 ardly anyone sees a rosy future
for the book. After all, it faces major challenges on at least three fronts:
the social (who has time for serious reading?), the economic (the publishing
industry's blind lust for blockbusters) and the technological (fierce competition
from a growing list of other, more overtly seductive media).
Yet if we are witnessing a twilight of the book, it is an unusually bright
one at Smith College. Across the departments, Smith pedagogy remains solidly
based on heavy doses of reading. And at least three courses honor the book
and assess its past and present contributions to our culture:
- Elliot Offner, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and printer
to the college, teaches "An Introduction to Printing," a studio
art course in which students learn the rudiments of hand typesetting and
letterpress printing in order to publish small editions.
- Martin Antonetti, curator at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, teaches an
art history course (long called "The Composition of Books," but
soon to be renamed "The Art and History of the Book" to better
reflect its newly modified content) that considers the book as a technical,
social and cultural artifact.
- Professor of English Eric Reeves teaches "The Technology of Reading
and Writing," a course (cross-listed with the History of Science Program)
that sees the book as part of a continuum of communications technology
reaching back to the dawn of civilization.
It says something about the status of the book at Smith that all three
courses are given once a year and attract more applicants than can be accommodated.
Encouraging, too, is the fact that many students take two of the courses,
and some take all three.
I: Fun in the Dungeon Paradise
Elliot Offner's course is devoted to letterpress printing, the same process
used some 550 years ago by Johann Gutenberg to produce the first printed
books. Students in Smith's typography studio set metal type by hand, one
letter at a time, line by line; assemble that type into forms representing
one or more pages; mount the forms on a press; ink the raised letterforms;
and print-usually at a very stately pace. Every step demands technical acumen,
dexterity, patience and the skill or luck to avoid catastrophes like having
your exquisitely composed form end up a chaotic heap of type on the floor.
For centuries letterpress dominated book printing. Now, however, nearly
all books are set in computer-generated type and printed by offset lithography,
in which the type does not make the subtle impression in the page so cherished
by connoisseurs of letterpress.
Offner certainly fancies letterpress, but insists that he teaches it
less to sustain a delightful yet utterly obsolete technology than to give
students "an exercise in small-scale publishing, the chance to produce
lots of tiny limited editions." And publish they do: the studio's bookshelves
sag under the scores of titles produced by Smith students since the early
1970s.
It's no coincidence that most of these books are student-written. "I
like students to publish something original," Offner says. "I'd
rather see mediocre poetry in print for the first time than yet another
edition of some Shakespeare sonnets."
Fair enough--but why do it the hard way, with letterpress? He grins.
"Well, I suppose we could use other methods," he says, "but
no other book has quite the look and feel of a letterpress book."
Offner admits that in some respects he reins in his students' designs.
For one thing, the metal types he stocks in the studio are all derived from
the designs he most admires, none of which date from after 1800. Nor does
he make any secret of his ultimate exemplars in book design: those from
printing's first half-century, which attained a spare elegance that many
bibliophiles feel has never been equaled.
The students have broad freedom, however, in the area of illustration.
Offner all but insists that the books be illustrated, by woodcuts (the making
of which he'll teach any student willing to learn), etchings, type ornaments
or any other means. Many nonartists are at first put off by this near-requirement,
but most end up producing creditable work and some do far better than that.
The class is popular enough that Offner routinely picks from a long list
of applicants. He says he favors the student of whatever background "who
has some instinctive feeling for books, who simply loves books and wants
to make one." He looks too for "irrational compulsion. Plenty
of mere talent passes through here, but it's the student with burning drive
who ends up being the really first-rate artist."
His current class suggests the reach of Offner's net.
Art major Sarah Szwajkos, a senior from Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania,
is using the class to print the text for her honors project, a book of photographs
she took during her junior year in Italy. Each picture will face a related
poem.
Szwajkos knows firsthand some of the pitfalls of letterpress: the time
it takes, the annoyance of discovering hours after you've begun setting
a text in your chosen typeface that you haven't got quite enough of one
letter to finish. Still, she prefers it to batting out type on a computer:
"I want this project to all be my own handiwork. This way I feel more
control."
That idea is echoed by another senior, Elysabeth (Abe) Young, a poet
and first-time art student from New Orleans. "I like letterpress because
it lets me physically see and experience every aspect of the process,"
she says. "There's no point where my project goes off into another
room or into someone else's hands and something esoteric happens to it."
