I want you to consider the book as place because books are defined by their distinct boundaries and the space they contain. As place the book holds things as obvious as an author’s words and ideas, but it also carries your attention. Place is distinct in its position and relationship to a surrounding geography. So a book on a shelf, in a bag, or in hand relates differently in each setting. Thus the book establishes our sense of direction and dimension. With that, the place establishes a space that goes beyond words and pages. A book seeps out into its surrounding environment, encompassing everything from the walls and the furniture to the noise level and present company. This is why you might seek out certain places for reading, whether that be on a park bench or quiet car with noise-canceling headphones.
My favorite portrait of a reader, reading, and the relationship of book and place is by Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari. In 1944, Munari published a series of staged photographs titled, “Searching for comfort in an uncomfortable armchair.”1 The character Munari plays has a burdensome relationship with an armchair, but each scene is propped up by books and/or reading. The issue of comfort is exacerbated by the book as place. Munari’s desire and struggle to read predicates the poor design of the chair. Reading is distracting, and our attention is split between the content contained and the surrounding space. The book as place, then, creates a distinct mental space and desire within you, the reader, that also influence and are shaped by your surroundings.
Munari reveals the importance of books and reading precisely because they play heavily in the everyday. Seven years later, in 1951, renowned German philosopher, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture entitled, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” positing that the act of dwelling is an important consideration when designing. In short, dwelling happens when we make a place for social and cultural habits and routines. Design facilitates dwelling by creating place through objects, experiences, and buildings. Heidegger writes that “building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable from dwelling.”2 Though his reasoning focuses on architecture and large-scale planning, it has very clear implications for other disciplines, including graphic design. I cannot help but think back to Bruno Munari’s struggle in dwelling, all for his desire to read.
Today our everyday is split; beside our real lives, we are living online. So, too, dwelling happens in both respects. When moving to a new apartment, I feel at home only after my books are unpacked and the internet is working. I arrange my books—their place—to correspond with how I use the space they share. Books in the living room, in the oce, and a stack in the bedroom have dierent purposes. I use books as place in order to understand my space, because, after all, “the relationship between man and space is dwelling.”3
What then of our digital lives online? Most, if not all, content online is there to be read. So our habits and experiences—our dwelling—there happen by reading, and reading is how we relate to a digital reality. This works the same way a book creates a relationship of reader and space through absorbing and/or deciphering text. Reading is fundamental to dwelling and this fact is true regardless of the technology used.
You know how to use a book, so you must know that they are freely navigable, and that you might skip ahead or page back quite easily. Unhindered flipping through a digital book is not so free. “Tables, illustrations, and captions—which might appear in countless configurations on a printed page—obey strict marching orders in the e-pub world.”4 So the method of publishing and the graphic design directly aect how we read. Devices like the iPad or Kindle usher a reader steadily forward, page after page. This creates a reading environment that is rigorously linear, while other kinds of reading—selective, informational, and consultative—don’t fare so well. Some would even argue that an ebook makes for better focus, where more flexible navigation of a book in paper might lead to more diversion.
Reading is distracting. All kinds of books create a purposeful space that happens to also fight reading. In addition to finding our perfect park bench or bustling café for reading, we adjust by selecting the material to fit a locale. The proliferation of niche mobile/web applications, dedicated solely to reading, allows you to pick the method best suited to the reading space around you. For example, reading a novel on your phone might seem claustrophobic, but for sneaking a paragraph at a time while at work, it is incredibly opportune. News outlets are also adapting to your preference. Websites like Mule Design’s Evening Edition and mobile applications like Circa distill the day’s news into succinct paragraphs suitable for your evening commute. While the more book-like, designy magazines recently shows an attempt at making a more serious reading space than magazines typically garner. Geeky publications like Oscreen, Bulletins of The Serving Library, and 8 Faces become collectibles instead of piling up in a corner, waiting to be read.
Here, reading and graphic design are an inescapable pair. Heidegger wrote that buildings become landmarks and change how we navigate space. The act of publishing serves a similar function. How we read affects what we read. I always think to appropriate Marshall McLuhan’s take on Churchill and say, “we shape our books and thereafter our books shape us.”5 Design aects behavior and understanding. The paradox is this: words and ideas are construed by the context of delivery. There is no such thing as plain text. Even the most rudimentary text editor has its own visual quality, one that reads, “This is a work in progress; cut me some slack.” In creating and publishing ideas, we might be aware that there exist levels of finish, formality and wholeness—of reading—that emerge purely by the graphic design of a work.
The book is not singular, nor is it fixed. Books are variable, open to our interpretation, medium, and subsequent editions. In that way a book is quite flexible. The redundancy of books as objects and concepts becomes a welcome constraint when making one. Because we know how to use books, and they are open to interpretation, judging a book is esoteric and hardly quantifiable. Taking risk with the form, pacing, and typography is supported by a reader’s prior experiences with reading. “All text involves sight and sound … what difference did it make if the visible text went its own aesthetic way?”6 So the content with those designed parts—binding, cover, margins, titles, index, etc—create the space within and around the book.
What does a book do? You, Reader, take note of your surroundings, your comfort level, and time of day. A book will not typically beg such consideration even if “the reader’s experience in reading a book creates its content, so there is no ‘text’ without the reader.”7 As a reader, you supply utility and interpretation, before, during and after reading. This relationship is made clear by Italo Calvino’s in his 1979 novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The novel focuses on you, the reader, and your experience reading. You never really start because of interruption and incomplete works, and each new chapter creates its own space that aects you dierently. In the story’s final moments Calvino equates reading with stormy travel. Reading is hard work.
After your “tempest-tossed” journey, you seek refuge in a grand library. In Calvino’s mind, this vast, public collection of books makes a space that is familiar and warm. Nearly 40 years on, we take our libraries with us. Content is now condensed in a cloud, always accessible, following overhead. I cannot help but draw parallel to the likes of the great jinx Joe Btfsplk who, despite his best intentions, was followed by misfortune in the form of a storm cloud.8 Our clouds have become our personal tempests, and there is no respite. Unfettered access to books builds an uninterrupted space for continuous and distracting or distracted reading.
Books are meant to exist with other books, and side by side they form our collections. “A group of books is therefore a network … all our collections make an argument.”9 A library helps to convey the identity of its owner. The size of a collection, the space it occupies and creates, are presented for interpretation and judgment. My reading lists are made public, and the whole experience is made more social. Services like the elegant Readmill, a web and native reading app that displays a text with less distraction and better typographic fitness than most other digital readers, allows me to share what I read with friends and followers. This is no dierent than proudly inviting guests to peruse your rows of books.
Holding a book as you are now, Reader, identifies you as such. Everyone is reading most of the time in a linear, selective, consultative, and/or informative way.10 You might be so open-minded in defining the term as paying attention to your surroundings. I might glance up at a chalkboard menu with my Twitter feed in hand and switch to The New York Times while I sit and wait for my Americano. If there exists a relationship between this juggled (jumbled?) content, it’s made within the place that reading creates.
Because “a nonmaterial definition of the book comes hand in hand with a nonmaterial definition of reading,”11 we can be equally liberal when considering the form of a book. Books are amalgams of processes and ideas, collected and displayed. As place, the book is distinct, though not explicit. As you read, for myriad reasons and with varied success, you relate with the space around you, whether lived in or in passing. The book as place establishes dwelling through a reader, reading in space.