Book sales||commitment to reading.

"In South Korea, where book sales there were down 20% in 2012, the drop was blamed on a simple phenomenon: “Korean’s don’t read books and don’t read newspapers,” wrote The Korea Times.

Earlier this month a New York Times Op-Ed, called out Mexico as “The Country that Stopped Reading” and blamed a failing education system for the lack of commitment to reading.

Clearly, despite the best efforts of the publishing industry to innovate and advance into the digital age, something else is being lost. Could it be something as straightforward as a lack of focus on fostering literacy and a love of books and reading? Or are there larger social and economic changes afoot?"

by Edward Nawotka, Publishing Perspectives

outside the box

___________
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Groucho Marx.
____________

The last contributions for the CODEX BETWEEN THIS AND THAT book are dropping in. There is a range of views. Moreover - about 77% of people who agreed to write in are somewhere between superb and outstanding at “thinking outside the box”.   I am astounded by the span of thoughts and vocabulary used.  
Q1: Is it because those people are thinking their thoughts and not mine that they seem  so much more creatively insightful?

The ability to think in novel and useful ways has been the defining feature of humans. We invented the wheel, which is nothing like any of the mutations and instruments found in nature. We invented the codex so perfect, it had not changed it’s fundamental structure for over a thousand years. We invented electricity and lightbulb. And then we coined the term “lightbulb moment”.

This week’s Horizon (still available on BBC iPlayer)) was about the brain and the insight and how all of that works: how without thinking logically and methodically we come up with extraordinary ideas. Insight moments, as it turns out, are fleeting and elusive - no wonder I struggle to capture them! They do not come from nowhere, but they are a result of a chain of events and they require awareness bordering obsession. Each problem has an insight bubbling in the background. It is the right hemisphere, apparently, that is capable to making far reaching connections.  
Q2. Do people, who are blind in the right eye - so all input information is first streamed to their right hemisphere - make more insightful associations?

In two weeks I am going to the lecture by Professor Vincent Walsh about lightbulb moments. I expect it will be currious and illuminating. ←This sounds like one of those James Bond puns. Very uncreative of me.

The River of Lost Souls by Isabel Greenberg

Beautiful, funny and clever.

codex: between this and that

 

collective investigation into codex and many contexts of its existence

a book + an exhibition + performances + workshops

private view: April 26, 2013 @ bookartbookshop,  London

2000 (two thousand!!!) Timbuktu manuscripts torched

 The latest estimates, though, suggest that about 2,000 manuscripts were torched, while the remainder of the estimated 30,000 at the institute survived.

 A Written Legacy
The written word is deeply rooted in Timbuktu's rich history. The city emerged as a wealthy center of trade, Islam, and learning during the 13th century, attracting a number of Sufi religious scholars. They in turn took on students, forming schools affiliated with's Timbuktu's three main mosques.
The scholars imported parchment and vellum manuscripts via the caravan system that connected northern Africa with the Mediterranean and Arabia. Wealthy families had the documents copied and illuminated by local scribes, building extensive libraries containing works of religion, art, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, history, geography, and culture.
"The manuscripts are the city's real gold," said Mohammed Aghali, a tour guide from Timbuktu. "The manuscripts, our mosques, and our history—these are our treasures. Without them, what is Timbuktu?"
This isn't the first time that an occupying army has threatened Timbuktu's cultural heritage. The Moroccan army invaded the city in 1591 to take control of the gold trade. In the process of securing the city, they killed or deported most of Timbuktu's scholars, including the city's most famous teacher, Ahmed Baba al Massufi, who was held in exile in Marrakesh for many years and forced to teach in a pasha's court. He finally returned to Timbuktu in 1611, and it is for him that the Ahmed Baba Institute was named.

