Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Experiments with typography date from at least the end of the 19th Century - if not earlier (Sterne makes much use of space on the page). Calligraphy is important to some productions even after the invention of the printing press. |
It's an interesting point isn't it - there was a thread on here a little while ago with the title "I don't care how books smell", or something like that. The point being that there is a question of how far the physical properties of a work impact the reading of that work. A number of people made the argument that they read for "content" and do not really care whether the book smells like a book and so, for them, electronic reading is not an impoverished form of reading compared with reading paper books. The same argument might be, and was as I recall, extended to typography and layout. I've just re-read Mann's The Magic Mountain on my ereader. Because of the zoom level at which I read it every third page consisted of about four or five lines "left over" from the previous page. This was slightly annoying to begin with but I am not sure if and how it impacted on the meaning that the book had for me, or on my ability to reconstruct the story world portrayed by Mann.
I'm not claiming that typography and layout do not have an impact, but it is not obvious that they do and saying just what that impact is seems sometimes to be quite difficult.