sssh! this is a working library.

Skipping stones

As we read, we build up an understanding of the text from small pieces. Our eyes travel along the lines in a series of jumps called “saccades.” Between saccades they stop for a moment (called a fixation) so that we absorb text in chunks varying in length from a few characters to up to about eighteen. … An experienced reader or one who is familiar with the subject fixates for shorter periods and uses longer saccades, enabling him to take in over three hundred words per minute. Unger, While You’re Reading (64)

When demonstrated on the page, a saccade is drawn as a parabola that touches down on a letter, reverses course, flies over a word or two, and touches down again, much like the bouncing ball sing-along hints you may remember from Sesame Street. This suggests another way of thinking about the reading process—in which reading is akin to skipping stones.

A beginner reader will skip once, perhaps twice, then sink. But an experienced reader will skip for pages without effort, barely noticing the brief dips into the lake, attuned instead to the moments in the air—during which the lake disappears and is replaced by the images and sounds that the text depicts. She flies above the text, and the text transforms into a reflection of the writer’s world.

It’s that sense of being in the air that defines reading—what we also refer to as being “lost” in the text. We no longer see words, we no longer notice the music in the coffee shop or the sound of construction next door—we see the images that the text conjures in our mind, images whose foundation is built by the writer but whose final existence we create ourselves.

Traveling

The paradox of reading is that the path towards ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in – a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of a part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (178)

When I was thirteen, I became a vegetarian. The decision was rooted in my inability to reconcile that one could have deep emotional feelings with one animal and yet kill and eat another. To a thirteen-year-old, there could be no greater hypocrisy. (How funny that we despise hypocrisy when young, yet grow to expect and at times enjoy it later.)

I remained a vegetarian for many years, largely out of habit. When you give something up at such a young age, it becomes accepted, normal. I forgot what it was like to ever be a carnivore, and still have only hazy memories of eating meat when I was younger.

Sometime in my twenties, I started to read seriously about food. I was struck by Richard Manning’s Against the Grain, a revisionist history of agriculture that challenges much of the accepted wisdom about why humans relinquished the life of hunters and gatherers. But rather than force me to reconsider what I believed about agriculture, it revealed to me that I believed nothing: this was a corner of my life that was, at the time, unexamined.

Towards the end of the book, Manning swiftly dismisses vegetarianism as a utopian ideal born of the city. One could argue this point (indeed, many have), but I recall being surprised at my reaction: I was insulted, but did not want to argue him. I wanted to agree.

I continued to read and to think about food, learning to interpret the effects of a decades-old food bill on what we eat each day, and gradually softening the boundaries of my vegetarianism to admit fish. I joined a CSA, perhaps the ideal way to eat locally and one that (Manning be damned) is really only available to city folk. Then one day, without ceremony, I had a steak.

When I came around to reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I had already reached a place where Pollan had little to teach me. I was deeply suspicious of the organic economy; I was committed to sustainable agriculture in my daily life; I bought ramps and celeriac and grass-finished beef from the farmer’s market, and sought out pastured milk and cheese as much for the flavor as the ideology. And yet, Pollan’s storytelling about Polyface Farm, and his experience in the abattoir, gave form to those beliefs in a way that no personal experience could. With his text, I could take the measure of myself, could see my own beliefs in the light of another.

And yet, as with Heisenberg, each measurement brings with it an unshakeable uncertainty. We are more than the sum of the books we read, and yet books are the means by which we form the equation. It is necessary then, as Bayard argues, not to read in stasis, but to travel through books – to use them as guideposts but never to set up camp.

This weekend, all of the reading and writing and talking about food that I’ve done for the past ten years was realized in a single tiny plate of celery, gelato, and apple – one course of the Farmer’s Feast at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It was perhaps three bites, but it arrived with the force of thousands of words. And while it brought to the fore just how much these books had affected me, it also revealed how much further I’ve traveled. And yet – how much further I have still to go.