Hiding the Texts
In addition to the Ahmed Baba Institute, Timbuktu is home to more than 60 private libraries, some with collections containing several thousand manuscripts and others with only a precious handful.
Sidi Ahmed, a reporter based in Timbuktu who recently fled to Bamako, said Monday that nearly all the libraries, including the world-renowned Mamma Haidara and the Fondo Kati libraries, had secreted their collections before the Islamist forces had taken the city.
"The people here have long memories," he said. "They are used to hiding their manuscripts. They go into the desert and bury them until it is safe."
(from National Geographic)

DIPTYCH: James Nasmyth and James Carpenter

James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, Back of Hand & Shrivelled Apple to illustrate the origin of certain mountain ranges resulting from shrinking of the interior of the globe, The Moon Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, 1847

The Book of Books is a highly collectible, two volume book (limited to 250 copies) 216mm x 280mm (8 1/2in x 11in). 2302pp. 1000 Colour Illustrations. $2500.

Uncommon Places

Uncommon Places

Mose

Hudson Valley

Hudson Valley

In 2012 PHAIDON published Stephen Shore’s Book of Books -  a book that contains all 83 books of his print-on-demand projects since 2003. Stephen Shore spent seven years producing one day editions using Apple iPhoto service. It is a simple project, but the result is some truly remarkable sequences of truly remarkable photography.

There is big woo-hah! about Book of Books, with 250 signed and numbered copies available for $2500 to the lucky collectors (mind, it is highly collectible, Phaidon says). The original layouts, including blank pages, are reproduced at actual size and organised chronologically. In this way, the collector experiences each book and the entire book project as Stephen Shore originally intended.
However, I have some questions to Steven Shore and Phaidon.

I.

This book embraces brand new technology and brand new ways of making a book. We at Phaidon have made a true work of art in a pioneering way with one of the most important and influential photographers in the world.

I really do believe that this is a one off in book publishing and the way that it’s made and the way that this work is presented will change the way that books are made in the future. It is not only a landmark but also a benchmark against which other books will be measured. (Amanda Renshaw, Phaidon Editorial Director, on the Phaidon website)

This was not written in 2003. This was written in 2012.  Today, everybody is an author: online and off-line editions of e-books and i-books are produced by anyone who owns a computer, a phone or a tablet. What is so pioneering about Phaidon’s edition?

Few would disagree that Stephen Shore is one of the most important and influential photographers in the world and that - at just over a dollar per photograph - the book might be a good deal to get ones hands on the best contemporary American photography. The book is an anthology of his day projects and it is as great as the individual books are. I fail to see the pioneering side of this benchmark landmark publishing. In fact, print-on-demand technology is not that unpopular among the artist’s books (especially photobooks) - I have used it myself. Blurb and Lulu are packed with limited and unlimited editions by names unknown as well as the accomplished ones (see Sarah Bodman’s Closure from 2009). It is also not entirely unusual for a mainstream publisher to work with an author that was self-publishing before (see April Hamilton‘s The Indie Author Guide, Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman‘s In the Lion’s Den, etc). It  is less common, however,  to have an artist of such recognition to be using print-on-demand technology consistently for such a long period of time, i.e.  sustaining the whole body of work on the idea of an immediate book.
But what is so pioneering about Phaidon’s edition?

II.

It is possible to make another book on his iPhoto books, but it would be very different in scope, style and extent, and it would no longer be an artist’s book. (Amanda Renshaw, Tate etc., 26)

This, I find very confusing. I suppose it raises the question of what IS an artist’s book  and  why should a reprint (or a second edition) not be an artist’s book. Ed Ruscha published 400 numbered copies in the first edition of  Twenty Six Gasoline Stations. The second edition contained 500 unnumbered copies and the third edition - 3000 unnumbered copies.  Ed Ruscha flooded the market, but the reprints never stopped being artist’s books.  
Book of Books contains day projects that were conceived as print-on-demand access-for-all publications. How does this Phaidon’s edition relate to the original concept? Why didn't they produce a boxed set of the original books? What was the intention?

Even though Amanda Renshaw is very explicit about the limited and signed nature of  Book of Books, I assume that sooner or later the $2500 edition will be followed by a trade edition of a more accessible kind.