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  • The Visual Economy of “Precious Books”Publishing, Modern Art, and the Design of Arabic Books
  • Zeina Maasri (bio)

Technologies of printing, widening spheres of literacy, and capitalist economies of publishing, among other global dimensions of modernity, have altered conceptions of the book and, arguably, standardized its visual and material form: binding, paper, size, typography, and page layout. But still, the aesthetic form of books has been the object of modernist experimentation throughout the twentieth century. Poets, artists, and designers, in association with editors and publishers, sought to rekindle experiences of reading and seeing, text and image, knowledge and affect along specific philosophical or political visions and in (subversive or nostalgic) responses to particular traditions of bookmaking. Johanna Drucker contends that the artist’s book is “the twentieth-century art-form par excellence,”1 and George Bornstein, in Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, urges us “to recognize that the literary text consists not only of words (its linguistic code) but also of the semantic features of its material instantiations (its bibliographic code).”2 Scholarship concerned with modernist aesthetic explorations of the visual and material form of the book, however, has excluded from its modernist framing book cultures that lie outside the geography of the West. Yet this very geography of margins, as Partha Mitter has argued, offers a vantage point from which a critical decentering of the exclusionary Western foundation of modernism can be mounted.3 Shedding light on the postcolonial Arabic book, this article contributes to a growing scholarship seeking precisely to “decenter modernism”4 and expands the latter field of inquiry by bringing into play the design and visual economy of modern art books.

In her recent Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut, Hala Auji centers her argument on how visuality, often disregarded, is crucial to the social history of the Arabic press. She rightly notes that the much-privileged textuality of books, and of print culture more broadly, has to a great extent overshadowed the visual and material dimensions of printed books. Through this framework, the book’s typography, layout design, binding, and size are examined as crucial markers of “visual literacy” in a moment of transition from scribal to print culture.5 The same problem can be extended to the study of Arabic publications from the mid-twentieth century onward, when, even more crucially, “vision was nominally ascendant,”6 and new techniques of image making and reproduction transformed the press and everyday media in the Arab world. Scholars of post-colonial Arabic literature, however, have repeatedly disembodied the texts they study from the visual and material form of the books and journals in which these have been published. Historians of modern art, on the other hand, have paid limited attention, and even then only tangentially, to artists’ books. In these approaches, bookmaking as an aesthetic practice is removed from the economy of publishing and the politics of the reproducible printed artifact.7 But we need to understand how engagements with the book as a modern artistic medium are productive of new conceptions and visual economies of Arabic books. What role does this aesthetic practice play in a capitalist economy of publishing and in an everyday visuality of reading? [End Page 95]

By being attentive to the fluidity across aesthetic practices in visual culture and to the economic dimension of these practices, the analysis inevitably directs attention to a disquiet troubling modern art history: art’s alleged autonomy. On this, Jacques Rancière’s argument against the dominant paradigms of the modernist view of the autonomy of art in the distinction drawn “between art forms and life forms” provides a neat departure.8 He exemplifies his argument by looking at how modernist graphic design of the early twentieth-century blurs the distinction between sign and form, and between the form of art and the form of the everyday object. He writes in conclusion: “Accordingly, the surface of graphic design is three things: firstly the equal footing on which everything lends itself to art; secondly, the surface of conversion where words, forms and things exchange roles; and thirdly, the surface of equivalence where the symbolic writing of forms equally...

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