Books Without Books: Digitally Communicating Materiality
This talk was given on February 24th 2021 as part of Stanford University’s “Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities” series.
My name is Allie Alvis, and I’m a rare book cataloguer at antiquarian book dealer Type Punch Matrix. Before that, I was the special collections reference librarian at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. I am a book historian, and my background is in material culture and the history of the book—basically, this field is about understanding what the book as a physical object can tell us about the time in which it was made. I maintain professional social media presences on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and most recently TikTok!
Special collections libraries tend to pride themselves on their “dog and pony” shows, where they bring a number of highlights out of the vault and show them to a group assembled in a room or two. This allows people to get up close and personal with the books, and start to understand them as objects.
Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Many people are used to seeing historical artifacts behind glass in museums, but books are materially and philosophically a bit different. Without opening and turning the pages of a book, you’re only getting part of its information, part of its story; displaying a book open in a case presents it as a two-dimensional static object, when in reality books are made to be extremely dynamic.
Now, going on nearly a year of a pandemic in which social distancing measures have proven to effectively slow down the virus, this is obviously not an option. But this overview of the situation overlooks something: how many people do those in-person dog-and-pony shows actually reach? Who is missing from those reading rooms, which are normally situated on college campuses and maintain somewhat intimidating security protocols?
Many librarians and book historians have been pondering how to make collections accessible in the absence of physical presence in order to reach underserved audiences for a long time. Much ink has been spilled on discussions of digitization, digital surrogates, and outreach, but the pandemic has turned the theoretical into the practical more quickly than anyone could imagine or prepare for. Today I’ll talk to you about some ways that digital communication methods work, some ways that they don’t, and some ways that they could.
But first: let me put on my best Blathers impression and give you a very brief overview of the history of the book!
That roughly rectangular thing you think of when I say the word “book” is the codex format. The word “codex” comes from the Latin caudex, meaning trunk of a tree—we’ll come back to that in a bit. The basic definition of codex is a stack of pages sewn together, usually sandwiched between two covers. But books did not always look like this! In fact, it took millennia for them to even vaguely resemble those rectangles you have sitting on your shelf.
The earliest surviving written documents are clay tablets from Mesopotamia, written in the cuneiform alphabet. But such tablets only had a finite amount of writing space, and their portability quickly became unfeasible—who would want to lug a bunch of heavy clay around to do some casual reading? When Upper and Lower Egypt were united around 3000 BCE, they found themselves in need of an efficient way of transmitting large amounts of information. It was around this period that Egyptians developed a method of flattening the pith of the Papyrus plant to make a writing surface. Papyrus was brittle, though, and folding it led to cracking. The Egyptians realised that rolling the papyrus was a much gentler way of compressing long sheets. Thus, the scroll was born!
For centuries, the scroll was the world’s most popular container of information. The famed Library of Alexandria contained scrolls, not codices! But scrolls weren’t perfect tools. Reading a scroll requires two hands at all times—one to unroll at one end and one to roll up at the other. Scrolls, of course, had no page numbers (since they didn’t have pages), and finding a piece of information may involve winding through yards of material.
The earliest book-looking things are diptychs, partially hollowed-out pieces of wood filled with wax and strung together. These wax tablets were developed in ancient Rome and were called pugillares, coming from the Latin word pugillaris that means “thing that can be held in the hand.” These book-like tablets could be written in with a stylus, and thanks to the malleability of the wax surface, could be erased and re-used.
Example from the London Rare Book School
These types of tablets persisted in schools even after the development of the codex proper; learning to write is much easier if you can erase your mistakes! It is from the wooden “pages” of the diptychs that we get our Latin caudex, and from that codex. Eventually, these tablets grew to have more than two “pages,” and the “pages” were replaced with thinner, lighter parchment. Parchment, also called vellum, is made of the stretched skin of animals, most often cows or sheep. When you think of something like an illuminated manuscript, you’re probably thinking of a book with parchment pages. Manuscript, by the way, comes from the Latin manu for hand and scriptus for written—it refers specifically to books and documents that were written out by hand.