Realignment

When I began this site, I was intentionally vague about my intentions, in large part because I wasn’t entirely sure of them myself. I knew I wanted to write about books, and I knew I wanted to explore what it meant to hold a personal discussion about books (which are always read in solitude) in the public space of the web. But I did not know – and did not want to know – where that discussion would take me.

So over the summer I took a meandering route, reading and writing more or less as things came to me, without much consideration for how (or if) it would all come together. And it shows. There’s a spontaneity and stream of consciousness to the writing that I find both appealing and frustrating. Appealing in that I’ve been free to toy with ideas and then discard them without justification; frustrating in that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, some of the parts are clearly superior to the whole.

I suppose this is, to some extent, the inevitable consequence of publishing frequently; the quality of the writing is bound to ebb and wane. But I do think it warrants some adjustment. For one, I’m clearly better at writing long than writing short, so I’m going to make an effort to do more of the former and less of the latter. If that means I post less frequently, so be it. Reading long can be difficult on the web (as my last post attests), but I’m not about to concede that it can’t be done.

In fact, I’m so convinced it can be done that I’ve redesigned the site to make it friendlier to readers. Each post will receive it’s own page – a room of its own, so to speak. The sidebar content has been tucked into the footer, which is now hidden away with a bit of javascript (click on the little “more” tab to retrieve it). I’ve also eliminated the related books sidebar, which never really came together as I thought it would. The result is, I hope, a site that invites and encourages reading – hopefully a welcoming oasis in a web otherwise awash with clutter.

An argument could be made that this goes too far – that I’ve sacrificed certain inalienable principles of web design (notably, orientation and ease of navigation) in favor of creating a space for reading. But since this is a personal site I feel free to experiment in ways I may not recommend for a client. And I think reading is an often and unfortunately neglected behavior in the context of web design. Bringing attention to a cause usually involves taking things to an extreme, and I’m happy to be out on a limb on this one.

The previous version of this site (now referred to as the First Edition) is now available at 1e.aworkinglibrary.com and will remain there indefinitely. I intend to archive all design iterations this way, such that one can follow the process through which the design has traveled. While some things have changed here, one fact remains constant: that the writing and design on this site are inescapably intertwined. For that, I offer no apology.

Unreadable?

Joe Clark has an article in the debut issue of Scroll magazine on the “unreadability” of the web. In it, he expresses dismay for the ways in which the web has shortened our attention spans and set expectations for content that is short, pithy, and ultimately mindless.

We realize now that long documents do not work on the web. We should never have thought otherwise. But all those short documents we’re reading instead are poisoning our ability to read long documents.

Clark makes a couple of points as to why the web is unsuitable for long: screen resolutions that remain poor substitutes for ink on paper; the inability to “curl up” with a screen; and the very nature of hypertext, with its constant invitation to distraction. All good points, and why many of us in the book business do not foresee an end to the printing press in the near term.

But perhaps more disturbingly, Clark suggests that the hours we spend reading short on the web are inhibiting our abilities to read long even when we’re away from the screen. Our brains are being “rewired” for short, such that when we do curl up with a book, we no longer have the fortitude to get through it. We’re less patient, more distracted, attuned to the efficiency of a text instead of its intellectual rigor. “This is your brain on RSS,” he asks. “Any questions?”

Ironically, the design of Clark’s piece in Scroll unintentionally echos many of his points. The entire magazine is set with a line length that is far too long for comfortable reading, in a typeface that, while lovely, is not at all suitable for reading long. The magazine is printed on a bright white coated stock, in essence replicating some of the inherent problems (i.e., glare and too much contrast) of reading on the screen. And the pages are littered with pull quotes that distract the eye, much like sidebars and hyperlinks do on the web. Clark’s article is no more readable in print than it would have been on the screen.

And here’s what’s missing from this conversation: the design of a text has a lot to do with how we read it, whether we look to “get in, get it over with, and get out” or decide to settle in for the long haul. Many of the design decisions on the web that inhibit reading long have nothing to do with our reading styles, and everything to do with the business decisions of the publishers: the annoying habit of splitting long articles into multiple pages to increase page views; the stream of advertising and related content in the sidebar; the spate of clique-like social media links which seem to always appear at the top of an article, inspiring you to share it before you’ve read it; and most egregiously, an inattention to the typographic details that make reading easier and more pleasurable.

