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Literature by Design
Literature by Design
Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880-1930 consists of literary works published between 1880 and 1930 that foreground the vehicle of the book and the visible nature of language itself. Literature by Design titles incorporate facsimile reproductions of the original editions—all of which are noteworthy for the role design and typography played in shaping readers’ responses—along with new critical material by leading contemporary scholars.
Craig Saper, ed., The Readies (2009). Before there was Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jeff Bezos, there was Bob Brown. Back in 1930, Brown foresaw the day when reading would be done on devices that brought with them a tendency to smash and recombine language into a kind of grotesque shorthand. With one foot in the avant-garde camp of Marcel Duchamp, Kay Boyle, F. W. Marinetti, and Gertrude Stein, and one foot in the more practical efforts to invent new forms of book storage and retrieval, Brown exerted a considerable influence on some of the most important literary and artistic figures of his time. The Readies—a parodic, playful announcement of Brown’s imagined invention of a new reading machine that would require writers and readers to reduce language to “smashum” words and to eschew use of bulky adverbs, adjectives, and countless other unnecessary words in the new age of streamlined communication—now stands as one of the most remarkable examples of accidental prophecy in the history of literature. Rice University Press is bringing The Readies back to light as part of its Literature by Design series, with a fascinating Afterword by Craig Saper, one of the world’s leading scholars on texts and technology.
Johanna Drucker, ed., Le Petit Journal des Refusées (2009). In the late nineteenth century, when the San Francisco artist and writer Frank Gelett Burgess published this one-of-a-kind sixteen-page pamphlet, printed on wallpaper, trimmed to a trapezoidal shape, and full of parodic referenes, he was making a critical argument about cultural networks and industries as well as creating an original and unique piece of humor. Purporting to be a publication consisting of works rejected by at least three other journals, Le Petit Journal des Refusées was really the work of Burgess and a few of his friends. This entertaining pamphlet would provide only passing interest if it were not for the remarkable degree of self-consciousness with which it exposed the social nature of aesthetic production. Le Petit Journal stands now as an engaging and thought-provoking artifact of late nineteenth-century international cosmopolitan culture. Noted scholar Johanna Drucker brings Le Petit Journal back to light in this new facsimile edition, brilliantly explicated by her Afterword detailing the intellectual ferment of the time.
Jerome McGann, ed., The Black Riders and other lines (2009). The 1895 publication of Stephen Crane's The Black Riders and other lines was a milestone event in the history of American letters. Crane's was the first American book to be printed with a clear Modernist design — a look devised with the conscious intention to echo the sense of his text.
Rice University Press is bringing Crane's breakthrough volume back to life in this new facsimile edition, part of our Literature by Design series, with an enlightening Afterword by the noted scholar Jerome McGann. Dr. McGann carefully explicates both the poetry and its presentation, leading the reader through an interpretation of the work that is also an interpretation of the pages themselves, along with a thorough account of the state and motion of the publishing industry in 1890s America.
