Quote:
|
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.
|
Writers - or at least some of them - do seem to think that these matters are important. Sterne did, Mallarmé did. It's difficult to imagine (for me, at least) what the impact of Dickens' works would have been without the illustrations, and without the care taken to place them in the text that the author exercised. Similarly, Alice is not Alice without Tenniel. The way the words run past the opening illustration in my edition of Alice in Wonderland is a marked feature which is clearly designed to have an effect on the reader.
This kind of thing may not impact on all readers - or may not impact consciously on all readers - but it does on some. Not all writers are bothered about it; just as there are readers who only read for the story (or, at least, so they say), so there are writers who pay little attention to anything other than the story itself. But some writers are, and so are some readers.
I'd be inclined to see space and typeface as aspects of the paratext, and to argue that choice of font makes a difference to the readers' experience of the writing, whether s/he recognizes it or not. Lay a bare-bones Gutenberg text next to the original edition: there's a difference. It's not the same book.
I imagine that eReaders, the electronic book, once they become commonplace, and once they come to be seen as what they are - that is to say, a totally different medium from the old paper-printed book - we will see authors and publishers using that medium to effect visual and spatial designs that will change the way people experience reading, just as print changed that experience. And that will change the way we imagine.