Posts by Tim

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how color turns out to be a surprisingly important part of our experience reading printed books, and I came across this terrific website on the history of color printing, part of a special collections exhibit in the 90s from the University of Delaware’s Morris Library.

I love this stuff:

Lithography was the first fundamentally new printing technology since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century…. Early colored lithographs used one or two colors to tint the entire plate and create a watercolor-like tone to the image. This atmospheric effect was primarily used for landscape or topographical illustrations. For more detailed coloration, artists continued to rely on handcoloring over the lithograph. Once tinted lithographs were well established, it was only a small step to extend the range of color by the use of multiple tint blocks printed in succession. Generally, these early chromolithographs were simple prints with flat areas of color, printed side-by-side.

Increasingly ornate designs and dozens of bright, often gaudy, colors characterized chomolithography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overprinting and the use of silver and gold inks widened the range of color and design. Still a relatively expensive process, chromolithography was used for large-scale folio works and illuminated gift books which often attempted to reproduce the handwork of manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The steam-driven printing press and the wider availability of inexpensive paper stock lowered production costs and made chromolithography more affordable. By the 1880s, the process was widely used for magazines and advertising. At the same time, however, photographic processes were being developed that would replace lithography by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Since I slid this claim in at the end of a long post with a lot of literary theory, you might have missed it:

When the media landscape changes, we actually begin to SEE things differently, even (or ESPECIALLY) things that haven’t changed at all.

This is the reason why the iPod didn’t just change the way we listen to music – and later, look at pictures or movies or play video games. It changed the way we read.

And (because I couldn’t help my ever-qualifying self):

(As did movies, television, video games, and many, many other things.)

(The big one I Ieft out in this list was mobile phones, but since the iPod and the smartphone wound up being convergent/complementary technologies, I think they’re more arguably part of the same story.)

Let me try to spell out point by point how I think the iPod – or more precisely, the evolution of the iPod – changed reading.

1. Design Matters. The iPod elevated the level of aesthetic pleasure people expected from handheld devices, as well as the premium they were willing to pay for well-made things. Looking back at the first-generation Kindle, it’s actually astonishing how much of the early commentary focused on the perceived ugliness of the device. In particular, the first Kindle didn’t just look ugly – it looked out of date. This was something we used to care about with home theater equipment and kitchen appliances – the iPod taught us to care about it on our handhelds, even when we were walking around with cheap plastic phones. If the e-reader breakthrough had happened in 1999 or 2002, even if the device had been similarly awkward-looking relative to the technology around it, I don’t think this would have been as much of a problem as it became.
2. Software Matters. I almost titled this “Design Goes All The Way Down.” It’s a truism now that Apple was able to swoop in on the digital music market because they wrote better software than the Sonys and Samsungs they were competing with on the high end. But it’s true. You’re not just creating a piece of hardware; you’re creating an interface for an experience. And in particular, if you get the experience of buying, sorting, finding, and selecting media wrong, you’ve got real problems. You have to make the software intuitive, powerful, and fun. The goal is to reduce the friction between a user’s intent and their goal – whether it’s buying music, listening to it, or flipping through album art. If there’s friction anywhere in the experience, it had better be deeply pleasurable friction. (That’s right, I said it.)

   The Kindle actually seems to understand this really, really well.

3. This is more specific: People Like Full Color. Was anyone complaining about the monochrome taupe-and-dark-taupe display of the first iPod? No. Was I when I bought my first iPod, in 2004? Not at all. Did I cry inside when they launched the first color-display, video-capable iPod about a month afterwards? Not exactly. I cried on the outside, too. Color is resource-intensive, and hard to get right on a small screen. But god – it’s beautiful. It’s also one of the things that easily gets lost in the transition from print to digital; there’s nothing like a book with full-color prints, and the only thing sadder than an image-heavy book that’s all in black-and-white is a digital version of the same book that doesn’t have images at all.
4. Images Make Reading Easier. I mean, this is one of the big lessons of the graphical interface on the desktop, right? Column after column of text is hard to look at, and it’s hard to distinguish one version from the next. Seriously – sorting through an early iPod, like my third-gen one, is one of the most intense reading experiences you’re likely to have, and I think it (along with text messages) totally softened people up for reading strings of text on small screens. But texts with icons – even generic icons that just look like little pieces of paper next to the text that identifies with them – reinforces the idea that you’re dealing with distinct objects. Add covers – like book or album covers, or preview images of pictures, and you’ve got a hieroglyphic hybrid mode of reading that is frankly more powerful and intuitive than text or images alone. Create a software interface where you can manipulate those objects, and you’ve got something that’s genuinely game-changing.
5. Media Devices Should Do More Than One Thing. It’s great that I can take my music with me, but I’d really like to listen to radio programs, too. (Podcasts.) I carry around all of these pictures in my wallet – maybe you could…? (Done.) What about TV? I like TV. And my kids like to watch movies in the car. (We can do that.)

