1) A young guest at Thanksgiving dinner was reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for school, and showed me the pages of text where this effect is apparently employed for some particularly dark passages, the words and then letters getting closer and closer together, until the page is black. She told me quit she was far more interested in the typography, layout, and use of pictures, than with the text itself.

2) The book I myself had packedto read on the trip, a cheap mass market paperback, had encounterd some mishap at the printer, and many of the pages in the first 3rd had word drop shadows, so there was effectively no space, and I found myself reading much, much more slowly.

3) Friday was the advent of the Gita and in quietly observing it too myself I once again remarked on how much more compact Dev Nagari is than roman letters, the words and even the letters scrunched up into themselves. I can report that my parents, at least, seem to read silently just fine from this scrunched up alphabet.

4) This oddly neolithic comic was on the breakfast table today.

Typographic effect, printing mistake, cultural habit, visual joke. All in the space between the words.

Tim, I like everything you say here—especially the bit about being predisposed to the model of lots of little revolutions—some textual, some peri– or paratextual—*and* the sense that there’s a threshold at which innovation *becomes* the longue durée.

I should note, though:

1) Silent reading definitely predates spaces between words; the most famous account of silent reading in late antiquity is St Augustine’s of St Ambrose, and there are precursors. Spaces between words may make silent reading easier, but they’re not necessary for it;

2) Print does a whole lot of other things besides the reconstruction of optical space, and print arranges space still differently from Irish manuscripts;

3) I think the bigger issue might not be the typographic innovation, but the fact that the Irish monks were able to manipulate, understand, and edit text in a language they couldn’t understand (or necessarily misunderstood) as a spoken tongue. It’s an extra metastasis in the production of the written word as an entity independent from speech in the mind;

4) I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that there are a LOT of revolutionary moments — little mini-revolutions, which aren’t really moments, so much as evolutionary spurs — in the development of writing and modern consciousness. It’s futile to say “ah, aha, X is the REAL revolution” — once we reach a certain threshold, they’re all innovations, and they’re all important, and psychological/social transformations can be localized in each of them with a greater or lesser degree of plausibility when considered over a long durée.