Reviewer: Grady Harp
Museum curator and writer, & amazon.com top 100 reviewer

'Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye.'

This hallowed quotation from the penulitmately creative writings of Emily Dickinson succinctly describes the passionate volume Goodbye Gutenberg: How a Bronx Teacher Defied 500 Years of Tradition and Launched an Astonishing Renaissance, a zealot's call to revolution in creating books of significance for the 21st Century by the enormously gifted Valerie Kirschenbaum. Armed with a background armour of teaching students in midcity Bayard Rustin High School for Humanities in Manhattan, having struggled with the youthful products of the visual generation influenced by television, video games, music videos, wildly mad animation feature films - Kirschenbaum came upon the idea that kids got bored with the written word, the blocks of black and white monotonous words that failed to generate not only their attention but also their hunger to learn.

Valerie Kirschenbaum has created a book of enormous visual beauty matched only by the scholarly investigation of her premise that Gutenberg's invention of the press may well have made books more readily available through mass production, but the advent of the mechanical press all but destroyed the magical magnificence of illuminated manuscripts that are now relegated to museums. Kirschenbaum proposes the idea of utilizing our most sophisiticated technology now widely available to everyone - the Computer with all of its abilities to extract creativity from the person at the keyboard - to make books in color, employ design, assimilate art, import images and treasures from the past, all with the endpoint of energizing students of all ages to rediscover the joy of reading.

Spend many hours with this fascinating book and find yourself not only completely absorbed in Kirschenbaum's 'novel' concept, but utterly mesmerized with the various areas of investigation she offers to support her discovery. Here, lavishly designed and richly colorful and cleverly written, are chapters addressing neuroscientific postulates about brain cell receptor sites that tie visual stimuli to emotional response, explorations of Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics, Greek and Roman scrolls, Sanskrit, Chinese, Islamic, and Hindu writings and visualizations of the Divine, analyses of fonts and the Male Domain of book production, the philosophies of Plato, Nietzsche, Descartes, Wittgenstein et al, the paintings of van Gogh, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, the writings of Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Proust, Joyce, Dickens, and numerous other discoveries such as the life and art of Christine de Pisan!

While it is obvious that Kirschenbaum has thoroughly researched the material for her book, she still manages to write in a manner so communicative, so warmly personal, yet so infectiously passionate that it is not possible to avoid falling under her spell! She is a consummate Teacher, a richly imaginative designer, and a compassionate human being. And if it sounds as though this description of GOODBYE GUTENBERG covers more territory than you can believe, then just explore this wondrous volume for yourself: there is far more here for your absorption and continued pleasure than the space of a review permits telling. Toward the end of her book (written by the way in her own designed elegant font!), she shares this: "My journey has been, I am sure, full of errors and omissions. But I hope that younger, more gifted souls will forgive them and see in my pages the seeds of a beautiful new future." "..to write in the vernacular today is to choose not only the right words, but also the right colors and the right designs. Our vernacular is visual. Soon our books will be visual, too."

From the stance of one committed to the arts, this book is a revelation. Read it for the discovery itself, for the sheer beauty of design and content, for the product of a successful dreamer. This book will be around for a long time as an aid to teachers, readers and other disciples of Valerie Kirschenbaum!

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