The page and its predecessors have existed for at least 3,000 years, and its modern rectangular form is now so familiar that we seldom notice its appearance, shape, layout, or materials. Yet the page has had a profound influence on Western culture and thought. From papyrus roll to manuscript codex to printed book to hypertext, the page has shaped the way people see the world. It has been the most significant site for displaying information, and in the process it has determined what counts as intellectual authority, logical argument, and useful information.

The earliest forms of the page such as...

The page leads an underhand existence. Lost among its brethren within the covers of a book, or singled out to carry, all on its own, a limited piece of scribbling; turned, torn, numbered, dog-eared; lost or recalled, lit up or deleted, skimmed or scrutinized, the page comes into our reader’s consciousness only as a frame or container of what we mean to read. Its brittle being, barely corporeal in its two dimensions, is dimly perceived by our eyes as they follow the track of the words. Like a skeleton supporting the skin of a text, the page disappears in its...

The following remarks arise from a growing concern for the future of the medieval page. This concern involves both of the broad constituencies implicit in the symposium The Future of the Page and in the related web siteArchitectures, Ideologies, and Materials of the Page.¹ On the one hand, we have those who believe that new technologies will finally allow us to transcend the medieval page once and for all, to move beyond it to new forms of organizing information and, therefore, to new ways of thinking about that information. On the other hand, there are those who believe that...

For years I have been fascinated by the marginal notes printed along the edges of old books, pithy and punchy remarks like ‘Here an excellent simile,’ ‘K. Richard in vtter despaire,’ and ‘No, no, no not on pain of eternal damnation.’ There is no ignoring these in-your-face annotations that dot the littoral boundary of early modern texts. They are the work of authors and printers hell-bent onmanagingreaders – telling us what to believe, what to remember, what else to read. The only way to rid ourselves of these meddling marginalists is to reedit the texts, demoting their interventions to...

In theMinima Moraliacomes a section in which Adorno reflects on being given a series of books as a boy. The books were in a language of which little Theodor was ignorant at the time; nonetheless, the objects still spoke to him, eloquently. In fact, he suggests that out of them – the bibliographical forms of them, purely, apart from any verbal content – a whole culture could be read:

In my childhood, some elderly English ladies with whom my parents kept up relations often gave me books as presents: richly illustrated works for theyoung, also a small green bible bound...

Indigenous peoples throughout the world have used a wide array of forms and systems of communicating or writing or remembering that have shown similarity in strands of symbolic designs, meaning, and function.¹ Early Indigenous literacy in America was largely symbolic and ideographic, reflecting a unified vision of knowledge and thought from one continent to another. A wide diversity of forms exists from the Tupi-Guarani’sAyvu Rapytaor Origin of Human Speech,² to the Yucatac-Mayan paper screenfolds,³ to the AlgonquianWalam Olumor Red Score,⁴ Midewiwin or Grand Medicine scrolls,⁵ and Mi’kmaw hieroglyphics;⁶ these mutually intelligible ideological systems comprised a tribal...

Marie Battiste has written about the cognitive imperialism of the Westernized classroom where the promotion of literacy and paginated culture has had a very powerful, though not always negative or irresistible, impact on Indigenous literacies and cultural self-determination. She has also pointed out parts of the history of symbolic literacy that have been casually or deliberately ignored or devalued in the course of monumentalizing the European page. I will begin my section of this joint project with images deriving from two historical conjunctures: one dealing with Aboriginal adaptation and resistance, the other with political liberation; one dealing with the page...

All the news organs have picked up the story: ‘After five centuries of virtually uncontested sway, the Book seems to be facing a serious threat to its power. Informed sources report a large computerized force continues its sweep through traditional centres of bookish institutional control. Resistance has been fierce in certain quarters, and vast areas remain wholly under Book authority. Spokesmen from both sides describe the situation as volatile. According to militia leader Sven Birkerts ...’

That kind of report shapes much of the public discussion about the relation of books and an array of new computer-based tools generically named...

Leopold Bloom has just received a tantalizing letter from Martha Clifford, and you are reading it along with him. You have read about fifteen sentences, and then you come to these two, one a complete sentence and one a fragment:

If you have a paperback version of Hans Walter Gabler’s edition of James Joyce’sUlyssesin your hands, you will have to hold your breath and turn the page to learn that Martha has told Bloom that she ‘will punish’ him (5:251–2).¹ Martha typed her letter on one side of a sheet of paper, and so Bloom was able...

In the summer of 2001 I spent several weeks at a Long Island City warehouse sorting through the William Gaddis archive before the papers were purchased, catalogued, and eventually housed with the American fiction collections at the Washington University in St Louis. What I found there was not too surprising – no substantial unpublished work apart from a packet of early attempts at fiction, satirical pieces forThe New Yorker(indicating a literary career that was thankfully not to be). Mainly there were boxes of letters, typescripts, manuscripts, business and educational pamphlets written for money, bills, memorabilia, and clippings – thousands of...

What changes when we no longer think of the page as ‘real’? Since the arrival of television and the personal computer, the presentation of our ideas via configurations of electron beams rather than fixed upon a more palpable page has inspired repeated commentary upon not only how our texts will change, but also how we will change. Whether a lamentation for the loss of the texture and substance of the book, or an exultation for a supposed new traversing of boundaries and freedom from hierarchical structures, a predominant conclusion has been that we are altered by our media. For many...

A few years ago, while I was working on a research project concerned with the role of the artist as public intellectual, I stumbled across the visual genre of the artist’s page, that is, photo- or photo-text essays inserted into the writing space of contemporary art journals, magazines, or periodicals. In recent years, this small-scale often unnoticed genre has generated considerable interest in artistic circles, with artist’s pages featuring regularly in the publications of artist-run-centres and in such interdisciplinary journals asHarbour Magazine and West Coast Line,among others. As a quick search through these publications reveals, the artist’s page...