Paper eventually made it to the west thanks to Arabic papermakers in al-Andalus, now the Iberian Peninsula, who in turn learned the art from the Chinese. Early Arabic and European paper was made of recycled linen rags, and looks and feels very different from modern, wood pulp-based paper. It actually feels more like a worn dollar bill, and is just about as strong! Paper from 1490 tends to be in better condition than paper from 1890 (and sometimes 1990) because it is not nearly as acidic as wood pulp paper, which is prone to quickly becoming yellow and brittle.
So, as you can tell from that overview, a lot of the history of the book is tied up in the stuff the book is made of. Not only that, getting a sense of the physicality of the book as an object helps people get a concrete sense of history. In a face-to-face setting, I would invite you touch the parchment or paper pages, admire the glitter of gold leaf, and feel the heft of wooden bookbinding boards.
Understanding books in this way has long been perceived to be the province of high-level academics and historians rather than “normal” people. After all, academics and historians have traditionally been the only ones who have access to special collections reading rooms. But librarianship and special collections are changing, both by choice and by necessity: With tight academic budgets, a library collection that trades on exclusivity of access is not appealing for those concerned with the bottom line.
Digitization of special collections items has acted as sort of a release valve for problems of access. Now researchers can access collections from anywhere in the world, if they have the means to do so. There’s also the added benefit of giving outreach teams pretty pictures to use in promotional materials!
Many platforms for digitized books make an effort to present these digital objects as, well, books. These digital objects are often called “digital surrogates” for this reason: they are meant to stand in for and act as books for most purposes. You can see this in most of the websites that host digitized books–from Internet Archive to HathiTrust to the British Library, most platforms default to a “two up” view, with two images side by side in an open book orientation. You then click or scroll through these pages sequentially, sometimes even with animations of page turning and paper sound effects to really set the atmosphere.
Digital surrogates even offer us textual functionality that we can’t achieve in a physical book: for example, with optical character recognition, finding mentions of a particular topic becomes a breeze! But while we all love digitization, I have to ask: how good is a series of digital images at communicating the book as an object?
In general, special collections libraries treat digitization more as an access medium than a preservation medium. And rightly so—the shelf life of digital files, and the hardware needed to access them, is much shorter than that of a 15th century book. But in this case, “access” is generally limited to the text, and sometimes a surface-level glimpse of the aesthetics of the book. But a book is so much more than a series of flat images; there is knowledge to be gained from literally every aspect of the object that is book.
A very interesting example of this is blank pages; Sarah Werner has written an excellent blog post on how blanks are presented in digitized books, and highlights a number of issues with them. Blank pages can be great for a book historian because they present unhindered access to watermarks, evidence of bleed-throughs or offsetting, the impressions of uninked bearing type, and all sorts of material history. But some institutions don’t image these pages; instead they insert an image that reads “blank page” into the digital object where the blank should be. Werner observes that this is an excellent time and cost-saving measure when the text is the priority, but it can be a loss for those interested in the object.
Werner also touches on something that has become a bit of a pet interest of mine, although I haven’t done anything with it yet: book glamor shots. Werner talks specifically about the use of raking light to reveal textural details of blanks, and there are all sorts of different light treatments that can reveal secrets invisible to the naked eye or basic photograph. But in that case, we’re often still talking about a flat image taken from overhead; I’m thinking of images that give a sense of the book in space, without going full 3D imaging. This can help a viewer get a better feel for the general shape, size, and orientation of the book. As an anecdote, a few months ago I commissioned a portrait of myself to use across various social media platforms, and I sent the artist a digitized image of the cover of a book that I wanted to be holding. In their first draft, the artist sent me a sketch of me holding the book so that it was opening backwards! What was clearly to me a leather spine with wooden boards had no spatial meaning to someone who hadn’t dealt with a book like this.
