How will the design of books change in our digital age?
From a story in Slate...
This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital
proliferation—a select group of design-conscious authors will continue
to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their
themes, like Plascencia’s and Foer’s, will likely revolve around the
history and practice of writing books, but that’s nothing out of the
ordinary—one of literature’s greatest themes has always been itself.
Other writers go even further, making over the
entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New
Directions publication, Nox. “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book,”
she writes on the back cover. “This is a replica of it, as close as we
could get.” The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound
accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages “translate” a Catullus elegy by
offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the
poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carson’s relationship to her brother
through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs
and letters.
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