Every book I seem to pick up these days is poorly printed. By this I mean that the ink is decidedly weak. As a result, the book is difficult to read with ease and pleasure. The lettering is almost never a strong, striking black, but invariably a sort of washed-out grey, the weak ink already fading into mere nothingness, straining the eyes and heightening one’s sense of the ephemerality of all Being, the futility of all knowledge...This is surely, on the whole, a disservice to the republic of readers. My Penguin edition of John Barton’s A History of the Bible (2019), besides betraying the terrible glue binding so characteristic of latter-day Penguins—which will probably dissolve within a decade—is not so much printed on the page as it is facsimiled: there is a kind of indistinct, digital-type, semi-pixellated placement of the whole page in blurry grayscale, rather than the stamping-out of individual letters in sharp, dark, inky typeface. Similarly, my hardcover copy of a P. G. Wodehouse novel from the Everyman’s Library series is washed-out and obscure. Black letters are never black any longer, it would seem, but so many shades of gray. Even though the binding is rugged and cover sturdy, the actual printed page is disappointingly weak. Everyman’s and Penguin produced quite decent books in the previous century, but no longer, apparently.
What does all of this spell for the future of the book? I find myself increasingly longing for a good antiquarian edition rather than these modern, newfangled books, which seem so qualitatively thin and weakly made when stacked up against their older brethren. But this approach is not a generalizable principle, for there are ever-increasing numbers of readers and an ever-diminishing stock of second-hand books available for consumption. It would be a violation of the Kantian principle to recommend that all and sundry jettison these new deviants in search of sounder copies.
And so I find myself turning to electronic editions. The e-book, at least, I know will contain strong, black typeface, as sharp and bold and sizable as I like it, though displayed on a peskily glaring screen, and therefore denying one the pleasure of the book as physical object, which requires no recharging, no cables or software updates, no expensive unit to be nursed protectively, away from wet weather. I suspect that the failure of major book publishers to produce high-quality printed books is precisely because the books are not so much set, in the typographical sense, as they are digitally spewed forth. As digital technology filters into every step of the book-making process—from writing to layout to printing—the craftsman’s approach to the book as physical entity is pushed ever more firmly into the background.
Pace Walter Benjamin, the book-work in the age of digital reproduction makes us veritably long for that age of mechanical reproduction lambasted by Benjamin. The digital now trounces the mechanical. The aura of the book was the aura of the mechanical: the dizzying scent of good paper stock, the visual magnificence of jet-black typesetting. The age of digital reproduction impinges even upon the mechanical, which anachronistically persists alongside the digital and is colonized by it. In his famous essay, Benjamin wrote that “profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.” The great irony is that, while Benjamin viewed the act of mechanical reproduction as the root cause of this qualitative dislocation and deterioration, the digital makes us positively yearn for what Benjamin railed against.
Now it is not the e-book that becomes a reproduction of the printed book: It is the printed book that begins to take on the phantom-like, imitative appearance of an e-book. The printed book becomes a simulacrum, a frail representation of its electronic cousin. The e-book has become the paradigm, the printed book a mere apprentice’s B-grade product stamped out of a digital mold. And in that particular book-making economy where these principles obtain, the well-made printed book looks increasingly set to become a specialist product, a kind of exotica for well-heeled customers wiling to pay a printer’s premium.
That might very well be more desirable than the present situation where most books aren’t really books at all, with all that this word entails of solidity and sturdiness, so much as collated, digitally printed reading material, hurriedly glued together and cheaply stamped with the weakest of fluids. The advantage of this thin gruel is that it serves to remind us of the evanescence of human knowing. Knowledge fades quickly, and nothing earth-bound lasts forever. The poorly made book—which is to say just about all books today—is a memento mori.
Still, it would be nice to be able to read without straining one’s eyes to their natural limits. But for this, it seems, one must either go rooting through antiquarian bookshops or embrace the sterile practice of screen reading.