Folger Library book used as an example
Resulting sketch
The Folger Library’s imaging department is a good example of moving towards glamor shots. While they have plenty of pictures of books as seen from above, they have also selectively imaged the edges, spines, and binding details of many items. I think it helps that the Folger’s image collection doesn’t default to a pseudo-book orientation, but presents the images as a grid. This means that there is no worrying about where to put an image of an endband in a two-dimensional digital surrogate.
I’m not saying this just because I work for them, but Type Punch Matrix is excellent at presenting different angles of books in their sale listings. This kind of photography is obviously very appealing for booksellers, as they have customers all over the world who are very interested in the condition of a book that they may drop several thousand dollars on without having actually seen it in person. Artistic shots from a variety of angles can highlight different aspects of books, and mimic the full 360 experience of being in a reading room with a book expert.
Some sites even give viewers the ability to view the very structure of the book in a way that would be impossible if you were seated in front of the physical book without breaking it into pieces. Tools like VisColl, a collation visualization system, allow you do actually see conjugate leaves in a manuscript side by side. As I mentioned in my book history intro, a codex is made of stacks of folded pages, but it can get very complicated. These stacks can be nested, and figuring out what connects to what (or doesn’t) can help a book historian figure out if all the pages are there. It sometimes takes some fancy fingerwork to hold a book open to hold a book open to observe this structure, and it can be almost impossible if the book is tightly bound.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are tools and projects to re-assemble a disassembled book. Lisa Fagin Davis is a champion of these initiatives. Historically, manuscripts and books were sometimes broken up into parts or even individual leaves for a variety of purposes. This sometimes still happens, unfortunately; just search “manuscript leaf” on eBay and you’ll see what I mean.
I’m going to be liberally citing Dot Porter throughout these next sections, because she has written some of the most compelling literature on digital surrogates and their relation to physical books. In one of my favorite pieces of hers, she likens digital surrogates to memes; the sense of iterating on an original to make something referential but completely new really fits how digital books work.
I’ve been using the term “digital surrogate” to refer to a digitized book, but that’s not necessarily the best term, particularly for the use case I’m talking about. Porter notes that surrogate refers to something standing in for, or perhaps replacing, something else; she further notes that, in general, the term is almost exclusively used for bodies. It “may imply some sort of embodiment or materiality of the digital object that is acting as the surrogate.” Digitized books are more remediations, or remixes, of physical books than they are true substitutes. But in this time of forced distance from physical collections, these digital objects have by necessity been pressed into becoming surrogates. I am not at all sure what this means in the long run; I hope it emphasizes the need for a more glamor shot model of book digitization.
All of this eschews the fact that a) digitization is expensive, b) storage of high-quality files is expensive, and c) there can be a pretty high bar for entry for potential users. While it may be theoretically easier to access a digital book than traveling to a reading room and potentially having to be vetted to see the thing, this is assuming that people know how to find a digital surrogate in the first place! Every library and/or museum website is a little bit different in how they present their resources; some are pretty buried in obscure places. Heck, I still struggle to find image galleries or digital libraries, and I literally have two degrees in librarianship!
Most libraries and courses have adjusted to directing people primarily to digital surrogates, but some libraries are also exploring the use of virtual reference sessions. Princeton University Library, the various special collections of the Harvard libraries, the University of Iowa Library, the University of North Carolina Library, and many others have now established structures for scheduling a virtual class visit to the reading room, including the virtual selecting of what materials to use. The University of Iowa has a great LibGuide on teaching and learning with digital materials; the University of North Carolina has a terrific collection of examples of the lesson types their librarians can provide. The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania recently started a program called Coffee with a Codex, a live Zoom event in which an audience can see and ask questions about manuscripts. This is again a Dot Porter project!
