I’m not a Luddite.  Sometime later this year, I’ll probably buy an e-reader.  I’ll do so with regret, because I really love printed text.  I love how I can totally lose all sense of the outside world when I’m reading a book—and I worry that I’ll never be able to achieve that sense of totally immersion when reading on an e-reader.

A couple of days ago, I caught a podcast of J. Robert Lennon interviewing Nicholson Baker.  Besides writing some of my favorite novels (Mezzanine, A Box of Matches, The Anthologist), Baker’s also writes thoughtfully on text preservation and the effects of technology on the written word.  Recall, for example, his 2009 New Yorker article on the Kindle. 

Baker seems to be more comfortable with e-readers nowadays, yet he still “connect[s] better with a printed book.”

“[T]here’s somehow a kind of connection that the text [provides]… There’s a more complete experience.  I remember it more.  I come away with more.  I don’t know if it’s just my own [experience], you know, just because I grew up in a paper-based world or something, but it’s still true for me.”

So it looks like Baker’s not getting total immersion from his e-reader.

I also worry about how an e-reader will change my relation to the books I own.  I doubt I’ll build the same kind of attachment to an electronic file as I might form with the ratty paperbacks I buy at thrift stores.

I’m not a rare book collector, but over the years I’ve picked up a few rare items.  Sixteen years ago, I came across a set of uncorrected galleys to Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time.  Conroy, as I wrote recently, was my first creative writing teacher, so the galleys to his masterpiece have personal meaning to me. 

The galleys were previously owned by Carter Burden, the one-time publisher of The Village Voice who had amassed one of the finest collection of twentieth-century US first editions.  To house the galleys, Burden had a special case made.

Another mentor, John McNally, introduced me to Stuart Dybek’s short stories.  After McNally had me read Dybek’s “Pet Milk,” I sought out all of Dybek’s work.  Eventually, I came across his 1993 chapbook, The Story of Mist (State Street Press Chapbooks).  The flash fiction collected within this volume is gorgeous. 

A few years after I bought the chapbook, Dybek came to Washington as part of the Pen Faulkner reading series.  ZZ Packer was also reading on the same bill.  Afterwards, lines formed so that audience members could meet the writers.  Dybek looked startled when he saw I wanted him to sign my copy of his chapbook.  Most people were asking him to sign copies of his then-current collection, I Sailed with Magellan—and here I was with some obscure chapbook that had been issued more than a decade prior.  Dybek seemed wary.  I sensed he feared I was some kind of fanatic—a mad fan who might attempt to chat him up for hours or even stalk him after the event.  It was awkward.  He had been friendly with almost everyone else in line, laughing and telling jokes.  With me, silence.

That same night, my wife and I talked with ZZ Packer for maybe five minutes.  She was charming, totally at ease with all the attention she was receiving for her collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which we had her sign for us.

Still, despite that experience, I'll always treasure my copy of The Story of Mist.

Donald Barthelme’s The Emerald (Sylvester & Orphanos) fills out my “rare book collection.”  After this story appeared in Esquire, a small Los Angeles publisher (Sylvester & Orphanos) published a handsome hardbound limited-edition.  Barthelme signed each of the 330 copies.  Somehow my wife acquired a copy, giving it to me as a birthday gift a few years back. 

This book is just so beautifully printed and bound.  What pictures I’ve snapped just cannot do it justice.

I guess to some degree I’m fetishizing the printed object, or at least already mournful that in the coming era of the e-book, there may be little room for these types of cherished mementos.  Five years from now, are printed galleys even going to exist?  And autographed e-books?  Can such things even exist?

However…yesterday…. my thoughts changed.

While future generations may never know what a limited edition chapbook might be, I saw something that made me confident that, in one form or another, the fetishizing of the printed object will continue.

Yesterday, I took my son to Kids Tech University, an awesome program developed by Virginia Tech’s Bioinformatics Institute to spur youngsters’ interest in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).  In the morning, a scientist spoke about her research in Antarctic core drilling samples.  In the afternoon, the kids explored exhibits of various University-supported engineering projects. 

