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I am going to tell here one possible genealogy of book design in the West, which starts (if we follow Richard Lanham in The Electronic Word) with Plato, who most thickly worked out, early on, the belief that knowledge lives in its own, unworldly, place, outside of but still tantalizingly suggested in the particularities of our experiences. In Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay argues that one primary conception of vision in the west has been as the sense that can get us closest to that knowledge, that is, an immaterial vision, understood not as sight of the eyeballs but rather “as the allegedly pure sight of perfect and immobile forms with ‘the eye of the mind’” (29). According to Lanham, the kind of book we academics have inherited in the west grows out of the Platonic desire for access to the capital-I Ideal and the kind of “seeing-through” vision Jay describes; first, however, according to Lanham, there had to be an alphabet that allowed for such immateriality:
The late Eric Havelock, in his pioneering work on the Greek alphabet, stressed that an alphabet that could support a high literate culture had to be simple enough to be learned easily in childhood. Thoroughly internalized at that time, it would become a transparent window into conceptual thought. The shape of the letters, the written surface, was not to be read aesthetically; that would only interfere with purely literate transparency.... It took a long while for this ideal to be realized in a page of modern print. (4)
The first kind of seeing and what it is meant to see—a “pure sight of perfect and immobile forms” as Jay put it above—thus connects with a writing, and eventually a printing and book pages, that are to be as invisible, as transparent, as possible.
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