   Was it obvious that there was a hidden affinity between pictures and music and movies? No. But once you’ve got a screen with a big hard drive, a great syncing tool, and a solid store that can deal with media companies… You follow the logic of what you can meaningfully offer and what your customers can use the device to do.

   The only thing more appealing for multiple media than a tiny screen with a big hard drive is a great big screen with a big hard drive. I can’t believe that future reading devices won’t take advantage of it.

6. Make It Easy For Me To Get My Own Stuff On The Screen. Can you imagine if Apple had ONLY let you put stuff on your iPod that you’d bought or ripped through iTunes? The iPod moment benefited tremendously from the Napster moment, which in turn was driven by the CD-ripping and cheap fast internet moment. You had all of this digital material sitting on people’s hard drives and floating around networks, and we just needed someplace to put it. There’s no stuff we want more than our own stuff. Apple smartly opened itself up to it. Well, likewise, now, we’ve decades of office documents sitting on people’s hard drives and hypertext pages floating around networks, and nowhere but our computers to put it.

   I’ll say it again: There’s No Stuff We Want More Than Our Own Stuff. If Amazon, or Google, or anybody, could find a way for me to get MY print library on a portable screen, I would both love and pay them dearly for the chance to do so.

7. Devices Should Talk To Each Other. My DVD player is an idiot. It has nothing to say to anyone except maybe my TV and some speakers. Now, I just leave it in a drawer. My TV is a little better, because it listens really well, but not by much. From the beginning, the iPod could both talk and listen to your computer. Now, because of its wireless connect, the iPhone can talk to almost anything.

   The Kindle’s networking ability, still limited as it is, stands on the shoulders of those devices. (And your computer, too, does a much better job of talking to small, post-PC devices than it used to, from video game consoles to mobile phones.)

8. This last point is from Gavin Craig, and it includes the iPod, and the Kindle, but also is more general: “It should be possible to make the device useful in ways that the designer may not have intended.” I call this half-jokingly “Media Existentialism.” (Existence precedes essence; we come to terms with our determined place in the universe, and only afterwards do we define who we are and what we’re for.)

   The point is that users, not designers, ultimately determine what an object is for; and any attempt to engineer-through that process in a closed-ended way restricts value rather than creating it.

This is a short list of the expectations we have for reading machines now that we largely didn’t have a decade ago. None of them came from devices that were designed (except largely accidentally) to read anything.

But this list only barely begin to speak to the expectations we’ll have for an electronic reader decades from now.

What might those expectations be? Where will they come from? How might they change everything else?

I love the actor/magician Ricky Jay, not least for his terrific supporting turn in the first season of Deadwood (understated on a show where nobody was understated). I resisted reading an old New Yorker profile of Jay when John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to it earlier in the week, even after linking to an interview Jay gave Errol Morris about deception and talking up Jay’s history of magicians and irregular stage entertainers Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (JG: “simply one of the best books I

Speaking of intertextuality, probably no readers are more explicitly intertextual than mainstream comic books. Everything you know about genres, the characters, the world(s) they inhabit, their history/histories, and how to read and make sense of what you see, comes from your experience with other texts — usually a lot of them, and not all of them comic books.

Readers see that experience as an investment in literacy. At O’Reilly Radar, Brett McLaughlin looks at comic book fans’ (and presumably, fans in other media/genres) investment in story continuity:

Putting aside issues of story, I’m struck by how much looking back and forth I tend to do in reading a comic. I’m scanning a bit ahead, and reflecting back on what I just read and saw, even while reading the current panel. I’ve got this constant sense of context; I have a continuity in which what I’m learning (about a comic book character, about a love interest, about an island that’s about to be submerged by supersonic waves triggering earthquakes along fault lines, etc.) fits.

