The power of the written word is well-known, but the page upon which those words appear can be just as compelling, according to GSLIS Assistant Professor Bonnie Mak.

In her new book, How the Page Matters (University of Toronto Press), Mak explains that how text is presented in a book can tell a bigger story than what is inscribed on each page. The page itself can relate much about a book's relevance to different communities through time. "The page transmits ideas, of course, but more significantly influences meaning by its distinctive embodiment of those ideas,” Mak says. “The page is material witness to the ongoing conversation between designers and readers. As writers, artists, translators, scribes, printers, booksellers, librarians, and readers configure and revise the page, they each leave clues about how the page matters to them and how they wish it to matter to others. The architecture of the page is therefore a complex and responsive entanglement of platform, text, image, graphic markings, and blank space. The page hosts a changing interplay of form and content, of message and medium, of the conceptual and physical, and this shifting tension is central to the ability of the page to remain persuasive through time.”

Specifically, Mak, who has a joint appointment in the Program in Medieval Studies, examines the fifteenth-century Latin text, the Controversia de nobilitate by Buonaccorso da Montemagno in three forms—as a manuscript, as a printed work, and as a digital edition. Transcending boundaries of history and language, How the Page Matters connects technology with tradition using innovative approaches from architectural, medieval, and new media studies. While historicizing contemporary digital culture and asking how on-screen combinations of image and text affect the way we understand information being conveyed, Mak’s analysis proves both the timeliness of studying the interface design and the persistence of the page as a mechanism for communication.

“The strategies of the page … are not tied exclusively to one particular platform or mode of production,” Mak writes in her book. “For instance, parchment is still used by printers today; readers decorate the margins of printed pages with notes and drawings; we increasingly write by hand on digital tablets, pads, and handheld devices; and ‘born-digital’ documents are printed from our computers onto paper. Even as we innovate now in the twenty-first century, we are drawing upon rich traditions in the design of our scripts and typefaces, the layout of text, image, space, and the paratextual devices of title-pages, headings, tables, and indices.”

Mak continues to share her research with the GSLIS community, especially in her popular class, The History of the Book, in which students look at marginal commentary, indices, bookmarks, and page numbers from the Middle Ages as the precursors to the footnote, hyperlink, and other apparently modern innovations.

“I want my students (and my readers) to consider the relationship between materiality and meaning—not only in manuscripts and printed books, but also in the scrolls of antiquity, bathroom graffiti, and the iPad,” says Mak.