Bibliographic Imaginaries

Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956; 20 minute film about the Bibliothèque nationale): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs

• end of film: "And now the book marches on toward an imaginary boundary more significant in its life than passing through the looking glass. It’s no longer the same book. Before, it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men. Here it’s been picked out, preferred over others. Here it’s indispensable to its reader, torn from its galaxy to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects, irreparably different from true insects in that each is bound to its own distinct concern. Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we glimpse a future in which all mysteries are solved…when this and other universes offer up their keys to us. And this will come about simply because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to end. Perhaps a secret bearing the beautiful name of 'happiness'."

Russian Constructivists

• El Lissitzky: "the handmade UNOVIS Miscellany, issued in two copies in March–April 1920,[24] and containing his manifesto on book art: "the book enters the skull through the eye not the ear therefore the pathways the waves move at much greater speed and with more intensity. if i (sic) can only sing through my mouth with a book i (sic) can show myself in various guises."" (from Wikipedia); see Vitebsk: The Life of Art, pg 122

Nunberg, The Future of the Book (1996)

Borges, "The Library of Babel" (duh)

Johanna Drucker, A Century of Artists' Books: "the artist’s book is the quintessential 20th-century art form. Artists’ books appear in every major movement in art and literature and have provided a unique means of realizing works within all of the many avant-garde, experimental, and independent groups whose contributions have defined the shape of 20th century artistic activity."

Waldek Węgrzyn, Elektrobiblioteka/Electrolibrary -- book interface with built-in electronics: http://info.elektrobiblioteka.net/?lang=en&img1=1&img2=1

The Feverish Library exhibit: http://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/2012-09-06_the-feverish-library/

Library as Incubator project: http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?page_id=9

symposia, "Books as/and New Media": http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/chb/books-and-new-media

• For the last 500 years, printed books have been the default means of circulating knowledge. In the last 15 years, this has ceased to be the case. We are now living through a moment of media change as significant as the invention of printing itself. But we will not understand this moment until we situate it in historical perspective. These twinned symposia aim to do that, by bringing together leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic working on book history, media, literature and digital humanities. All of them will attend both symposia, with the speakers at one event becoming the interlocutors at the other. Re-embedding the book in the changing media ecology, these symposia explore the long history of new media - from a time when the printed codex was the new medium, through the book’s encounters with the new media of photography, lithography and sound recording, to the digital revolution. In doing so they offer a more nuanced and historicized account of the book’s place in the shifting mediascape."

synesthetic books -- poetry/art; early examples

• Blaise Cendrars (text) and Sonia Delaunay (artwork) - La Prose du Transsibérien (1913)
  • http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/breakingtherules/btrtranssiberienz.html
  • Sonia met Blaise through Apollinaire
  • theory of simultaneity -- colors next to each other create movement and rhythm that matches movement of the poem; "first simultaneous book"
  • 12 different fonts
  • full edition would have reached height of Eiffel Tower
• Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Memoires, sandpaper cover
  • "Thus the moment was ripe for our hero [Debord] to write his Mémoires, which was done with the grating effect of broken glass – a book of love bound in sandpaper, which destroys your pocket as well as entire shelves in your library, a nice reminder of the time past that refuses to end and distresses everyone with its obstinate presence." -- Asger Jorn
  • http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html
• Kandinsky, Klänge
  • original images online at MOMA: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?SHR&tag=vo26560&UC=1&sort_order=5
  • English translation, can check out through Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/isbn_9780300026641#page/120/mode/2up
• see Surrealism and the Book

Topography of Typography, by El Lissitzky, Merz No 4, June 1923

The Electro-Library

First published as ‘The topography of typography’ (above) in Merz no. 4 (Hannover: July 1923).

1. The words on the printed surface are taken in by seeing, not by hearing.

2. One communicates meanings through the convention of words; meaning attains form through letters.

3. Economy of expression: optics not phonetics.

4. The design of the book-space, set according to the constraints of printing mechanics, must correspond to the tensions and pressures of content.

5. The design of the book-space using process blocks which issue from the new optics. The supernatural reality of the perfected eye.

6. The continuous sequence of pages: the bioscopic book.

7. The new book demands the new writer. Inkpot and quill-pen are dead.

8. The printed surface transcends space and time. The printed surface, the infinity of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.

Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451, group of people that memorize books to save them, are called "walking books"