Young signed up for the course because "I really wanted to learn
the physical process of creating a book, to concentrate intently on the
word and on all the tiny details that go into the making of a book."
Far from finding typesetting tedious, she says that after a long session
of studying, "it's a huge relief to come away from looking at the word
in an extremely abstracted way and to go down into this dungeon paradise"-the
studio is in the basement of Hillyer Hall-"and lose yourself in this
repetitive, meditative, very reverent process. It also makes me feel in
some way connected to the bookmakers of history."
A third senior in Offner's class could hardly be more book-besotted.
Elizabeth Kates of Dobbs Ferry, New York, is the daughter and granddaughter
of writers and journalists and says, "You can't really live in the
Kates family and not do books." Certainly she does them in a big way:
a classics major, she has already taken Antonetti's and Reeves' courses,
has convinced a reluctant Offner to let her also take the calligraphy class
he is teaching this semester, and wishes she had more book courses to take.
Deeply drawn to illuminated medieval manuscripts, Kates is an unapologetic
sensualist of the book. She thinks that great writing should be encased
in books that exhibit workmanship as inspired and accomplished as their
texts. "I don't think that readability is always the most important
thing about a book," she says. "I think sometimes a book should
just glorify the words within it."
II: Beyond the Chestnuts
At Smith, words in their most glorious settings are most often found
in Neilson Library's Mortimer Rare Book Room, whose 27,000 items include
some medieval manuscripts and a worthy selection of important books printed
between the 15th century and today. Yet the collection's curator has mixed
feelings about what is often termed "fine printing."
Not that Martin Antonetti is indifferent to superlative book design.
He hardly could be: just before coming to Smith he was the librarian at
the Grolier Club, a New York society of bibliophiles with an outstanding
collection on the history of the printed book. Nor, with his background
in classical studies, does he lack due regard for the printed word.
But Antonetti is too independent, too clear-headed to teach book history
in the traditional manner, as a predictable series of long-sanctioned "great
books" starting with the Gutenberg Bible and culminating in some lavish
production by one of this century's private presses. "Trotting out
the chestnuts," Antonetti calls this approach, and while he in no way
denies that many and even most of these universally acknowledged classics
are deserving of respect, he chafes at the limitations of the high-points-only
approach to book history.
He also rejects the notion that today's book designers ought to limit
themselves to emulating the masterworks of the past. "In some cases
these books represent grotesquely outmoded canons of design," he says.
"I want students to appreciate what is great in such books and then
feel that they can go beyond them.
"In the course, my approach to the book is primarily archeological,"
he explains. "I treat books as objects, the analysis of which can yield
a surprising amount of information not related to the text. We consider
the component pieces of the book-type, paper, design, illustration, binding-and
learn as much as we can about them in order to better understand why and
how the book was made. We also consider social and cultural aspects, examining
the impact of the book on European society in the early modern period and
trying to assess its value both for the culture in general and for individual
readers."
Antonetti has each student "choose one book in the collection and
go as deeply into it as she can, examining every aspect of the artifact.
I help students choose books on the basis of their interests. They make
an oral presentation and write a short paper. I am thereby building a bibliography
file for the collection that I hope will eventually include good research
on much of our material."
Those projects are often memorable experiences for students. Elizabeth
Kates, for example, applied her knowledge of ancient languages and her interest
in the history of religion-particularly in Catholicism as a bridge between
Roman and modern culture and philosophy-in studying a first edition of the
Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament edited by Erasmus and published
in 1516 by Johann Froben, one of the titans of Renaissance printing. In
analyzing its ornately tooled binding, Kates learned that the book had once
been owned by a branch of the Richelieu family, and she found the printer's
mark to be a relatively rare one. The book also has handwritten notes in
Greek, Latin and Hebrew; she translated those in the first two languages
and had a friend do the ones in Hebrew.
Antonetti himself is working on an ambitious long-term project: he wants
to get beyond the stock adjectives and perceptions that 20th-century typographic
scholars have applied to the types of the past in order to determine how
those types were seen and described in their own day. He is also exploring
how these early type terminologies may have been influenced by the vocabularies
then current in such realms as architecture and political philosophy. He
is thereby helping to place typographic history within larger social, political
and esthetic contexts.
That Antonetti can make such material come alive is obvious from the
accolades students offer him. Abe Young hasn't taken his course but was
so excited by a lecture he gave for Eric Reeves' class that "I've been
going frequently to the rare book room and having conversations with Martin
that have been extremely inspiring." And Sarah Szwajkos, mapping out
her post-graduation plans, is working closely with Antonetti in exploring
two options: rare-book librarianship and advanced study in the book arts.
