Maria Inês Cruz, Lozana Rossenova (eds.): Bookspace: Collected Essays on Libraries (2015)

“Bookspace: Collected Essays on Libraries focuses on the current development of library spaces as public institutions through the perspective of architects, writers, librarians, and readers. The book addresses the architecture of modern public spaces, and the development of library collections in the age of digital information, in order to discuss the larger social context of library institutions. It provides an insight into their management and how their functions are changing.

A comprehensive look at the social role of libraries is a key part of the book. In the Western World, constant funding cuts – justified with austerity measures in the current economic climate – affect the functioning and closing of libraries. While in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the challenges arise from socio-political conditions and military regimes, thus, threatening the preservation and sharing of knowledge, and overshadowing those libraries’ historical roots and social roles.

Recognising how patterns of information distribution and consumption are changing driven by both technical and social developments, we aim to suggest how they might evolve in the future.”

Contributions by David Pearson, Heba El-Sherif, Marie Lécrivain, Julius Motal, Jorge Reis, João Torres, and Tom Vandeputte.

Publisher Inland Editions, London, 2015
133 pages

Publisher (archived), Twitter
WorldCat

PDF (6 MB)

New Formations, 78: Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net (2013)

“The cultural authority of the codex form of the book appears to be in a process of displacement ensuing from the rise of on-line digital media. The traditional material structures of the book – its physical forms and its institutional forms of production, circulation, and preservation – are often seen as being subject to dematerialisation; evaporating in the transitory appearances of the digital screen and in the proliferation of new systems of production. However, this issue of New Formations makes the case that the present historical juncture should be understood as a mixed media milieu, in which traditional and digital forms of writing and publishing coalesce and conflict in a complex array of textual materialities.

Such materialities of text are at once sites of political and aesthetic experimentation, and of intense capitalization, intersecting features which are approached in the articles collected here through a broad range of theoretical and empirical themes: diagrammatic writing; the material reading formations of a best-seller novel; grey literature in the institutions of cultural studies; Black Twitter; the politics of Open Access and the artists’ book; digital humanities and its political problematics; the bibliopolitics of the passport; and the political and aesthetic forms of independent publishing.”

Contributions by Richard Burt, Sanjay Sharma, Hanna Kuusela, Johanna Drucker, Ted Striphas and Mark Hayward, Sas Mays, Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik, Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn and Dmitry Vilensky.

Edited and with an Introduction by Sas Mays and Nicholas Thoburn
Publisher Lawrence & Wishart, Summer 2013
ISSN 0950-2378
207 pages

Review: Janneke Adema (2013).

Publisher

PDF

Johanna Drucker: Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995–) [EN, SR]

“The alphabet is at once familiar and mysterious. Its letters have been the object of speculation since their invention almost four thousand years ago; the symbols represent sounds, yet they exist in their own right, often invested with quasi-magical power. Johanna Drucker, who teaches art history at Yale University, examines the imaginative and idiosyncratic ways in which the letters of the alphabet have been assigned value in political, spiritual, or religious belief systems over two millennia. The first book to explore fully this colorful, poetic, and frequently eccentric realm, The Alphabetic Labyrinth is richly complemented by images that have rarely or never before been reproduced. Drawing on a wide variety of little-known sources, both literary and artistic, the author adds a new and exciting chapter to the history of ideas which will prove fascinating to cultural historians, art historians, and anyone interested in the history of writing.”

Publisher Thames and Hudson, London, 1995
ISBN 0500016089, 9780500016084
315 pages

Reviews: Ellen Lupton (Eye, 1995), Cliff Pickover (Leonardo, 1999).

WorldCat

The Alphabetic Labyrinth (English, 1995, 18 MB)
Alfabetski lavirint (Serbian, trans. Branislav Kovačević, 2006)