So why would we simply accept that in non-fiction–especially projects and products that purport to actually teach something–we can’t have continuity?

I guess weblogs are one solution to this problem; and in its own way, academic writing is another. Both have mechanisms make their own continuities with other writing explicit, and signal when they’re about to reboot.* But general nonfiction, especially journalism? Harder than it probably ought to be. More rewarding when it does pay off.

Which begs another question; why do readers get such pleasure out of continuity? Is it the happiness that comes with recognition, a feeling of belonging to a community, a function of reduced learning/transaction costs when you approach something new…?

*I think rebooting in a series actually pulls in more of your unconscious knowledge about characters, genres, etc. than even continuity does – not only are you establishing all of these new contexts, you’ve got this layer of old context, too — “oh, that’s how they’re handling this event/character/place.” It’s like building a city on top of another city. This is why the ultimate trick to pull is to do a reboot that isn’t really a reboot.

It turns out that one of my ideas about Kindle 2020 —

How might [electronic readers] change the entire FIELD of media consumption, handheld devices, computing, reading, etc? Will everything restructure itself around the reader? Or will it be a fun, handy curiosity, plotting its own logic while everything else goes along unchanged?

— actually depends on a whole bunch of other ideas, some of them a little bit technical. I’m going to try to spell those out here.

The big idea is material intertextuality. The short version of this is:

1. a text’s meaning (use, experience, etc.) always depends on its material/physical form;
2. material/physical form always depends on both the materiality of the media itself and its physical contexts (readers, bookstores, sites of reading);
3. all of those forms are always part of a system where they’re in dialogue with other forms.

In short, when I read something, I bring all of my assumptions about reading, in all of its various forms – in cheap books, expensive ones, pamphlets, comics, movies, street signs, etc. – with me. How I read is structured by all of them, even if negatively. A novel printed on cloth paper can be cheap, unserious, escapist reading in one context, and the epitome of high learning or even political protest in a different context — even if it’s the same physical book.

*

I’ve been trying to explain what literary critics (and litcrit-minded people) mean by intertextuality, and this “Semiotics for Beginners” website is a good place to look (without, like a lot of otherwise smart critics, getting it wrong).

As with so many other things, Roland Barthes is a good place to start:

A text is… a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations… The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.

Two things are getting disrupted here – the unity of the book and the unity of the author. Hence the “multidimensional space” — you can think about the text or the writer as points of intersection with all sorts of vectors flowing through them, coming from and headed to someplace else. Those vectors are what we call language.

Michael Bakhtin tried to approach the novel this way. A lot of classical poetry seems to have one voice – one guy (usually) talking, in one mode of address – usually a high or elevated style. You couldn’t understand the novel without trying to understand how the novel orchestrates all the different modes and varieties of language — narrative, dialogue, storytelling, letter-writing, the weird naturalist-scientific mode that so many novelists adopted. Bakhtin’s solution was to see this heterogeneity of language in the novel as a reflection of the dialogic, plural voices always present in language itself. This is from Sue Vice’s Introducing Bakhtin:

The language we use in personal or textual discourse is itself composed of many languages, which have all been used before… Each utterance, whether it takes the form of a conversation in the street or a novel, consists of the unique orchestration of well-worn words. As in an everyday dialogue, all these languages will interact with each other, jockey for position, compromise, effect a temporary stabilization, before moving on to the next construction of meaning.

Intertextuality has a slightly different spin than dialogism – partly because it’s trying to move away from the notion that individual people are pulling the strings of language, rather than the other way around. Julia Kristeva, who coined intertextuality, put it this way:

Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that ‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it’ (cited in Culler 1981, 105). She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure of a text we should study its ‘structuration’ (how the structure came into being). This involved siting it ‘within the totality of previous or synchronic texts’ of which it was a ‘transformation’ (Le texte du roman, cited by Coward & Ellis 1977, 52).

Part of this move, too, is to move away from using words like “book” (which implies a kind of self-contained perfection of the text) or “work” (which implies a one-to-one relationship between a text and its author) or even “author” (which implies that the person who wrote this language down has a authoritative monopoly on its meaning).

Words aren’t little pictures happily joined to sounds in your head. They’re out in the world, and so are you. This is what Jacques Lacan meant when he said “the unconscious is structured like a language.”

