-de-des-nabolira-le-hasard

…and rip up the books

Response by Malachai Bandy

As a musicologist working primarily with sources from the seventeenth century and earlier, the experience of remotely “handling” digital books has become unavoidably routine, and thus oddly normalized, within my usual research experience. In this context, objective tactile limitations, relative to those of historical musicologists before me (and those barely my senior), feel at the same time both novel and mundane. I encounter and rely on digital books every day, with the full awareness that the materials might not have been accessible online yesterday, last week, or last month. But at the same time, by digesting them digitally I implicitly sacrifice tactile experience in favor of simple convenience (at worst) and newfound accessibility (at best).

In all of this, I find it striking that a seemingly insurmountable void no longer exists between researcher and availability of materials, as it might have in the past, but instead between these digitized, printed materials’ own materiality or immateriality in their expression, and the materiality or immateriality of our interest in it. Speaking for myself, even in a digital context I relish looking at the photos of a book’s binding, the staining and tears on the ostensibly “blank” pages at the beginning and end, almost as much as I do examining the written content I am supposedly only there to find. The information itself is clearly still the “point” of my encounter—it has to be. Unless one specifically studies materiality, I imagine that this “actual” information is likewise the catalyst for the vast majority of one’s contact with digital sources. But in favoring keywords and search terms over physical contact, this transmission effectively removes the opportunity to truly “stumble upon” related or unrelated stacks of books, be attracted to them by their bindings, or more casually “leaf through them” (as Veronica mentions), without incessant clicking or finger-cramped scrolling. The availability of information is rightfully tantalizing, but where does it, in its current form, leave the library solace-seeker relative to the pure information seeker?

As equal parts library solace-seeker and information-seeker myself, and as a constant participant in this kind of digital consumption, I am genuinely conflicted. The majority of libraries worldwide, especially over these first and last ten years of my collegiate schooling, have generously extended themselves to make the precise books, prints, and manuscript scores within their collections that I need daily, but that the world understands to be the most “rare”—whatever that can possibly mean now—widely viewable online. Objectively, I can speak to the genuine gratitude and real joy in finding the concrete information contained in digital volumes available at the click of a mouse, when just a few years ago it was not. But at the same time and as a direct result, I suspect that the vast majority of people accessing these materials, like me, consciously deny themselves the human grief over physically holding, treasuring, and exploring with their hands, not just a computer cursor, the prizes of research’s perils.

This is nothing if not a twenty-first century problem. And we can perhaps add it to a growing list of strange quandaries that young scholars today face, at the objectively positive hands of informational progress, under the ever-tightening stronghold of newly promised technological possibilities. Our elders of course found themselves in similar positions, but surely on a different scale, with less regularity and certainly less normalcy. For today’s dissertation researcher, for instance, how does one go about arguing for, or believing warranting at all, a quest for funding to spend in-person time with materials that over the course of the next months, weeks, even hours, are suddenly completely digitized? Is the tactile and environmental experience we might crave, as external to images of the objective information we require, really enough to support the various expenditures?

In my own tiny way, at various points while probing more esoteric sources with which my larger dissertation topic overlaps, I’ve found these questions particularly poignant when digitized material upon which I rely both inherently concerns intersection between the material and immaterial worlds and pointedly acknowledges its own materiality as contained within a physical book. Perhaps the best example I can think of comes from Count Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617/18), an alchemical emblem book containing fifty engravings illustrating alchemical principles, each of which receives a unique title, caption, epigram, discourse, and musical canon. The eleventh emblem’s instructive title is the very epitome of the “self-aware” materiality I describe, in an informational context specifically designed to blur boundaries between realities: “Make Latona White and Rip up the Books” (Dealbate Latonam & rumpite libros) [see Picture Gallery]:

Within the context of an allegorical alchemy treatise, Latona, mother to twins Apollo (gold, the sun) and Diana (silver, the moon), is to be “whitened” in the early stages of the alchemical magnum opus, in a material process to be carried out in the physical laboratory. The treatise itself is designed, however, to communicate—through material transmission hinging on verbal cipher—alchemical concepts that all at once contain multivalent layers of meaning across the spectrum of material to immaterial. Only in the transposition of material experience to spiritual knowledge does the path to ultimate enlightenment reveal itself to those clever enough to unravel the mysteries Maier presents. Thus, through strictly material means, Maier’s emblem urges the alchemist to first heed his written instructions, then apply them experientially to base metals in a laboratory context. But the final step of internalizing that experiential wisdom, he says, is to “rip up” the material guide in order to paradoxically solidify immaterial understanding. The layers of irony are thick even in a physical context—I think they only multiply in a newly digital one.

But on yet another level of irony, this work more than any other imaginable begs for a fully immersive, explicitly digital experience only attainable in our present world. All emblem books are inherently multimedia, after all. But in this extraordinary work, the addition of musical composition adds yet another contemplational dimension only accessible today to those who read historical musical notation. The unlikelihood of that scant demographic’s overlap with those able to read old Latin and German prose and understand intentionally obscure alchemical symbol erects numerous walls between Maier and today’s reader. Thus, recreating the true emblem book experience—that is, stimulating learned conversation through social contemplation of multimedia objects and puzzles—for Atalanta fugiens would require scholars from a range of the humanities and sciences to decipher the allusions in advance, rather than in real time, on contact, for a digital audience. Out of its own context, the chase (the puzzles, format) is probably not nearly as useful as the informational goal, as a simultaneously absorbable translation and musical recording.

Today, when viewed digitally but still in the photographic format presently available (rather than in some future multimedia form), yet another, new layer of allegory emerges in Maier’s work, one that even the most fantastical historical alchemist could not have foreseen let alone imagined. Between Maier’s approach to knowledge and our growing strides in worldwide digitalization of old materials, we see that we must still need tactile contact with wisdom, if we are to interact with it on all of its conceptional and constructional terms. We will only reach a turning point, digitally, when with the simple click of a button or the swipe of a finger, just as we can turn a virtual page, we can also rip digital books to digital shreds. The seventeenth-century alchemist inhales ancient texts but, as a formative step on the path to enlightenment, ultimately destroys the map in favor of experiential gnosis, as the philosophers instruct. To Maier, this comes about naturally and inevitably, from intellectual absorption and internal reconciliation of concrete, material elements with the intangible, immaterial tree of life. So today, in this new paradoxical practice of immortalizing material sources through their immaterial digitalization, the true “prima materia,” theorized, practiced, or digitized, can still only instruct us to a point. No matter the ostensible accessibility of however many infinite sources, the command to “rip up the books” reminds us that we still, like all those before us, are on our own in the laboratory, digital or otherwise. With physical libraries closed now, for good reason, and physical interaction with so broad a range of materials impossible, never has this felt more real.