There is an exhibition at Toronto’s Mercer Union gallery all about books, books not as channels for words but as objects, as works of visual art. Called Out of Print, the show is by a disparate group of young and old artists who seem to share a view of the book as something from the past, a dusty object, a bearer of nostalgia, but also as something fundamentally opaque and distant.
They have done things like create large-scale book covers with the lettering of the titles altered so that they are not in any recognizable alphabet, like hieroglyphics. Or made imaginary old books from a provincial library with hilariously boring titles (Index Card Sizes, Coat Hook Quarterly, Managing Thermostat Disputes ...). They have made small oil paintings that look exactly like the covers of famous works of philosophy, turning the cover art into an icon that means more than the words inside. They have taken photocopies of pages from science textbooks and then made painstakingly accurate pencil drawings of the photocopies, adding layers of mediation to an already dry and off-putting text. They have filmed every single page of the Encyclopedia Britannica as it flips rapidly past, too fast to absorb any information from.
This fixation with the printed page and its essential nostalgia is timely in a week when all who are connected to the industry of making books are in shock over the demise of a major Canadian book publisher. This time, it was Key Porter, which has been around since 1979 and was one of the very few Canadian-owned publishers left.
After a year in which we saw a genuinely significant rise in the sales of e-book readers and an astounding jump in e-books themselves, the event seems full of dark foreboding. The publishers I talk to are wondering how they are going to subsidize the production of expensive paper books if they are going to be forced by distributors to undercut their own sales by offering e-books for pennies. No one is yet ready to abandon printed books in favour of an all-electronic program, although they must be at this point realizing that some presses, particularly among the smaller ones, are probably going to have to do this sooner or later in order to survive. (I hope they realize too that extremely cheap e-books may lead to an increase in their sales, not a loss.) Many academic publishers have already done so.
There is much weeping over what we will lose if a culture of printing and binding disappears – we will lose, as I myself have lamented, bookshelves and we will lose gorgeous artifacts such as those produced by Gaspereau Press and the Porcupine’s Quill – but we could say the same about writing letters with a feather plume. That was nice too.
And we won’t actually lose bookshelves, of course, not if the expensive interior designers of Manhattan keep at their habits of furnishing new apartments with book-like objects. You may have read about this trend in this section on Monday: It’s all the rage to have bookshelves in your modernist cube, and sometimes, though not necessarily, filled with actual books. The books you pay for by the pound, and they are chosen so that their covers – usually all white or beige – match the decor. The New York Times quoted one of these decorators, who explained, diplomatically, “A book is a meaningful, sensory experience.” Meaning, I guess, that it’s a pretty object.
Which brings us back to the Toronto art show. My favourite of the exhibits was that collection of carefully made imaginary “found” books, by San Francisco-based David Stein. Their covers are perfectly faithful to the aesthetic of a pre-digital era: They have simple geometric designs and clunky fonts. Stein has aged and distressed the books expertly, giving them worn spines and, sometimes, a stamp from some Midwestern library, so that they look just like all the unwanted books that fill basements and second-hand shops. And their unlikely subjects are all trivial. They are reminders of the book’s mortality, and also its surreal charm. It is also clear that there is nothing of intellectual interest inside them: They are like the discarded plastic containers that once provided food and drink and that we now have to think about recycling.