Nothing is in here. Everything is out there.

But all of these ghostly circulations inevitably leave out huge chunks of the material world. Eventually, critics and theorists started to say, okay, we get it; we were assuming all of this metaphysics about books and authors and readers and bodies. But let’s forget about “books” as hypothetical ideal and self-contained entities. They’re not just self-cancelling disembodied authorless language. A lot of those metaphysical illusions actually seem to come from real, physical practices, effected on paper and book covers and sold by booksellers and acted on by readers. Let’s start to look at some of those codes and practices too! (Ditto the body, commodities, etc., the whole historical/materialist turn of the last twenty years.) This is what some of us mean by the materiality of the text.

So we started looking at physical objects again. And I mean looking, really hard – sometimes at individual pieces of paper, stray punctuation marks, registers of subscriber lists, ledgers for ink and paper purchases by regional booksellers. It’s the paranoid style applied to bibliography; a kind of collector’s mania, where you strenuously insist on the importance of alternate covers, variations in editions, the subtle sonic differences in grades of wax on vinyl recordings.

What we forgot though, in all of this emphasis on specificity, is the place of the system, and the importance of understanding how perception itself changes in time and space. This is where Walter Benjamin’s project of aesthetics and theories of comparative and convergent media become really important.

When the media landscape changes, we actually begin to SEE things differently, even (or ESPECIALLY) things that haven’t changed at all.

This is the reason why the iPod didn’t just change the way we listen to music – and later, look at pictures or movies or play video games. It changed the way we read. (As did movies, television, video games, and many, many other things.)

The question is – what kinds of new media, or new experiences of media, drive these changes, and make us change the way we read, think about, produce, exchange texts? Will electronic reading devices be largely a peripheral part of this change (reflecting the way we read paper books, or on computers, or on our phones), or will they be at the center of it?

I found a chance to sneak this idea into my dissertation. Here’s an excerpt:

…

In any writing system, a document’s material creation or assembly shapes both its meaning and its legitimacy. As [Cornelia] Vismann notes with respect to history and the law, “[a] new way of binding or of writing things down, a change in the way data are collected, affects the legal framework… [Only] by turning into parchment codices, string-tied convolutes, or standardized chrome folders, do files acquire face, form, and format.” Indeed, it is just this transformation from parchment and fine paper codices to convolutes and chrome folders that marks the modernist information revolution.

But Vismann’s formula for files’ dependence on materiality for their meaning also instantiates D.F. McKenzie’s broader axiom for any text: “New readers of course make new texts, and their new meanings are a function of their new forms.”

Here we can add the voice of Michel de Certeau:

Whether it is a question of newspaper or Proust, the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation to the exteriority of the reader, by an interplay of implications and ruses between two sorts of “expectation” in combination: the expectation that organizes a readable space (a literality), and one that organizes a procedure necessary for the actualization of the work (a reading).

But what if we were to transform de Certeau’s analytic disjunction (“newspaper or Proust”) into a synthetic conjunction (“newspaper and Proust”)? If we take seriously the modernist idea – whether T.S. Eliot’s conception of literary tradition or Jorge Luis Borges’s observation in “Kafka and his Precursors” that “each writer creates his precursors” – that reading texts (what de Certeau calls “the actualization of the work”) transforms the meaning of prior texts, then we must also grant that a text’s meaning may depend on the material form taken by other texts.28 The reader’s (and writer’s) expectations governing literary space (de Certeau’s “literality”) are affected not just by the material form of the text in its immediacy, but by that form’s position in a system. This system (in a classically structuralist sense) is synchronic and diachronic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, differentiated by and differentiating a broad range of material texts past, present, and future, all of which are always potentially at play in the expectations, whether conscious or unconscious, of readers, writers, designers, advertisers, booksellers and publishers.

This may be an obvious point: obviously the physical design and makeup of a text invokes a series of similar texts, which in turn differentiate themselves from texts in a different genre, with a different readership, or in a different form. But taken to its limit, the consequences are both unexpected and radical. Proust’s A la recherche does not need to appear in a feuilleton to be transformed by the newspaper; and it can just as easily be shaped in its re-reading by the form of the medieval scroll or of cinema. This sense of material intertextuality is necessary for any treatment of modernism, like this one, which tries to rethink modernism in the historical context of varying media, whether it appears as literary or nonliterary, residual or emerging.

