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.Thinketh: As A Man Thinketh Beautifully Designed for the Internet Age

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"Different forms of art excite different groups of cells in the brain." Page 242

Get ready to stimulate all those cells in this magnificent book.

There is nothing like this book, anywhere. Think combination text book, coffee table tome and art masterpiece.

Valerie Kirschenbaum has put together a delightful and most interesting work of art - combining unusual works of art from cultures we rarely experience.

If you are looking for the ULTIMATE GIFT for an art lover, history teacher, graphic designer or marketing executive, you won't go wrong with this book. Buy Goodbye Gutenberg to be as memorable a gift-giver to your friend as Kirschenbaum is to the publishing world.

As a publisher myself, I'm seeing, reading and buying new books every day. I am stunned at the beauty of this book - world class quality with world class information, too!

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.

This is one of my longest reviews so bear with me since this is a rare and wonderful book on par with some of the masterpieces of centuries past when one considers the art work involved.

Being a rabid bibliophile I am always overjoyed when I come across a book that makes me pause and have one of those light bulb moments. Case in point is a quote I read on page 107 which states 'We increased knowledge after Gutenberg, but we also lost. sorrowfully, our ability to see' (emphasis on the word see). Lest you not know, Gutenberg was the one given credit for mass literature becoming available because of the printing press idea. And as this book demonstrates, prior to that time when books were produced individually and with great care, which included beautiful illustrations, and even gold leaf lettering beginning on most new chapter pages.

This made the work in my opinion, come alive and made the literature important and worthy of ones money and time. Alas, it is true that only those who had the money or the exposure to education where such literature was available read per se. So when Gutenberg came along so did the desire to learn to read and own books. I applaud Gutenberg.

What this book does is educate bibliophiles like myself on the evolution of fonts and literature in general. Starting with the dedication which states: To Zuzana Licko One of the great typographers of our age.
Never heard of her/him and admit the word typographer is one of those words that give book lovers like me erotic fits. So I did a web search and discovered that a person (as a compositor, printer, or designer) who specializes in the design, choice, and arrangement of type matter is a typographer and that Ms. Licko is the co-founder of Emigre, together with her husband Rudy VanderLans. Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the U.S. in 1968; she graduated with a degree in graphic communications from U.C. Berkeley in 1984.
Emigre Magazine was founded in 1984, and garnered much critical acclaim when it began to incorporate Licko's digital typeface designs, created with the first generation of the Macintosh computer. This exposure of her typefaces in Emigre magazine led to the manufacture of Emigre Fonts, which Emigre now distributes as software, worldwide. She is mentioned briefly on page 77 and 170.

This is a book about words and fonts and so much more. Which is why it would actually take thousands of words carefully scripted to even give this book its worthy due as far a a review goes. It simply boggles the mind. No sooner would I be intrigued and educated briefly on something like art and calligraphy but wham I would be reading that 'In modern western writing, unlike with Chinese calligraphy 'the hand does all the work, leaving the rest of the body inactive, so that our writing is reduced in the end to a cerebral activity almost entirely cut off from its gestural foundation,' writes the scholar Pierre Francois Billeter' . Alas a new name to read up on and a Zen thought never considered. I say this because I do calligraphy, and I also grind my own Japanese brush stoke inks, and love practicing writing Hebrew and even Greek since alphabets are so artistic and intriguing to me.

Like the author who writes of starting out writing term papers on a typewriter (me on both a manual and electric) then on a computer the who evolution now allows for colour to be injected into ones final work. It is almost as if we have made a brief journey back to pre-Gutenberg time.

And on page 151 I am again reminded that colour used to play such an important role in literature as the author notes 'The illustrated books of the Chinese Buddhists were often the opposite of what Westerners consider 'normal'. The words were often printed in bright colors, whereas the illustrations were printed in black and white. The Chinese Buddhists wanted to insure that the pale ink drawings would not compete with the text for the attention of the reader'.

On page 176 I discovered that 100 years ago a man named Frederick Goudy introduced the concept of customized fonts. Now I admit I am a font junky as are other website owners I know. Fonts are art to me and they make any letter, diary, publication stand out if they arent the standard newspaper font. Anyway I discovered that Goudy had a big role in corporations developing personal fonts as part of their logos. Look at Coca Cola, Apple, Microsoft, Sears, IBM and you will see what I mean. Yet as the author asks, who was the 'artist' who designed these well known fonts? Should I assume they don't get residuals for each year the font continues to be used?

This is literally a piece of literature that every library public or private should own. It is for all ages if one loves literature. Have even been sharing it with my young grandchildren because I think it has serious historical value. My nerd family members are mesmerized and like me are drawn to the book because whenever you open it you find something new, either blatant or hidden that whets your appetite for more information. Which means google.com and the various bookstores I use are getting a great work out.

And being an artist myself I even bought some gold leaf and am in the process of gold leafing the old world letters on various chapter start pages.

This hallowed quotation from the penulitmately creative writings of Emily Dickinson succinctly describes the passionate volume GOODBYE GUTENBERG: HELLO TO A NEW GENERATION OF READERS AND WRITERS, 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!

Length:: 0:48 Mins

I found this little book to be laced full of wisdom; the kind of wisdom that I can apply to my every day life. Worth the purchase and one that I will refer to most often.