The Simple Reader Colin Sackett

The confluence of the River Axe and the River Yarty in Devon.

The Simple Reader Colin Sackett

Illustrated above is the layout of a colour postcard, viewed on-screen as a pdf, and reproduced here in black and white. The card shows a numbered grid of details of seventy-two books, published from 1984 to the end of 2005. Although the sequence is chronological, left to right and top to bottom, the overall impression is as one might have of this group of work in entirety, albeit haphazardly. The books vary considerably in extent and format, and in means of production—handwriting, typewriting, letterpress, offset, photocopy, ink-jet—but the singular concern of the books is an examination of reading and writing, its meaning and variation within the structure offered by an extent of pages.

As well as the slighter books, works demonstrating a single idea, there are several extended collections —publications that gather and redeploy the parts of other publications to make something larger.

The most wide-ranging of these is Englshpublshing, Writing and readings 1991–2002; a reformatting and unifying of material in a standardised paperback. Densely typeset and ‘constructed’ entirely on-screen; edited and assembled as the sum of its parts.

Common to all current practice of research, writing and composition, publishing and broadcasting, are the framed workings—browser, word processor, formatter. The process of construction is made within the illuminated bounds of the device itself, and the reader in a document viewer or browser reads likewise.

The difference of sensation between the handling of the pages of a book and the articulation of active frames is not replicated in the focus of the eye and the brain, which are identical. The directional movement from page to page, or from frame to frame, is contrasted by just the physical and actual—the hand and the means.

The following sequences of frames and captions contrast several works, from process to publication in printed and online formats.

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1.1 Image viewed in Photoshop, showing an open spread from Black Bob (London, 1989). This photograph, taken in 1998 has been reproduced on several occasions, and the willing reader in this case is the author’s daughter Bethan, then aged four.

1.41 ‘A Consideration of Black Bob’. Top of website page in browser. http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/writing_readings_02.php

1.2 On-screen PDF, showing the front and reverse of the leafletA Consideration of Black Bob (Compiled for the event ‘All or nothing? A consideration of blank books’ at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 25th June 2005). The repeated image and quotations are laid-out in the form of a strip sequence with numbered captions.

1.42 scrolled to middle.

1.3 ‘A Consideration of Black Bob’. The upper part of the proposed layout of the web page using Indesign, showing text/image frames and rules. The content is as in 1.2 above but image and text are in a vertical arrangement.

1.43 scrolled to bottom.

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2.1 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop, showing the handwritten file cards used for the collating of texts for the alphabetical collection ‘rereader’.

2.41 ‘rereader’. Top of web page in browser: “a… alignment”.http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/writing_readings_01.php

2.2 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop, showing a detail of the centre-spread of rereader: selected reading and writing ninetyone to ninetysix (Axminster, 1996).

2.42 scrolled to middle: “lines… nestlesson”.

2.3 ‘rereader: selected reading and writing ninetyone to ninety-six’, reversed version. Double page layout in Quark, showing guides and text boxes; in Englshpublshing (Clonmel, Limoges, Exeter, 2004), pp.40–41[44].

2.43 scrolled to bottom: “typingby… z path z”.

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3.1 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop, showing a detail of ‘essayes’, the large public-reading enamel sign version of this text comprising 158 lines of 1 to 158 characters.

3.3 ‘essayes’. The upper part of the proposed layout of the web page using Indesign, showing text/image frames and rules. The image shows a section of the enamel sign (left, 3.1).

3.21 Double page layout in Quark, showing guides and text boxes of the small private-reading essayes (Axminster, 2001), pp.10–11.

3.41 ‘essayes’. Top of web page in browser. http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/writing_readings_05.php

3.22 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop, showing a detail of the cover of essayes.

3.42 scrolling.

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3.43 scrolling. 3.46 scrolling.

3.44 scrolling. 3.47 scrolling.

3.45 scrolling. 3.48 scrolled to bottom.

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4.31 ‘Rota’. Top of web page in browser. The image appears twelve times, the full transcript twice. http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/writing_readings_04.php

4.32 ‘Rota’. Bottom of web page in browser. http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/writing_readings_04.php

4.2 ‘Rota’, 2’12”+2’12”. On-screen pdf showing double-page spread; in Englshpublshing (Clonmel, Limoges, Exeter, 2004), pp.28–29.

4.1 ‘Rota’. Analogue diagram, viewed in Photoshop, of a recording and transcript of a radio discussion, illustrated with two short vocal examples, from the fourteenth century musical fragment Rota versatilis.

5.2 ‘by playback tape’. On-screen pdf showing detail of text; in Englshpublshing (Clonmel, Limoges, Exeter, 2004), p.46.

5.1 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop, showing a negative of the cover image of by playback tape (Axminster, 1997)

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6.1 ‘A sketch of Leith Hill Surrey’, c.1844, from Brayley’s History of Surrey, viewed in Photoshop.

6.3 ‘Ringinging’. Page layout in Quark, showing guides and text boxes; in Englshpublshing (Clonmel, Limoges, Exeter, 2004), p.66. “The telephone number of the tower built at the top of Leith Hill in Surrey is 01306 712434…”

6.5 Digital photograph viewed in Photoshop.

6.41 ‘Leith Hill, Dorking, Surrey RH5, United Kingdom’ Google Maps map/satellite hybrid view in browser. http://maps.google.co.uk/

6.2 ‘Leith Hill’. Wikipedia page in browser. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leith_Hill.

6.42 Maximum zoom, looking down on the tower, the viewing platform of which is—at 1000-feet—the highest point in south-eastern England.

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