Reviewer: Lawrance M. Bernabo
Amazon.com Top 10 Reviewer
Duluth, MN

For the last couple of years I have been teaching exclusively on line and have had a lot of fun, undoubtedly too much fun, in playing with the "pages" for my classes. Whereas most of my colleagues were putting together pages of text in their word processing programs and then loading them into the system, I was create each of my pages as a series of blocks, each of which could contain an image and have a different font in a different color with a different background color. In the original system I used I could even make entire pages different colors, so that everything in my Mythology course was yellow because it make the color photographs of Greek pottery show up better, while my Utopian Images class had pages a shade of blue. I was immediately warned that too much "eye candy" could be distracting and reigned myself in so that things would not be too overwhelming, but I was still looking for ways of visually representing information in ways that would be helpful to students.

Consequently, when Valerie Kirschenbaum put together her tome "Goodbye Gutenberg: Hello to a New Generation of Readers and Writers," she was preaching to the choir in my case. The genesis for this work was the question asked by a student in one of her classes as to why books were no longer in color like they used to be? The inquiry was provoked by the sight of the one of the illuminated pages from the Reeve's Tale in "The Canterbury Tales." The answer was that black and white is the easiest and cheapest way to read and write today, but Kirschenbaum recognized that this was a justification built on the profit margins of economics rather than on any principle of education. However, given that books are currently in competition with television, movies, music videos, CD-roms, and the multitude of multimedia available on the Internet, Kirschenbaum argues that it is long past time for the visual dimension of books to be reconceptualized for the 21st century and beyond.

Kirschenbaum did some initial research that indicated that the reluctance to publish literature in color was not really an economic one, but rather cultural. By simply printing Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" in color, she found students were more interested in doing their homework assignment. From such small beginnings Kirschenbaum envisions a Renaissance in books and book design. In "Goodbye Gutenberg" she not only justifies her print revolution in terms of what she considers to be profound, technological, cultural, and historical reasons for such a transformation, she also practices what she preaches, turning virtually every two-page spread in the six chapters that make up the body of this book into the sort of visual displays we would associate with the covers of books and not the simply pages of text that have been printed in black & white for five centuries.

Section 1: Hello to a New Generation of Writers look at the process from the creative end. Kirschenbaum believes there has never been a better time to be a writer and develops the concept of the "Designer Writer," who can write with body language and in the color of the stars, thanks largely to the ability to create original works of art digitally. William Blake is presented as "The Visual Prophet" of this movement, a great poet who was also a great artist and who wrote in different colors.

Section 2: Hello to a New Generation of Readers argues for readers once again being asked to "see" when they read, instead of simply being asked to interpret the standard code of black print on white paper. In a series of comparisons of great works before and after Gutenberg, Kirschenbaum amply illustrates that her great leap forward is based on what happened in the past with hand-printed illustrated books coupled today with computer technology. Looking at cultures of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Mayans, along with that of Islam, she explores the history of the visual "essence" of writing.

Section 3: Hello to a New Generation of Women begins with Christine de Pisan, the "Godmother of Designer Writing," and ends with Kirschenbaum creating her own "Modern Feminine Font" based on her own handwriting. Ultimately, the book is not tied to gender so much as it is to the idea that each writer can create a font as distinctive as their individual handwriting.

Section 4: Beauty and the Book, which begins and ends with black print on white pages, contains in the middle a chapter devoted to the question of what is the role of terror in the arts in the post-September 11th world. But the point of the section is to dismiss the idea that typography, book design, and other aspects of visual communication, are minor art forms. The graphic designer that is Kirschenbaum's ideal rejects both the concerns of being "commercial" and of creating "fine art," in the quest to have a text communicate its meaning to its readers.

Section 5: Hello to a New Generation of Teachers grounds the principles of this book in science and literature. After looking at the role of color in both education and reading, Kirschenbaum devotes chapters to Edgar Allen Poe as "Seer of the Designer Tale," and reconsiders Chaucer, Homer (as the "Birth of the Comic Book"), and Plato as the foundation for a new generation of visual theorists whose goal is to write outside the box.

Section 6: Hello to the Critics and Skeptics anticipates what critics of designer writing will say and pretty much beats them to the bunch, at least with regards to the first round in this debate. The second chapter refutes the idea that "ornament" and "decoration" are suspicious words on trial in the new world of the designer writer.

Section 7: Goodbye Gutenberg reiterates the revaluation of visual values Kirschenbaum proposes and announces the "Dawn of Designer Prose." After sketching out the "Visual Vernacular" of today, she addresses again "The Old Way of Reading" to emphasize that the debate about the future of books is not between print and screen but rather between blocks of black & white text (i.e., the "Gutenberg cliché") and colorfully designed pages. The final "unfinished" chapter, "And So Begin the Beautiful Books" underscores Kirschenbaum's hope that we are "Excited by the possibility" and "inspired by the dream" that she had laid out in this manifesto.

The great irony, of course, is that I am reduced to the Gutenberg cliché to write this review. At least I have the pages of my online courses to play with, even with the limited range of possibilities our current platform system allows. Kirschenbaum makes a compelling case, especially because she overwhelms us with the style she gives her substance. If this is not the most gorgeous book you have ever actually held in your hands, then I would like to see what you think is better. Her title makes it clear that Johannes Gutenberg is her target, but I think it is equally clear that Kirschenbaum's kindred spirit here is Marshall McLuhan because more than any other volume I have read in the past several decades, "Goodbye Gutenberg" instantiates the idea that the medium is the message.

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