Handmade Campaign: books without batteries
By Lindsey Rivait
Arts Editor
September 7, 2010
 Eschewing e-readers in favour of the experience of actually holding a real live book in their hands, the Literary Press Group of Canada (LPG) has embarked on a new campaign celebrating the physical book.
The Handmade Campaign, the brainchild of LPG’s B.C. sales rep Nadine Boyd, puts the emphasis back on the craft, design, and tactile aspects of book production, and turns reading a book back into an experience in itself, something Windsor-area book publisher Biblioasis can get behind. Of the titles chosen for the campaign by Boyd, three are from Biblioasis——Zach Wells’ Track & Trace, Mauricio Segura’s Black Alley, and K.D. Miller’s Brown Dwarf. Flipping through these titles, the reader can feel how much care has gone into the design. From heavy paper to intricate illustrations, beyond capturing a story, these books just physically feel good.
“Book design has always mattered to us, and to have had a few titles selected for this campaign is very satisfying,” said Biblioasis Publisher and Editor Daniel Wells.
Biblioasis isn’t against e-readers. In fact, they’ll be offering e-books on their website this week with plans to be on most of the e-retailers sites early next year. For Wells, reading on an e-reader, an act he refers to as “not a pleasurable experience,” while not ideal is better than not reading at all.
“The experience of reading is made far more pleasurable by the work that goes into designing a book: the typography, the leading, the margins, the font choice and size, the paper, the binding. It’s not just Benjamin-like fetishizing of an object. There are practical reasons why good designers and typesetters and publishers set the books the way they do, and much of this is lost when converted into one of the various e-reading formats. This makes the e-reading experience more awkward, less nuanced. It’s good to be reminded of it,” Wells explained.
The popularity of e-readers are rising, but many readers still prefer that alone-ness one can get only from reading an actual book. Wells hopes LPG’s Handmade Campaign isn’t the last we hear about the movement away from e-readers. Although e-books can be tempting, Wells believes “real book people” will still return to physical books.
“The only thing that bothers me a lot about e-reading devices is this boneheaded idea that they are going to improve on the experience of reading by making it more social,” said Wells. “Reading is after all, in some essential way, an anti-social activity. And I’d like to keep it that way. In an age where we are bombarded with social media, with texting and tweeting and Facebook and all of the rest of it, isn’t the idea of a technology (because a physical book is quite obviously that) that can give you some space, a way to tune out all of the rest of the noise, perhaps something special? Something we might want to preserve? To transform it into yet another vehicle for electronic chatter, that’s the only thing that could kill the book,” he continued.
Coming up for Biblioasis this fall are three new titles—Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting (a collection of short fiction based in Windsor), A.J. Somerset’s Combat Camera, and Marius Kociejowski’s The Pigeon Wars of Damascus—launching Sept. 24 at Phog Lounge.
Besides Biblioasis, the LPG has chosen titles from such other small presses as the Porcupine’s Quill, Coach House Books, and Pedlar Press. For the full list of titles, visit: www.lpg.ca/booklists/handmade_campaign_selected_titles_fall_2010/. |
