Bonnie Mak: How the Page Matters (2011)

“From handwritten texts to online books, the page has been a standard interface for transmitting knowledge for over two millennia. It is also a dynamic device, readily transformed to suit the needs of contemporary readers. In How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak explores how changing technology has affected the reception of visual and written information.

Mak examines the fifteenth-century Latin text Controversia de nobilitate in three forms: as a manuscript, a printed work, and a digital edition. Transcending boundaries of time and language, How the Page Matters connects technology with tradition using innovative new media theories. While historicizing contemporary digital culture and asking how on-screen combinations of image and text affect the way conveyed information is understood, Mak’s elegant analysis proves both the timeliness of studying interface design and the persistence of the page as a communication mechanism.”

Publisher University of Toronto Press, 2011
Studies in Book and Print Culture series
ISBN 080209760X, 9780802097606
ix+129 pages

Reviews: Martha W. Driver (Speculum, 2013), Martin G. Eisner (Renaissance Quarterly, 2013), Brett A. Hudson (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2014), Julie Holcomb (Information & Culture, 2012).
Interview with author: Gretchen E. Henderson (Ploughshares Literary Magazine, 2013).

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Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading (1934-) [EN, ES, PT]

Ezra Pound’s classic book, first published in 1934, is a concise statement of his aesthetic theory. It is a primer for the reader who wants to maintain an active, critical mind and become increasingly sensitive to the beauty and inspiration of the world’s best literature. With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. ABC of Reading displays Pound’s great ability to open new avenues in literature for our time.

First published by George Routledge, 1934
New edition published by Faber and Faber, London, 1951
This edition first published in 1961, reissued in 1991
ISBN 0571058922
206 pages

wikipedia (EN)

ABC of Reading (English, 1934/1991)
El ABC de la lectura (Spanish, trans. Miguel Martínez-Lage, 2000)
ABC da literatura (Portuguese, trans. Auguste de Campos and José Paulo Paes, 2006)

Robert Darnton: Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984–)

“When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions Robert Darnton answers in this classic work of European history in what we like to call ‘The Age of Enlightenment.'”

First published in 1984
Publisher Basic Books, New York, 1990
ISBN 0465027008
298 pages

Reviews: Roger Chartier (Journal of Modern History, 1985), David E. Apter (American Journal of Sociology, 1985).
Commentaries: Darnton (Journal of Modern History, 1986), Dominick LaCapra (Journal of Modern History, 1988), Philip Stewart (Journal of Modern History, 1994).

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