How the Page Matters

By Bonnie Mak. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2011. 176 pp. $55 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8020-9760-6.

Whether handwritten, printed, digital, or some hybrid combination, the page matters. “The page is now ubiquitous – we flip absently through the pages of a magazine, scribble down notes on a pad of paper, and surf web pages on our laptops, PDAs, or mobile phones – but this ubiquity has led to present-day assumptions about the page and its operation,” Bonnie Mak notes in the introduction to this short, fascinating monograph (3). These new forms of engagement with the page draw upon traditions that predate the page’s relationship with the book. For all its commonality, the page is more than just a page, according to Mak. Rather the page is the site of dynamic engagement between “materiality, temporality, and context” (4). Regardless of “its platform, text, image, graphic markings, and blank space,” the page uses architecture as well information to create “an ongoing conversation between designers and readers” (5). Within the architecture of the page, “writers, artists, translators, scribes, printers, booksellers, librarians, and readers configure and revise the page . . . leav[ing] redolent clues about how the page matters to them and how they wish it to matter to others.” (5) How the Page Matters examines the various iterations of the fifteenth-century treatise the Controversia de noblitate to trace the historical development of the page as a cultural phenomenon.

Authored by Florentine humanist Buonaccorso da Montemagno in 1428 in Latin, the Controversia is a debate about the origins of nobility. Buonaccorso “stages the traditional question as a debate in ancient Rome between two suitors . . . who are competing for the hand of the virtuous Lucretia” (19). By the middle of the fifteenth century, the text of the Controversia was widely circulated “in manuscript and print, in Italian, French, German, and English translation on both sides of the Alps. More recently, digital versions of the French and English translations have been released on CD-ROM and the Internet” (5). Because Buonaccorso’s treatise still survives in these various iterations dating from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries, the Controversia is an ideal source for a material history of the page.

Mak structures her discussion of the Controversia and the material history of the page around the various physical elements of the page. Beginning with a historical and theoretical analysis of the page, Mak challenges the traditional assumption that the print revolution of the fifteenth century and the digital revolution of the twentieth were moments of “technological supersession” (9). In Mak’s analysis, the historical development of the page is “one of overlapping methods, materials, and means.” Thus “the page emerges as evidence of its own production, performance, and consumption” (15). The page doubles as both “an expressive space for text, space, and image” as well as “a cultural artefact” and “technological device” (18).

In a particularly interesting discussion of the arrangement of the physical elements on the page, Mak demonstrates both the malleability of the page and the Controversia. Tracing the history of the manuscript, Mak describes the use of Humanistic and Gothic hands. The use of Humanistic or Gothic script reflected a particular design choice, “a conscious and careful fabrication of identity.” Moreover, as printed editions of the Controversia began to appear in the late fifteenth century, such paratextual devices continued to be used in a conscious effort to reach a broader audience (26). When the Controversiawas translated into Italian shortly after 1428, designers consciously appropriated the Humanistic hand, Mak argues, “to add prestige and authority to texts in the volgare” (29). Likewise, a French vernacular translation produced around 1450 reinterpreted the Controversia as courtly literature. Printing the Controversia with other didactic works and adding illustrations, the printers manufactured a new heritage for Buonaccorso’s treatise. In each of these iterations, Buonaccorso’s treatise remained the same. Instead designers used paratextual elements to create particular meanings for the text.

In subsequent chapters, Mak examines the influence of the paratextual devices used such as title pages, prefaces, and prologues; the distinctions made by librarians describing various editions of the Controversia as rare and non-rare; and the creation of digital versions of the Controversia. In each discussion, Mak reinforces the dynamic engagement of the page with its particular cultural context. Mak’s cultural history of the page emphasizes the various ways in which materials and meaning are entangled: “[O]ne set of materials and meanings has never been entirely been supplanted by the next. Indeed the pagina of the scroll was not eradicated by the parchment page of the medieval codes; the manuscript page was not replaced by the paper printed page; and none of these pages has been rendered obsolete by the page in digital form.” Instead the page uses “multiple modes of production” from the handwritten to the printed to the digital facsimile (73).

How the Page Matters is a well-researched, interdisciplinary work that covers a wide range of topics including art history, cultural studies, graphic design, library and information science, history, and museum studies. Mak’s monograph is an important reminder of the rich tradition of intellectual and artistic achievement recorded and disseminated within the discrete borders of the page. How the Page Matters encourages readers to reconsider the page. Rather than a passive carrier of information, the page matters as a lively and active participant in a conversation between author, designer, and reader.

Julie Holcomb, Baylor University