T H E O R D E R of B O O K P A G E SThe book always aims at instilling an order, whether it is the order in which it is deciphered, the order in which it is to be understood, or the order intended by the authority who commanded or printed the work.
— Chartier, The Order of Books, viii
I start by considering book design as a potential source for helping people in our writing classes design for the Web because it is out of books that our Web has grown: we speak almost exclusively of web pages, not of web frame sequences or web movements or web sculptures; in addition, web pages have the left-to-right and top-to-bottom orientation we have learned from reading. I also start with Chartier’s words because they delineate three kinds of order with books: the intellectual order constructed by a reader as she moves through a text, the order—the arrangement of parts—given by a writer, and the order that is allowed or encouraged or imposed by the larger world around the reader and writer, an order that is both limiting because it sets the parameters of what can be published but which is also productive in the Foucauldian sense, continuously shaping us into ourselves.
I am going to focus on the last kind of order (although the other two kinds will make intermediary appearances) as I talk about book pages and, eventually, web pages. I could consider this kind of order in terms of the development (for example) of a standardized, compulsorily-taught grammar that was to “suppress wild, untaught vernacular reading” in Spain in the 15th century (Illich & Sanders, 68), or I could consider it in terms of the copyright laws developed (for another example) in the 17th century in England to ensure that government and religion had power to see that a man was “hanged, cut down alive, ‘his privy members’ were cut off, his entrails taken out, and with him ‘still living’ burnt before his eyes” for printing a book uncomplimentary to the Crown (Stewart, 10-15). I am instead going to consider what seems to be a less bodily, less visible form of order, which is the visual composition of book pages; this may seem like a paradoxical statement, to claim that the visual composition of book pages is—in *serious* writings, at least—generally intended to invisible, but this is indeed the case.
