I’d like you to imagine a fairly popular book you know, say for example ‘Pride and Prejudice’. When you open it up you are in touch with a world in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. We go there. It’s a place that’s been drawn from someone’s imagination and experience that doesn’t exist, yet it has causal force, bringing Jane Austen tourists from all corners of the globe to visit places made famous by television adaptations. Other works on paper, of fact as well as fiction, have, sometimes, more powerful causal force. A marriage license is one such, being something that has authority because we say it does. The printed word is one – particularly powerful aspect – of the world of human culture, which is a world we share. It’s important to us, in ways I want to touch on a bit more later.

To put it another way, many people here might may have read this book, Pride and Prejudice. Some of us may not have done, but have, perhaps, seen adaptations on tv or seen other works inspired by it, for which it represents an origin to be acknowledged and sometimes undermined. The book, the thing, the place conjured in our common experience is one we share. It is a corner of the shared world of reading. I want to talk about this world a little bit today.

The written word, as I say, is NOT innate. It is a learned faculty, and while there are many parts of the world where illiteracy is still the norm, there are few of us, (barring pathology), who lack competence in speaking our native languages. But, even with the communication tools our bodies provide us with, there is a question of trust. Even with the communication abilities we evolved to have, there can be doubt and confusion.

To illustrate this, I want to read a quotation from a book – “Strange Ritual” – by David Byrne, the singer with the band Talking Heads.

“We spend years learning how the wires are connected. We must eventually learn, by rote, that pulling on this particular string, as odd as it seems, will connote happiness, and this string, which our guts tell us denotes fear and anger, will, to the contrary, signal to the outside world a sense of well-being. I often sing with all my might, and I find that all I’ve accomplished is to convey a sense of energy being expended and a desperate need to communicate something. Often, no one is able to figure out exactly what it is I’m trying to communicate. I myself often feel that I’ve touched something deep as my voice rises into a sudden, painful, sharp edge and I assume and hope that the exact same feelings are reconstructed inside the minds and hearts of the listeners, but it isn’t always true. The audience often only watches in puzzlement as I produce a series of nonsensical, confusing, conflicting sounds that somehow they know denote intense emotional states, but they don’t know which ones they are. Just like all our facial expressions, my strings are attached in all the wrong places.”

In different cultures, different gestures and objects have different values. You have probably seen the adverts for a worldwide bank that plays on their knowledge of these differences. One example is the reversal of the usual nodding/head-shaking gesture in Sri Lanka and Bulgaria. We mean to say one thing, pull on the wires, and end up saying something else.

The written word, by contrast, SEEMS on first glance to be the very model of clarity: it is, after all black and white. David Byrne gives us an image of a physical puppet here, controlled by an inner homunculus who pulls at the strings to try to communicate to an outside world what he thinks and feels. How like bits of coiled string our letters are, and how like that puppeteer we are when we tap away at the keys of our keyboard. The written world is potentially no clearer than the world of expressive gesture that Byrne talks about. It is fluid, consensual, shared. Circumstances can exist where what was hitherto black and white will, to quote Byrne again “stop making sense”.

What we are walking into in that library I mentioned earlier is of course not just a disquisition on the part of the authors, it is a conversation in which we take part as readers, and the reality of reading does not exist on the page itself, but in the relationship between writers, readers and their medium.

When we think of the history of books, we are thinking, really, of a circuit – a pathway – that connects those who take part, writers, readers and publishers, and over the hundreds of years of the printed word’s history they have become a crucial part both of our consciousness and of the societies we live in. [Read more about ideas like this in the work of Robert Darnton and Marshall McLuhan]

The shared world of reading is important because it represents in concrete form the idea of culture. The world of the force of human imagination made real and given concrete causal force. Much of this is given credence because we have historically relied on the authority of print in the form of coventional agreements like laws. Our own authority was once vested in our signature rather than the secret digital forms it takes today, but the secret of one’s signature, the art of the hand, was once the gatekeeper of our authority. But print has been responsible in part for our ancestor’s ability to share ideas about what a country or a religion is, and who gets to decide what knowledge about such things is. Hansard is now online, for example, but the linguistic proceedings of parliament were once (and of course still are) ‘Printed by authority’. Others such have included the act of Union. [Read more about the strange quality of human culture in ‘The Imagined World Made Real’ by Henry Plotkin.]