The iPod wasn’t the first digital music player, but that doesn’t really matter; when it was introduced in 2001, it was the first digital music player that made ordinary tech-inclined (but not necessarily tech-savvy) consumers pay attention.

I graduated from college that year, so I remember that time very well. Let’s review; Napster had been shut down. I didn’t own a DVD player. In fact, I didn’t even have my own computer. (I bought both that December.) I didn’t have a cellular phone, but some of my friends did. (In fact, I didn’t get one until 2005.) I had never used wireless internet, ever. I had bought an APS camera two years before, on study abroad. (Digital cameras cost about a kajillion dollars.) Instead of writing a blog, I kept email lists of everyone I knew and periodically quasi-spammed them with prose poems, Nietzsche quotes, outlines for essays on Bulworth (“The key to understanding Bulworth is that it’s not very good”), and news about my life. Oh, and I used telnet for email.

The time hardly seemed propitious to launch a device that would effectively break wide open handheld digital media. But that’s what happened.

It’s worth remembering this, because we’ve now had eight years of the iPod, iTunes, and the Apple Store, during which we’ve had to clear all of these technical and commercial and psychological and social hurdles to get to the devices that most of us carry around (in one version or another) every day.

What does this year’s model of the iPhone (already almost three years removed from the announcement of the first version) have in common with the first iPod? It fits in your pocket; and maybe – maybe – you still put stuff on it from your computer – to update the firmware, if nothing else.

That’s eight years of the iPod. I’m glad I saw it, because 21-year-old me wouldn’t have believed it. All the more so because none of what happened is in retrospect at all ridiculous.

Now let’s imagine twelve years of the Kindle.

Now the Kindle in 2020 might not even be the Kindle anymore. Maybe Sony or Apple or Google or Microsoft or someone we don’t even expect might shoulder Amazon aside and take center stage, or readers will be more like the smartphone market right now, with a handful of solid competitors egging each other on.

But the Kindle now, like the iPod eight years ago, is the first electronic reader that most of us tech-inclined but not tech-savvy users have paid much attention to. It’s already gotten better, it’s already spurred competition, and the chances are good that we’re going to see some significant advances in these devices before the end of the year.

In twelve years, we know electronic readers will do more, store more, work faster, look cooler, and offer more things to look at then it does now.

But what don’t we know about the Kindle 2020 yet?

Robin, Matt, and I – yes, all three of us – have proposed a presentation for South by Southwest Interactive where we — and some other supremely smart people — are going to try to figure out just that.

Here are some basic questions:

• What kind of devices will we use to read?
• What formats will be used to deliver documents?
• What kinds of documents will be “read” – text, image, video, audio, hybrids?
• How will documents be written and produced?
• How will documents be bought, sold, and otherwise supported?
• How will contributors be compensated?
• How will reading work in different industries?

And here, I think, are – for me, at least, some more interesting ones:

• What could turn an electronic reader into a totally NECESSARY device – like a mobile phone, or iPod?
• What features will the reader of 2020 have that nobody’s even talking about yet?
• What are we going to use it to do that nobody uses anything to do now?
• What’s going to be your favorite thing to read on it?
• Forget your favorite thing – what are you going to use it to do over and over again, whether you like it or not?
• How are you going to write with it?
• Who’s going to have one? How are they going to pay for it?
• How do we share what we read?
• What will we still want but not get?
• Here’s the big one: how might it change the entire FIELD of media consumption, handheld devices, computing, reading, etc… Will everything restructure itself around the reader? Or will it be a fun, handy curiosity, plotting its own logic while everything else goes along unchanged?

Beginning today, you can vote to help get this panel accepted to South By Southwest. I am way excited. First, I am a nerd for all things related to the written word. Second, Robin and Matt are the most talented futuronomists I know.

Finally, in addition to being awesome, Austin is (oddly enough) geographically centered for the three of us. If you look at our locations (Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco), Austin is the country’s fourth column, which (I think) bestows it with Penumbra-like magical powers.

Between books, papers, and screens, I think we might just have this covered. But see, this is where we start to worry about our own blind spots or idiosyncratic enthusiasms, not because we want to lose them, but because we need to put them in context.

