A Reader on Reading

The first shape of the page was perhaps dictated by the measurements of the human hand. The Sumerian clay tablet fit the hand of a child (the student scribe) or the hand of an adult (that first remote accountant to whom we owe the art of writing). The vagaries of social needs and political propaganda blew the amiable tablet to gigantic proportions: a code of laws from Ashur, for instance, from the twelfth century B.c., measured more than six and a half square feet. But periodically, the page reverted to its manufactured origins: the codex that Julius Caesar is supposed to have created by folding a scroll into pages to send dispatches to his troops; the medieval books of hours, meant for private devotions; Aldus Manutius’s pocket classics; the standard-size books decreed by François I in 1527; the paperbacks of the twentieth century. In our time, the French publisher Hubert Nyssen created the elongated format that distinguishes the Actes Sud publications by measuring vertically the distance between the metacarpal bone and the tip of his index finger and horizontally from the root of his thumb to the far edge of his palm.

All these pocket-size pages give the illusion of being contained in the hand, but that illusion does not carry far. On the page the strings of words are cut off by the blank space of the margins and trail away in order to resurface on the next page, thereby forcing the reader to hold the text’s meaning in constant suspense. Widows, hanging lines, irritants to the eye, have caused printers to suggest to the author changes (especially in journalism), so that the text itself is altered to fit the demands of the page’s tyranny.

Partly to subvert these special demands, writer and readers created odd-shaped books: round, horizontally elongated “à l’italienne,” heart shaped, infolded, and accordion-style, which then in turn imposed their own individual limitations. In our time, the so-called artists’ books routinely interfere with the classic shape: they enlarge the text to cross over the gutter, or reduce it to fit in its entirety a given space, or work the text into shapes that overwhelm the shape of the page itself. The shape of a page seems to cry out for counteraction.

When not changing the format or shape, the writer can change the text the page contains, so that the subversion becomes internalized. Laurence Sterne, composing his Tristram Shandy in the 1760s, introduced blank pages, pages filled with ellipses, and even a page printed completely in black. Lewis Carroll, in order to provide a limitless map for his Snark-hunters, designed a page that was completely white. And Guillaume Apollinaire with his Calligrammes, poems written in the physical shape of their subject, and concrete poets such as the Brazilian Haroldo do Campos, imposed a new shape to the page from inside, drawing the reader’s attention away from the straight margins into new and startling textual designs.

This interior restructuring is of course quite ancient. Many are the medieval manuscripts that play with acrostics and crossword-puzzle-like grids, multiplying the use of a page many times. As the broadening of restrictions became apparent, the text began to breed its own commentary. The page metamorphosed into a series of concentric spaces, as when Scripture, for instance, written in a narrow central panel of the page, was carefully surrounded by a gloss, which was in turn surrounded by further annotations, which then received the reader’s scribbles on the margins. These spaces are not in themselves protectionist: the comments of the third space, for example, may annotate either the central text or the gloss; the scribbles may refer to the notes, the gloss, or the central text. To take just one among thousands of possible examples: one of the manuscripts of Aristotle’s Parva naturalia, now in the British Library (MS Royal 12 G.ii), from the second half of the thirteenth century. The text itself occupies the center top right; it is framed by glosses derived from Averroës and written presumably by a certain Henry de Renham of Kent. In turn, there are interlinear commentaries on both Aristotle and Averroës that look a little like our own proofreader’s notes and are written in a smaller hand, filling the spaces left by the glosses. Dante’s proposed four possible levels of reading — literal, allegorical, analogical, and anagogical — acquire physical reality on Henry de Renham’s page, as text, gloss and commentary on text, and gloss quadruplicate the space allotted by the page to the text.