Marc read this as part of our Incident Report evening at the Yorkville Library and has kindly allowed us to reproduce it here. Enjoy.

Requiem for Printed Matter
By Marc Glassman

The book is dead! Long live the book!
Le livre est mort; vive le livre!

Those two sentences run in counterpoint in my head whenever I contemplate the future of my first obsession. Books gave me a way to negotiate through adolescence and into maturity. The simplest and most effective act of rebellion turned out to be walling your room with books while responding to intrusive questions from adults with a quote from Camus or Kafka.

With books came a community of fellow nerds, though we liked to think of ourselves as artists and intellectuals. Between coffees and cigarettes, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we would hang around bookshops—it was too early for galleries---and make pithy remarks about the issues of the day.

When the Internet and computers hit, it seemed at best a mixed blessing to many writers and other cultural practitioners. The question du jour for lovers of literature became, “would you take a computer to bed with you?” There was warmth in the physicality of the book—the paper, binding, typography and, in older volumes, the aroma. How could a screen and pieces of hardware replace it?

Of course, it hasn’t---yet. Small screens still aren’t light and beautiful enough to replace the book in the mass market. But just as ipods are replacing CDs, and Hollywood movies are spinning more money for their producers on DVDs than in cinemas, it is likely only a matter of time before books become endangered commodities, scorned in their historic configuration by mainstream consumers.

If that is so, what is the future of the book? While publishers and retailers struggle mightily with that question, hoping to come up with a solution that will mirror the survival of radio, the true answers may lie in the twin worlds of private galleries and artist run centres, where older forms thrive for a collectors’ market and new solutions are applauded by curators and an informed niche public.

From the publication of the Gutenberg Bible at the beginning of the Industrial Age, the book as a form evolved, with paper, typography, binding and printing techniques become increasingly sophisticated. Art was an essential element in that maturation with illustrations by the likes of Gustav Doré, John Tenniel, Edmund Dulac and Alphone Mucha helping editions of the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and many others to achieve worldwide acclaim.

Small presses have developed to serve niche audiences interested in either fine art collectibles or the creation of new artist books. Vancouver’s Heavenly Monkey & A Lone Press produce award-winning books noted for their fine design and use of handmade paper and letterpress printing. Arion Press out of San Francisco regularly commissions artists of the caliber of Bruce Conner, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell to create illustrative work for their reprints of writers ranging from Italo Calvino to Sigmund Freud to that old standby, the Bible. Surely those presses and many of their ilk will survive the technological shifts now occurring.

The 20th Century saw the growth of artists’ books. Some of the greatest work of the Surrealists came in that form, not surprisingly given that the group’s main thinker was the writer Andre Breton. Surely reading Breton’s Nadja and viewing Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté are essential avant-garde experiences. The Fluxus movement, like the Surrealists, combined many art forms including visual art, music and film. Founder George Maciunas and fellow artist Dick Higgins created Something Else Press, an astonishingly successful artist enterprise, which at its height in the 1970s, could publish 5000 copies of Fluxus editions. Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono and Jackson Mac Low are just three of the many Fluxus artists who created brilliant works in the book form.

Even more than Surrealists, the Fluxus movement opposed the commodification of art. In fact, artists who now espouse the Fluxus stance are embracing the Internet where communication is broad and expectations of profits are low. Their example inspired artists worldwide including Canada’s General Idea, who founded Art Metropole, an artist run centre that is instrumental in the dissemination and creation of artists’ books. Artists who have worked with Art Metropole include Robert Fones, Greg Curnoe, Luis Jacob, Michah Lexier, John Greyson, Andrew Paterson and John Baldessari.

Following the lead of Art Metropole, many galleries, artist run centres and small presses in Canada are producing books. Just as an audience will continue to exist for beautiful rendered classically created books, newer forms are bound to be explored by artists like Jacob, Lexier, Greyson and others who are not content to work solely in one format.

One can imagine more delights for artists’ books in the years ahead. Moving images combined with text will be harnessed to create multi-media works. Hyperlinks will instantly transport readers to other texts and images referenced in a master text. Sounds and images will aid the author to create books that combine aspects of cinema, theatre and music with old-fashioned literature. The Internet, more subtle and expansive than today, will be at the service of creators who will be devising the history books, the novels and the works of art for new generations of readers.

Will print survive? Yes, just as video didn’t kill the radio star, nor TV destroy cinema. All forms are possible. People will still be worshipping illuminated manuscripts while others are enjoying graphic novels linked to sound and movement on disc or the ‘Net. The twin streams of traditionally produced beautiful volumes and innovative artists’ books will keep literature flowing into the future.

And the book, like the vampire, will still exist---even if it does die!