William Drenttel, "Introduction: The Book Arts at Millenium." Pages from the Press: The Stinehour Press. Lunenberg, VT: The Stinehour Press, 1997. pp.6.


We are almost at the millennium. This line in time, which we can now see on the horizon, is at a distance numbered in days rather than decades. And yet despite its proximity, our sense of place in time is clouded by an "almost there" quality: our days are consequently filled with the unclarity and uneasiness of any period of transition.

Today, fine printing--and its counterpart, the finely made book--is an enterprise overshadowed, on one side, by the expansive appetite of the commercial publishing industry, and on the other, by our cultural preoccupation with new technologies. In these "almost there" days, how do we define what makes a beautiful book? Are we merely nostalgic for the quality production of earlier times? Is the well-made book even noticeable among the thousands stocked by our mega-bookstores? And if it is this--the object quality--of these books that we wish to preserve, then how do we address the increasingly intangible qualities of "books" that reside in the electronic environment?

A beautiful book is anything but intangible. It may be, as William Gass has suggested, "a container of consciousness," but it is also a projector of meaning, making words strong and images powerful. Its enduring value rests in its texture and its precision--bespeaking values of materiality and craft--at a time when so much seems to have an "almost there" texture and an "almost there" precision. Robert Adams, the former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, recently observed that "competence and accuracy" are attributes often lost in electronic publishing. These, of course, are precisely the qualities required to make beautiful books.

If we take a long view of the history of the book, we might imagine that while new modes of printing and improved channels of distribution will change considerably over the next few years, these changes will neither negate the role of books themselves nor affect their basic, fundamental form. The book as an object is still the result of human genius: this is an invention that will continue to inspire and challenge us--and the technologies that serve us--well into the next millenium.

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