Perhaps the most difficult physical aspect of a book to communicate is its temporality, the sense of being with the object in real time--being “live” with a book is perhaps the closest you can get to interacting with a book on a digital platform. I have purposely not spoken a great deal about virtual reality or 3D imaging of books, because I’m not at all familiar with initiatives and techniques in those areas. There are platforms such as Turning the Pages which offer a more three dimensional sense of moving through a book over time. Turning the Pages even has different page turning animations for paper and vellum, to try to capture the different textures and thicknesses. But books quickly enter the uncanny valley for me on these sorts of platforms--no matter how good the page turning animation is, I’ve never seen it accurately capture the real sense of a page in motion.
But what’s the best way to share all these resources with a large audience? Social media is often treated as the great equalizer when it comes to rare books. Colleen Thiesen has done a great deal of work on this topic, and her 2017 article “Toward a culture of Social Media in Special Collections” outlines a number of must-haves for a rare book library to maintain a successful presence. Thiesen notes the persistent problem of the stereotype of special collections libraries as dusty and unwelcoming places, full of quote unquote discoveries to be made in stacks of disorganized material. This is a bit at odds with the parallel stereotype of libraries as uptight and restrictive, but the popular understanding of libraries is quite a complex thing.
Thiesen lays out six goals for a special collections social media presence: Build awareness, inspire and delight, educate, demonstrate proper use of materials, increase understanding and appreciation of the past, and be visible as a model. One of Thiesen’s most important and prescient points is that, in this time of near-universal budget squeezes and isolation, libraries and their digitization programs exist in an ecosystem, rather than in competition with each other. But all this can be easier said than done! With so many different social media platforms and formats, what’s best for communicating the materiality of a book?
There’s no one answer to that big question, but something I find to be successful is trying to harness the temporality element. To that end, I have done several “Live Tweets” of manuscripts and incunables, taking people along on my own journey of discovery through books. And I mean that literally--I tweet interesting things as I come across them while moving through a book sequentially. Some of these things would be visible in a traditional “flat” digital object, but others aren’t; the cockling of a vellum page, the way gold leaf sparkles, the subtle ruling of a manuscript. I use both still images and short videos and loops to highlight these things, as well as textual descriptions.
While interfaces for digitized objects like IIIF can offer some of this functionality, the structure of Twitter threads lends itself to this kind of sequential exploration. I’m aware that not everyone is going to “tune in” to the livetweet when it is going on, but being able to look back on it as a crystalized event (or in pieces, when one of the tweets does better numbers than the others) is somewhat similar. Every platform has a different tone that is most effective; some are more irreverent, like TikTok and Tumblr, while others lend themselves to giving a bit more textual information, like Instagram and Twitter. It’s important to consider the kinds of audiences who will get the most out of seeing books on social media, even passively! Putting rare books in the context of social media can help to lower the sense of intimidation around seeking out primary sources in a library.
However, social media is not as much an equalizer as we may think. While it may reach a larger audience than university- or library-internal messaging, the audience is still self-selecting by way of wealth: not everyone has a smartphone or a computer at home, or access to one to use casually. Sadly, bibliographic communication via social media still leaves out the vulnerable audiences who have been excluded from the beginning. As the end of the pandemic begins to take shape on the horizon, the field must emerge with a renewed commitment to reach those audiences. This may mean leaving the “comfort zone” of the library, and taking a book or two on supervised field trips to schools and community centers. Additionally, this should mean making more of an effort to bring those communities into the reading room; it can be a revelation to realize that you’re allowed to be in special collections, and can touch the books! I know it was for me.
When you get right down to it, there’s no substitute for physically handling a book in real time. But as the pandemic grinds on and we continue to see the far-reaching benefits of effective digital objects, I am confident that our methods of capturing materiality will continue to improve.
Before I wrap up, I just want to thank my friend and mentor Johanna Green for encouraging me to pursue thinking about the intersection of digital and physical books, and for just generally being an inspiration.
