The Future of the Page (review)

Next to the luminous visual space of the screen, the paper page may appear flat and lifeless. Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor's The Future of the Page refocuses our attention on the page in all its forms. Through an investigation of materials, architecture, and ideologies, this collection of essays examines how 'the book's most frequently encountered, compressed, turned, torn, punctured, inked, cut, bound, marked, fingered, numbered, burnt, and read component' (1) has shaped practices of reading, the dissemination of knowledge, and the structure of social relations. Writing about the page from a spectrum of disciplines, including cultural studies, literary studies, art history, and postcolonial studies, the contributors offer insights into the page that are relevant and accessible even to readers with little or no knowledge of bibliographical studies, palaeography, or book history. The Future of the Page is a book of and about pages, but how many pages can and should one dedicate to an exploration of the page itself ?

Like many publications in the growing field of book history, including Geoffrey Nunberg's The Future of the Book and Jonathon Sawday and Neil Rhodes' The Renaissance Computer,¹ Stoicheff and Taylor's collection looks back to the eclectic history of manuscript and print cultures in order to explore the effects of new technologies of writing and book production. As contributor Jerome McGann suggests in 'Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in N-Dimensional Space,' appreciating the 'the truth about paperspace' may be especially useful 'in an age fascinated to distraction by the hyperrepresentational power of digital technology' (156). However, many of the essays in The Future of the Page also resonate with the work of an earlier generation of communications theorists, including Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, whose work demonstrates how seemingly incidental changes in book design have often had profound effects on the production and dissemination of knowledge.²

Although The Future of the Page is not divided into discrete sections, two recurring themes link most of the essays in this collection. The most dominant theme is the transition from page to screen. While nearly all the essays in the collection pick up on this theme, those that reflect upon pioneering digitization projects treat it most thoroughly. McGann, one of the architects of the Rossetti Archive, an early Web initiative that sought to create a digital archive of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's writing and artwork, highlights the potential and limitations of what he describes as the 'n-dimensional' space of the Web. While acknowledging that it can be valuable to compile materials in the context of a printed anthology or physical archive, he maintains that there is little doubt that digital space can be 'a much richer and more flexible space than bibliographical space,' since the book medium, bound as it is by the page, is 'physically incapable of the kind of storing, integrating, and accessing operations' (145) made possible by the Web. Like McGann, Michael Groden, the designer of Digital Ulysses, another pioneering digital archivization project, emphasizes that the digitization of literary works not only creates new ways of interacting with existing works of literature but also holds the potential to refocus our attention on what we have taken for granted about the extent to which the page structures our experience of specific texts. As Groden emphasizes in his essay 'James Joyce's Ulysses on the Page and on the Screen,' Ulysses is 'very much a text of pages as well as words' (166). It is widely known that Joyce sought to control all aspects of the book's design, from the choice of font to the location of the page breaks. As a 'book of pages,' the screen may seem bound to deceive the printed version of the book, but, as Groden explains, during the development of the Digital Ulysses, efforts were made to both circumvent and foreground the screen's deceptive tendencies. The project's ultimate decision to reproduce the original...