III: Teaching Ambivalence
In his tidy, book-lined office on the third floor of Neilson Library,
Eric Reeves gestures toward the computer atop his desk. "It's hard
to see what this whole technology bodes for the book," he says, "but
I only see bad things. I'm very, very nervous about what the curriculum
will look like in 50 years. Anyone committed to doing deep textual analysis
of the sort that now makes up the book-learning of English courses is likely
to be as marginalized as people in classics departments already are."
Reeves says that "The Technology of Reading and Writing" is
based on two mottoes: "One is 'How a culture writes determines what
the culture can write': there is a fundamental intimacy between the technology
of writing and what gets written. The other is 'Writers are produced by
readers.' If we want to understand, for example, what Plato represented
in the Athens of his day, we have to understand the readership created by
the Athenian pedagogy of that era."
In his teaching Reeves tries to be as dispassionate in contemplating
the possible demise of the book as he is in recounting transitions, remote
centuries ago, from oral to literate cultures. Clearly it's an effort.
His admiration for the computer is grudging and conditioned by his belief
in the primacy of the book. He owns up to being a near-total stranger to
the Internet but says he values word processing as "a tremendous facilitator
of writing. Still," he adds, extracting a slim, handsome volume from
a nearby shelf, "I primarily see the computer as a means of producing
this sort of thing." It turns out to be last year's edition of Milton
Studies, a collection of critical essays, including one by Reeves.
Leafing through the pages, he says, "This is where I want my work
to appear. When I think of where my interests are, where my work lies, it's
here, in books."
Reeves admits to liking "good paper, large fonts, large margins."
Holding out the open book, he says, "I might have wished for a larger
font in this, but it does have beautiful pages." Then, quietly showing
that he puts the word first, he notes, "Beyond all that, it is extremely
well edited. That really does make a difference."
He bemoans the decline in the quality of editing at university presses
during the past few decades ("no single imprimatur any longer guarantees
the highest quality of scholarship"). Nor is he sanguine about the
likely editorial standards of tomorrow's electronic publishing.
Reeves also fears that the computer may already be sapping some aspects
of his students' reading and reasoning abilities. "The book represents
a kind of linearity that seems to me to be endangered, which really means
that reading habits are changing," he says. "One of the things
the computer does is enable us to assemble knowledge in nonlinear ways.
That's celebrated as a good thing, but it undermines our ability to read
books linearly, sequentially, to follow a complex thesis cover to cover
through a big book."
At least one of Reeves' students seems skeptical about much of this.
Miriana Ilieva, a first-year from Sofia, Bulgaria, is considering becoming
a computer major, less because she is drawn to the subject-she far prefers
English and art-than because, as she says, "it is just the future."
She is taking Reeves' course for two reasons: "First, I speak four
languages and wanted to find a common basis for all of them. Second, I am
also taking a course in artificial intelligence and feel that we have to
understand how communication takes place between people, to know the whole
history of it, so that in establishing new communication systems with computers
we take the right direction and lose as little as possible."
Despite having such notions, Ilieva is no sentimentalist about the book.
Asked where she expects it to be in 20 years, she retorts, "In a museum."
Is she drawn to the book as an object? "No, our society is very utilitarian,
very oriented toward information stripped of everything else. There is no
time for elaborate productions." Is she troubled by the decline in
editorial standards? "Not much. It's the information that is important.
If we see a grammatical error but still understand the message being conveyed,
that's all right. Written language has to be useful, to serve us. Given
how rushed we are today, the simplest way is the best way."
Do most Smith students agree? Reeves doesn't think so.
"I've seen in the past that by the end of the course most students
have an ambivalence toward the computer," he says, "which in some
ways is what I am trying to teach: I am trying to say, 'Let us think about
what this new technology represents.' Of course, at the dawn of visual literacy
there were curmudgeons like Plato who said that writing was a bad thing
in that it destroyed memory and the face-to-face communication that is central
to an oral culture. You see similar ambivalence in every period of transition:
when printed books first emerged, for example, many people only saw them
as being déclassé, inferior to manuscript books. So it can
be tempting to look back and think, 'See? That wasn't so bad. Everything
worked out fine.'"
Reeves sighs, then adds, "This time, I'm not so sure." | 