We have, over the last century or so, come to see more of what goes in to producing such authority, including our own complicity as readers in agreeing with what the pulling-of-strings really means, what its value is, and whether or not to disobey. The authority of the author is joined in conversation by the readership of the reader. When we read books, we enter into conversation with what their possibilities suggest. The same is true when we write or otherwise make books: the conversation implied by the shared world of reading is an explicitly social enterprise.

One thing I think all the book artists here might share would be that they enter into this conversation in the act of making books. They are participants in a field of human cognitive experience defined by reading in its various forms, visual, tactile, textual. It is, though, a world conjured from thin air.

From thin air? Is that why big libraries need specially strengthened floors?

Well, the books are just a means to an end. The book… is not the book. The book exists in your mind. The book exists between us.

I am not, here, trying to persuade anyone that the book is ultimately an immaterial experience. (I’m not even sure whether Mallarmé wants us to entertain that.) Lest anyone should think that I do, let me praise a few of the artist’s book’s many physical and experiential phenomena. Books tactility, their portability, the sequence-of-spaces that the codex presents, the unity of word and type, and design and aesthetics and content that a beautiful book exhibits, are all, in their various ways, vital to the experience of books. But I want to say that what the book offers, or perhaps more explicitly, what its author offers, is got at through the book. The book through all these different phenomena, is a complex incantation that offers a portal, or -less bad- a portage to a human world we share. A portage rather than a portal, because it is often not the case that the door simply opens, no matter how skillfully crafted a wardrobe it’s hidden in. Sometimes the way is hard; a portage, where we have to carry our vessel over the terrain. Such books are difficult to get into. But sometimes worth it for the new geographies they open up.

To discuss just one of its many aspects, when I see an artists’ book, I see an artwork that issues a fitful promise to get us to that shared world of reading . Very often this is so, and there are pages and words, and some kind of structure that takes place in the world of reading. Here there are often further augmentations where the images conveyed by the text are paralleled by visual images. There is counterplay and cross-fertilization and the world of reading is invaded by worlds of print and gesture and photography.

Sometimes the door to that shared world is opened through image alone: I read from one image to the next, across, through, over the stretch of pages and back again. The book fuses into one object the play across several dimensions.

Other books are unique. They mark a special place on the globe of reading. This book is the only point at which this space unfolds. It is not possible to get there from anywhere else. More than other books, which in their multiplicity, could be simultaneously accessed all over the world, such unique works stand distinct from the reading experience we can have on the internet, whose spaces open up simultaneously from as many angles as there are viewers. But such unique books are still part of the promise of reading. The promise they make to us is that the way this object functions is – however obliquely – through reading.

Some – part – of the work of being an artist or a poet consists in trying to work with that process David Byrne described as “pulling on strings”. Seeing what can and cannot be communicated, noticing that there ARE strings being pulled in the first place and trying to make other people see them too. Sometimes we want to try to go the edge of what can be accomplished in the expressive forms open to us, whether these are physical, linguistic, printed or visual. What constitutes the end of what I can say, dance, write about? To limit the question to the expressive power of books alone, what are the limits of the book? The book is a trusted vessel that we have freighted with meaning, but there are things it cannot carry, and sometimes there are things it can say that seem to point to a world beyond reading, textual or visual.

We’re lucky enough to have an exhibition featuring a copy of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, and the presence of that book makes me want to draw another comparison:

The shared world of reading is not identical to the ideal world contained, or rather invoked by Mallarmé’s notion of The Book. (I’m trying to make you hear those capitals there)

But they are in some ways similar.

Print’s ability to render textual experiences reproducible multiplies the shareability of the author’s world to include anyone literate with the wherewithal to access a copy (and libraries are great helpers in this project).

Mallarmé’s project on the other hand, tries to assemble or perhaps discover The Book wherein a poetics is at work that can truly be – in some sense- the world; it enacts the ideal world through the constellation of the type (and the equally important spaces between) that make up its text. This is somewhat different from the idea of a shared, human world of reading which really requires us, as readers, to take an active part in its constitution. We must ‘vote with our eyeballs’ that the book is worth being shared. Mallarmé’s conception is ideal however; the book alone suffices.

Nevertheless, Mallarmé did consider the reader’s part to be of importance. He tells us,

First, it allows us to take from the essential components of the printed world, (those components being the movable type alphabet that Marshall McLuhan tells us rendered the world reproducible and quantifiable), a starting point for our own relation to the book. In such a way we create the shared world of reading using the atomistic letters we use to describe it.