A publishing house is a fragile organism
‘In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’
– Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98
In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …
A few relatively ill-informed thoughts -
If the book – the physical object – is a cyborg, it makes perfect sense that Calvino’s publishing house is part of the necessary infrastructure to maintain its “moment-to-moment self-reliance”. It must be built, structured, wrangled in textual and physical form; the machinery of production must be properly maintained and configured. Once it is out in the world a wider infrastructure of distribution, sales, marketing, remaindering, re-editing and reprinting continues to work on the cyborg/book, getting it to where it’s needed, rebuilding it, making it stronger, faster, better.
Reader/book interaction is broadened out by Calvino’s quote beyond the reader – he makes it explicit that the book is a physical item with impact in the world beyond the mere arrangement of printed text. So if this invisible infrastructure exists to serve the cyborg without ever necessarily engaging with the text, that could point to a wider study of human/book interaction, a study of the ripples of infrastructure, marketing, creation and the publishing ecology as it might relate to a single creature born of that ecology.
But then it’s early on a Monday and I’ve not read up on this, so that may or may not make sense…