Whitney Trettien: Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork (2021)

“In Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. Bringing these long-forgotten objects back to life through hand-curated digital resources, Trettien shows how early experimental book hacks speak to the contemporary conditions of digital scholarship and publishing. As a mixed-media artifact itself, Cut/Copy/Paste enacts for readers what Trettien argues: that digital forms have the potential to decenter patriarchal histories of print.

From the religious household of Little Gidding—whose biblical concordances and manuscripts exemplify protofeminist media innovation—to the queer poetic assemblages of Edward Benlowes and the fragment albums of former shoemaker John Bagford, Cut/Copy/Paste demonstrates history’s relevance to our understanding of current media. Tracing the lives and afterlives of amateur “bookwork,” Trettien creates a method for identifying and comprehending hybrid objects that resist familiar bibliographic and literary categories. In the process, she bears witness to the deep history of radical publishing with fragments and found materials.

With many of Cut/Copy/Paste’s digital resources left open for additions and revisions, this book reimagines our ideas of publication while fostering a spirit of generosity and inclusivity.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, Dec 2021
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781517904098, 1517904099
328 pages

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Janneke Adema: Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (2021)

“Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema’s proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality.

Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn’t cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.”

Publisher MIT Press, August 2021
Leonardo series
Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9780262046022, 0262046024
xiii+335 pages

Interview with author: Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra (Dariah Open, 2021).

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Lawrence Liang, Monica James, Danish Sheikh, Amy Trautwein, Another: Invisible Libraries (2016)

“In Chemin-des-dames, a memorial library may be found encased in a series of catacombs, while in Memorious, the living have themselves become an oral record of literature. The rules of Linearis mandate fidelity to a book till its completion, while Dermestis Lardarius houses books in a state of half-eaten incompleteness. Journey further into this world, and you will find libraries taxonomized by smell, composed of marginalia, etched in ice, and forged in nightmares.

Invisible Libraries captures the sensuous, enigmatic and aesthetic world of books and libraries. Taking a cue from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the authors explore bibliophilia, especially in the way it manifests itself via our love affair with libraries.”

Publisher Yoda Press, New Delhi, 2016
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISBN 9789382579274, 9382579273
vii+102 pages

Reviews: Parvathy Raveendran (Scroll.in, 2017), Ahalya and Ritika (Trilogy, 2017).

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