Sister or ‘Handmaid’? How to do Things with Prints

Abstract

Print is often understood as typography or engraving. In the hand-press era engraved illustrations were produced separately in different workshops and then inserted into the gatherings of a printed text at the time of binding. Print histories are often shaped as narratives of supersession, with engraving displaced by photography,1 and hand-press printing by mechanized and digital printing. The function of books changed with the advent of technologies that could separate, capture, and record sensory experience: in addition to photography, the gramophone, film, and typewriter define a new ‘discourse network’ around 1900.2 Since new technologies have integrated digital platforms supporting media convergence, and the book has ceased to be the hegemonic support for writing and reading, paradigms of interpretation have been shifting from medium specificity to interplay and intermedial interaction. Building on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation (1999) and Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s understanding of Enlightenment as ‘an event in the history of mediation’,3Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation explores the hegemony of print from the licensing act of 1695 to the publication of photographs in newspapers in 1897. Rather than focusing on invention as did Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ and Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979),4 concentrating on print’s hegemony means thinking about how print acts as ‘a solvent of culture, a vehicle for other media as well as a medium in its own right’ (p. 11). Such a research agenda has been driven by a multidisciplinary network hosted at McGill University since 2006, publishing under the name The Multigraph Collective.