Seth Lerer (UC San Diego)

The History of the Book and the Idea of Design

Since the origins of literacy in the West, written communication has been as much a matter of physical design as it has been a matter of symbolic representation. The relationship between the physical, material quality of the “book” and the “meaning” of its contents has been a matter of critical reflection since the Greeks and Romans. My presentation argues that the social experience of written documents is keyed to the physical medium of their dissemination. Moreover, i argue that various cultural and historical periods have sought to adjudicate this relationship as a matter of design: that is, finding ways of bringing the “book” into a relationship with the body of the reader. Reading is an embodied experience, and the shifts from scroll to bound codex, from written manuscript to print, and from print to digital literacy have less been matters of technology as such than of the design of technological instruments. My presentation traces some historical developments in western literacy to show how the history of the book is, in many ways, a narrative of design challenges — challenges from which we can learn as we develop new models of literate teaching and learning