I’m as guilty as the next person in flipping through site after site as quickly as I can, skimming articles while I post to twitter or IM a colleague or delete the last six emails received. But I have not – yet, at least – lost the ability to read long; in fact, at the end of the day, I’m often eager for the relative slowness and calm that a book can provide. Some of this is because the physical cues of a book – the soft paper, the warmth of the text on the page, the way it fits into my hands – suggest a different mode of reading. But I don’t believe we’ve yet attempted – yet alone exhausted – methods for triggering these same feelings on the web.

Even this site – which was inspired by book design and falls somewhere between restrained and aggressively minimal on the design scale – tilts away from reading long in several ways. There’s no navigation bar, few hyperlinks, and the sidebar is so meek it almost apologizes for its intrusion. As perhaps it should. If we design distraction into the web, we aren’t exactly in the best position to complain when distraction consumes us. But must we design this way? or has the time come for designers to recognize that speed and efficiency are not the sole parameters with which to judge the screen?

One of Bayard’s arguments in How to Talk About Books is that the difference between reading and not reading is hard to pinpoint. If I only skim a book, does that count as reading or not reading? If I read a book years ago, but can no longer remember it, isn’t that more akin to a state of not reading than of reading? Or, what if I have never opened a particular book, but can still speak about it authoritatively, because I know what other books it is similar to (or, put another way, I know its location in the library and what it means to be in that place) – is that a book that I have read, or a book that I have not read? Does it matter?

Someone with whom I spend a great deal of time is a significantly less avid reader than I am. Our arrangement is such that I read vigorously – making numerous recommendations about which books he should read – wherein he reads about one out of every dozen or so books I push in his direction. And yet a strange consequence of this coupling is that he can speak as authoritatively and compellingly as I can about books of which he has never so much as cracked the spine. It’s as if I’m reading for two, and the act of reading expands from the initial contact (me, alone, with book in hand) to the later event (the two of us, talking about books, drinking wine). In a certain sense, he has read these books, in that he is as familiar with them (albeit through different means) as I am.

Underneath this theory of reading is an elevation of the ideas that a book espouses over the experience of reading it. The challenge I see therein is that ideas cannot be completely decoupled from the act of reading – cannot escape the material condition of the written language from which they are born. For me, especially, an idea must be judged in part on the merits of the words that describe it. The best ideas are therefore married to the most beautiful language; a divorce diminishes them both.

On not reading:

… what is interesting about a text – which is not the work itself but the qualities it shares with others – might be best perceived by a critic who closes his eyes in the presence of the work and thinks, instead, about what it may be. Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (29)

There was a time when I read books in, shall we say, the romantic manner, which is to mean all the way through and usually in one sitting. I had, at one time, an enormous patience for spending hour upon hour with a single text; on rainy days, I sometimes still do. But more often than not, I read a dozen books or more at once, flitting from one to the other, looking for the connections, finding the spaces between them where I can inhabit safely. This is one way of “not reading” which Bayard rescues and promotes, in that it rejects the singular book in favor of the entire library. And, perhaps more importantly, it recognizes that to lose oneself in another’s work is to fail to make a work of your own: only by pushing books away does the writer find her voice.

At its root, this is a vision of reading couched in discontent. It is discontent – or, more completely, a sense that any given text is insufficient – that makes us close the book at hand and tilt our head back in thought. What resides on the page is often just a catalyst for further thinking (or writing). It’s what feeds the culture around books – for a book that is never talked about is like the tree that falls in the forest: it leaves behind no evidence that it ever made a sound.

Macro- versus microtypography:

While macrotypography – the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of text and illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative.’ Hochuli, Detail in typography (7)

A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words. Any shiver in the page – a bad break, a too-long measure, a space too wide or narrow – and the book will press into the reader’s hand and tug at the lids of her eyes. It takes a designer who is also a reader to be be attentive to the ways by which the page becomes a burden to the words.