Display Case: The Mystique of the Codex

I find myself becoming uneasy as I hear more and more discussion of “the end of the book.” The growing trend of publishing in electronic formats is increasingly influencing museum-produced publications—and was, in fact, the focus of the University of Chicago’s June 2010 National Museum Publishing Seminar in Washington, D.C. Conversations there gave this book-lover much to think about, with some aspects giving me pause and others giving me hope for the future.

Within the already quirky and odd niche of museum publishing, my particular subspecialty is publishing by a library-museum. On the one hand, as a book-lover who works at an institution dedicated to the preservation of books, I am mightily in favor of the codex format and strongly attached to the idea of a book as a physical object one can hold in one’s hands. But as manager of the exhibitions program, it’s my job to share the rare treasures in my library with the public through programming, text, audio and Web content. These varied facets of presenting information seem to be merging more and more into a shared electronic format, with the e-book on the verge of becoming a leap-step into the future.

At the heart of my discomfort about “the end of the book” is the simple fact that I love the lushly illustrated volumes that museums like mine produce, with their case bindings, carefully selected typefaces, glossy images and gloriously wide margins. They are coffee-table books created not just for art’s sake but for books’ sake. With their color pictures and glossy pages, they aren’t designed to be read on your e-reader but perused as display objects, produced by institutions that know how, in fact, to display objects. As such, they cannot (yet) take another form quite as appropriate.

But it is also true that these indulgent volumes are expensive to produce and expensive to buy, and that museum-goers are more likely to pick up the souvenir brochure or saddle-stitched gallery survey for $9.95 than the $70 case-bound beauty with six-color panoramic reproductions. Most of our institutions are not flush with money, and producing a pricey book that doesn’t sell (and can even cost more money as it languishes in storage for years) is largely impractical. Out of necessity, catalogues are increasingly crafted so that trade publishers might want to distribute them. What could be more appealing than an advance from a trade publisher to subvent some of the cost of publication? We may cringe at the thought of going electronic, but we’ve already been willing to tiptoe away from the coffee-table catalogue in favor of a publication that might make money. After all, just breaking even sounds good to museum publishing departments; making money seems a far-fetched dream.

But profitability can become reality if we can let go of the coffee-table book and accept that our publications need to shift along with technology, audience expectations and the market. I wholeheartedly endorse my own institution’s move toward print publications that have a life beyond the four-month exhibition that inspired them. Consider, for example, our small primer on extra-illustration—the tradition of owners adding their own pages to their books. This book accompanied the 2009 exhibition “Extending the Book: The Art of Extra-Illustration” and is a catalogue only in that it lists the exhibition items at the back. It contains two authoritative but accessible essays on the history of extra-illustration and provides a technical how-to on the process—material that can be read or applied outside the context of the exhibition.

I like the idea of scholars and curators writing lively prose for a general audience, and offering a—yes, still illustrated—book for less than $30. We must keep in mind what it is we are trying to achieve. A traditional exhibition catalogue offers text in addition to illustration, but its first purpose is to describe and identify the work curated in a show on a very specific topic. What an e-book can provide that a traditional catalogue cannot is something of both worlds. Its accessible writing style can reach beyond just scholars and institutional archivists. At the same time, metadata can be embedded in the accompanying images, providing valuable cataloguing information that exceeds the typically minimal list in the new breed of exhibition-publication-that-isn’t-a-catalogue. Books are so rarely just one thing. From conversations at the 2010 seminar, it became clear that museum professionals, depending on their institutional role, have quite different feelings about what a museum publication should accomplish. It’s just possible that the e-book helps bridge that gap between scholarly and trade publication.

Of course, as the exhibition manager at a library-museum, I’m in the business of preserving books, and I would mourn the loss of the codex format should it disappear altogether. I wrestle daily with the conundrum of the book as a container of information (that I could read on an e-reader) versus the book as historical artifact (an object to be displayed in an exhibition). Books are not one or the other; they refuse to be. A beautiful binding can stop you in your tracks the way a painting can. A signature or marginal note can tell a story of ownership and provenance that transcends a drab volume of Cicero. Conservation work can reveal printer’s waste in endpapers or spine-linings and lead to the recovery of long-lost manuscripts.

Books are tangible objects, historic artifacts and valuable pieces of art. But books are also simply books. They are full of pressed flowers, fingerprints and marginalia only because they were used by someone (or many someones). They were, and they continue to be, read. Most people see a book as words on paper imparting knowledge, but I have a hard time separating the artifact from the information vessel. Perhaps that’s why I don’t like to imagine a day when the arrival of a new publication doesn’t involve tearing into a box, pulling that first volume from the top of the stack and burying my nose in its spine.

There is a central tension for museums between our need to stay relevant and our obligation to preserve our collection and its collective cultural heritage. The preservationist in me wonders what happens to institutions like mine if we don’t allow for changes in how we share information. If the objects we house securely in our vaults become an obsolete format, they only become more valuable. But if we lose our audience because we refuse to move forward with technology, we become obsolete. Despite how much I love to cradle a book and smell its fresh-from-the-printer aroma, I’d much rather stay in the business of preserving and exhibiting the books that other people held in their hands 400 years ago.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter so much what format we use to convey the information. What is more important is our pledge to preserve, educate and make accessible those objects that have cultural, historic or scientific value. We must step forward and embrace new ways of doing so with our publications, just as we have done in our exhibition spaces with audio, video and interactive stations.

This change can’t—and won’t—happen overnight. In the short term, I foresee smaller print runs of codex-format publications, with more and more of the same content available online and as e-books. We will produce fewer coffee-table books. As our audience shifts, so should we. As e-books in museums develop, they must retain a record of an exhibition through visual and textual documentation while offering a compelling narrative that interprets those objects that mean so much to us. After all, this is the very goal we’ve always had for all our publications.