So we don’t just need your vote. We need to know what you know. And we’re willing to use the patented Snarkmarket figure-four leg-lock — by which I mean, your comments in the thread below — to get the conversation started.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but that’s not really true; some people remember the past better than others. The future, however, really is 20/20 (especially in 2020). Right now, we all know just as much about the future of reading as everyone else.

The only difference is that we — you and I — are focused.

What do you see?

I love this SO VERY MUCH.

(Via.)

Here’s an idea for a great Google web application – an online archive where you can tag, sort, and store all of your used-to-be-paper documents, i.e., PDFs – and to share the same documents with other people, or even everybody.

I use many, many applications that perform a similar service with the PDFs on my hard drive; Yep!, Papers, Zotero, Scrivener, Evernote. And I use Dropbox to backup and sync my PDFs between machines. I also use Scribd to read PDFs and share them with the world. But Google could easily offer a service that does everything these applications do and more. They’re already offering a web-reader for PDFs. What they need is something that actually lets you USE them.

Here’s how I imagine this goes. Let’s say someone emails you a PDF to your Gmail account, or appends a PDF to a feed you read in Google Reader. Instead of downloading it onto your computer (or, egads, a public machine), you have the opportunity to load it into Docs. Just like that, it’s in your archive. You can also have Google Desktop scan for and index your PDFs and auto-load them into your archive, too.

Once you import it, you don’t have to do anything else. It’ll either pull the text — or if there’s no text layer, it’ll OCR the document FOR you. You can auto-tag it or add your own tags to help you sort your docs together. It can also pull metadata, like Zotero. And you can create smart collections that link PDFs with text documents, emails, and stuff from Google Books, Scholar, even Maps or Groups.

You can also customize levels of privacy and security. Some files you might want to have public, like on Scribd. Maybe you’ll even create RSS channels so folks can receive your new images/PDFs/ebooks/XML documents automatically. Others you want to share with specified users, like Dropbox or Groups. Still others (tax and employment info, etc.), you’ll encrypt with extra passwords.

In fact, this is awfully close to the vision two enterprising chaps passed off years ago of the Google Grid.

Seriously; Google says it wants to index the world’s information. Well, let me tell you – I’m chock full of information that I don’t know what to do with. Why can’t it start by taking some of mine – and giving me some tools so that I can do things with it as payment?

A link, and then a long digression (or several).

Andrew Robinson at the Oxford University Press blog writes about attempts at universal languages:

In the mid-1970s, with increasing international travel, the American Institute of Graphic Arts cooperated with the United States Department of Transportation to design a set of symbols for airports and other travel facilities that would be clear both to travellers in a hurry and those without a command of English. They invented 34 iconic symbols. The design committee made a significant observation:

Tom Devaney, a terrific poet and friend of mine, teaches a perennial seminar at Penn on writing about food, variously titled “Food For Thought” or (in the advanced version) “The Art of Eating.” The University of Pennsylvania Libraries recently put together a book based on writing and research from his courses, making use of a unique archive:

The boxes contain more than 3,000 recipe booklets from church organizations, small to mid-sized companies, food manufacture PR departments, and far-flung community groups. Every sturdy box is labeled with the implacable title, Victus Populi. The items in each box are not high-end cookbooks, but are all over the map: stapled together mimeograph copies, eye-catching (often kitschy) promotional pamphlets, one-off recipe booklets.

The boxes intrigued me. Each Victus Populi case was an archive in its particular a category: Bread, Fruits, Nuts & Olives, Seafood, Cheese, Meats, International Foods, Condiments: Herbs & Spices, Salads & Sandwiches, Health & Diets, Leftovers: Quick & Easy, Chocolate, Ice Cream, and one devoted solely to JELL-O.

And so the assignment took shape. Each student would choose a box to write about. The student essays would chronicle their journey and search of the primary source materials. They would use both large brush strokes (to provide an overview of the box) and develop one or two finer points in greater detail. To finish, they would find and cull all but two recipes from hundreds in each box.

The Art of the Box Lunch contains four of these essays, plus a generation selection of images from the collection, and a long introductory essay by Tom. I’m really stunned by how gorgeous it is – and also now feeling quite shamed into coming up with a similarly cool project for my seminar students in the fall.

And I know you were waiting for the best part: The Art of the Box Lunch is also now available as a free PDF.