An exhibit on 3-D Printing, a manufacturing process that can reproduce any physical object, caught my attention.  I first read about 3-D Printing last year in a New York Times article.  Last month, I heard again about it through an NPR Talk of the Nation story, but seeing the exhibit astounded me.

As the Times wrote,

“A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.”

Digital pictures are taken of an object, which are then computer-processed, building up a digital record of the object’s dimensionality.  The objects, which can be comprised of many components (including moving parts) are then “printed out” by spraying layer after layer of materials upon each other, allowing for each layer to dry before another is applied.  The objects exhibited this weekend were made from rubber and resins, but other materials, like copper and concrete, can be used.  To print out a fully-functioning adjustable wrench might take several hours but it’s amazing that objects which used to be hand-forged or assembled from molded parts can now be manufactured more effortlessly with much greater precision.

Although I didn’t ask, my guess is that the process needn’t begin with the photographing of an actual object.  Instead, one could probably design the objects through computer animated designs.

One of the exhibitors said that the images can even begin as CT scans, allowing surgeons the ability to print-out a patient’s body organs to get a better idea, say, where malignant tumors may reside.

As the technology progresses, I wonder if fully-bound books might be printed out this way.  Theoretically, 3-D Printing might actually expand book culture’s fetishizing of the printed object, allowing for the custom printing of newer, more fantastical books.

The other day, in my post about The Official Catalogue of the Library of Potential Literature, I quoted the Adam Robinson’s idea of a “wooden novel” composed of different “drawers.”  Today, such a thing might not be possible.  However, through 3-D Printing, it’s conceivable that such a book might yet be made, allowing readers new ways to immerse themselves in the printed word.  Meaning, the technology behind the printed book need not be dead.

Consider this: at various points during the last 150 years, painting has been said to be on its deathbed.  The nineteenth century emergence of photography required that painting justify itself.  Other forms, like collage, sculpture, video, and installation art cut into painting’s share of the visual arts marketplace.  Yet painting persists, much re-defined and evolved since its crisis began.

Consider this: the book—and, by extension, writing—is now said to be on its deathbed.

I thought of these things last night when reading The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature (Cow Heavy Books).  The anthology, edited by Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager, consists of blurbs, dusk jacket copy, and descriptions for unwritten  and, perhaps, unwritable books.  In their call for submissions, the editors made clear that they both wanted to writers “to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered” and, in the broadest sense, “conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being.”

Sixty-two authors provided entries for this Catalog, most in fundamentally unique ways.  Some satirized the hyperbolic language of the blurb form (Blake Butler: “this book lit down upon my house and ate my children and my mind”).  Others used the occasion for socio-political barbs: (Vanessa Place: “Capital—the most important epic poem of the twentieth century”).

Where the Catalog succeeds most, in my opinion, is in the entries where the book form itself is brought into question.  Rather than be just a bound collection of text printed on paper, Catalog writers point to other possibilities. 

Michael Martone, writing about Nabokov’s lost book about butterfly collecting in the “central Indiana hardwood swamps,” envisions the book as a kind of Joseph Cornell wonder cabinet, complete with “… scale reproductions of the wing scales taken from the Karner Blue… a coupon redeemable for a podcast recording of the Luna moth calls....”

Assemblage also features in the book that Lance Olsen imagines, Paradise Blind, which is “contained in a text packed with typed over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-lœil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies…”

Craig Dworkin proposes The Cube:  “Set in a grid, the book’s words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column… But they can also be read as stacked strata…By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space.”

Shelley Jackson’s The Slow Book is hammered out and “encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper… at a rate of one word per century (local time).”

Ben Mirov’s Inadequate Pillow is “seems to be about nothing in particular.”  Yes, it contains “orthographic symbols,” but its primary function is as a physical object:  “It might be used as a pedestal for a vial of dust.  In certain cases, the book may be used for sexual intercourse…”

The book’s physicality is further explored in Sean Higgins’s The Paper Archivist entry, while, most tantalizingly, Adam Robinson writes that he “opened the third drawer of Barbara D’Albi’s wooden novel.”

Can all the modifications in book technology suggested by these many writers be implemented given present book industry operations?  Perhaps not.  Yet like the Oulipo movement that inspired this collection, the works show that even this late in the game, we still have not fully explored what “book” might mean.