Books always come with blank spaces, which are a vital feature of their visual and typographical design, including the margins and spaces between words and sentences. Sometimes they are intended to be filled in, like the postcard, and sometimes they require the active dismantling of a pre-existing book to create more space for new plates, like the extra-illustrated book. Whether the additions that fill books are ink scribblings, sketched portrait inserts, pasted in engravings, or hand-applied watercoloring, they turn the book into an object altered by its owner’s individual needs, fancies and preoccupations.
One of the structural elements of an early printed book is the gathering, the folded sheet of paper that makes up the text block, wherein several of them are bundled and sewn together. Books are created and marked by other acts of gathering. These include gathering pieces of information, such as personal recipe books, or excerpts from the works of classical authors organized by different subject headings, such as a commonplace book. All kinds of books offer a means for channeling the impulse to bring previously disparate things together to form a whole, both through their construction and their textual content.
A basic maneuver necessary to reading a codex is the turning of its pages, which demands the reader to touch the book directly and repeatedly. As they do so they progressively consume the book’s meaning and advance through its body in time. Turning is also performed when operating tools stored inside books to obtain information, like the volvelles found inside Hevelius’s Selenographia and other books of astronomy. The maneuver fundamentally entails change and metamorphosis, whether on a narrative level, as with children’s movable books, or an organic one, as with an artist’s book made up of processed cheese slices. The greatest turn is a cognitive one, when the reader’s mind is transformed as much from touching and turning the pages of a book as from reading the text printed on them.
Any act of engaging with a book may be construed as an act of “using” it. Indeed, the term “used books” refers to books that were previously owned. Yet there are books that were produced expressly to allow the owner to carry out specific activities, from cooking and identifying plants and herbs to “telling” on what day a religious holiday will fall. There are also books whose marks of use, such as the insertion of plant specimens on the corresponding pages of an herbal (a book devoted to identifying plants and their curative properties), provide evidence that the owner used them in the way they were intended. As objects of use, such books were embedded in the quotidian lives of their owners, and carry their traces.