December 10, 2012
Diagonal Semantics and the Lacine: On Erica Baum’s Dog Ear
The first thing I noticed about Eric Baum’s Dog Ear—a series of cropped, close-up photographs of dog-eared pages of unidentified books—was not the texts in the almost-too-sharp images but the […]
August 7, 2012
A Humument in the age of mechanical reproduction (iv)
(This post is a continuation of a series. Italicized lines in this piece are sourced from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and […]
July 27, 2012
The matter of the word: a conversation with Peter Koch
The sleepy, industrial building on Berkeley’s 4th St. in which the Codex Foundation resides belies the international significance of its residents. Were it not for one meek sign, I might’ve […]
July 24, 2012
It’s more than Greek to me: on visual translation
I’ve written in the past about typography and materiality—how the physical elements from which language is forged can influence, govern, or dictate its semantics. The relationship, though, is complex; there […]
July 5, 2012
A Humument: the hierarchy of sight
The question is almost too nebulous to ask, and so grows muted in critical consciousness: How does a book’s typography—abstracted as a representative component of its materiality—affect, or effect, anything […]