De Certeau, to whom Jacob dedicates The Sovereign Map, specifically defends the media consumption habits of the common man. We are not “herded” into our tastes, with no power to push back, by powerful media conglomerates (De Certeau, p. 166). Nor are we confined to the one, “correct” interpretation sanctioned by the literary elite (ibid, p. 171-172).
De Certeau concludes his “Reading as Poaching” chapter by examining the practice of speed reading. He offers this technique as a potent example of the everyman reasserting his agency. “Through the rarefication of the eye’s stopping points” he writes, “[and] emancipated from places, the reading body is freer in its movements” (de Certeau, p. 176). The 20th century Jesuit philosophe compares this act to that ubiquitous little resistance: running a just-turned-red light. De Certeau shows us how, by paying more attention to what our bodies are doing as we read, we might recover some autonomy in an increasingly authoritarian media-consumption landscape.
By detailing the journey that 43 has sent me on— intellectual as well as spatial—I’ve already answered de Certeau’s call in an abstracted way. I’ve gazed at where this book has prodded my body and mind, especially through the peculiarly socialized spaces of the special collections reading room and the university campus at large. I’ve recounted some of the maps that assisted me in moving through these spaces and the anxieties that they alleviated and aggravated. All of this is predicated, naturally, by the trappings of the graduate level course for which I write these posts. Now, finally, let’s get back to the book itself. Because while, in the first post, I detailed my physical, tactile experience with 43, I still need to give the same treatment to my gaze.
Initially, I had trouble reading even one line of Price’s excerpted text. They all seemed so randomly strewn across the page, and my eye bounced from excerpt to excerpt, overwhelmed by the apparent lack of meaningful organization. But soon, I realized that they were all anchored by their own legends. My gaze suddenly became more structured. I still didn’t know why the excerpts were where they were, but I began to trust that this was all part of some organic whole; I don’t have to know why the continents and islands look the way they do, but when I see a map of the world, supported by all of the place names and legends, I trust that it is representing something real. This is what legends do, according to Christian Jacob: imbue maps with scrutable meaning by connecting images to verbalized concepts.
Gleaning meaning from this book becomes a game of reading a snippet of poetry or prose, working your gaze to the edge to find the counting symbol and source, consulting the legend card to ascertain what tricks Price used to connect this excerpt to her holy number, and flipping through the annotated bibliography. 43’s legends, then, function by structuring the reader’s gaze. They call to outside information, which prompts the decidedly non-bookish act of grabbing and consulting those physically separate supplements.
These further remediations of map functionalities answer de Certeau’s call as well. The heavy-handed manipulations of gaze and gesture might seem “authoritarian.” But, by incorporating them into this primarily bookish sculpture, 43 uses these limiting structures to bring our unconscious book-gaze into perspective. From there, we can reclaim our agency in reading and a greater appreciation for books’ material functionalities.
The game of cross-references and imagination also feels a lot like casually flipping through an Atlas and wondering what it’d be like to live in the Sahara, or Greenland, or a tiny little Island in the South Pacific. Remember when you were a kid, how exciting it was to close your eyes, point to a random spot in an Atlas, and say, “That’s where I’m going to live!”? Did you ever slide your finger a little, after you’d open your eyes, to get yourself a better future home? This sort of map-play echoes Price’s process in finding her excerpts. I imagine her flipping through an inspiring artists’ book in a special collections reading room. She finds a quote that she loves and tries counting to it in derivatives of 43. When she can’t, she resorts to her own little act of resistance, that “Cheating” option, which she has allowed herself and even printed on the legend card.
In all of these ways, 43 functions as an abstract atlas of Robin Price’s mastery of her craft. Just as atlases provide a simultaneously birds-eye and localized view of the world as we flip through their pages, 43 can be appreciated for its fine printing and binding techniques or as a 20-foot-long, awe-inspiring vista (if you have a long enough table). With 43 and its supplements, our gazes and bodies are manipulated in service of a Mercator Projection of Robin Price’s life’s work: a life’s work brimming with an appreciation and a deep understanding of the materials, functions, and readers of books in all their forms
The pursuit of knowledge or even just entertainment—whether through books, maps, art, or travel—is a noble thing. Reading, researching, is a sport that requires an array of tools that aid in navigating the field—spatially and psychologically. 43, as I see it now, is a playful materialization of this process. Through its remediation the many forms and affective features of maps, 43 turns its readers into performers. As they figure out how to open the book, how to read its pages and uncover its secrets, they act out Price’s lifelong devotion to the craft. They mime the moments of inspiration, perform the acts of research and reference that went into its long production. This artists’ book, which to be properly read must be physically manipulated in unfamiliar ways, pays homage to the history of the genre, to the power of the TEXT types that it remediates, and illuminates the joys, confines, and freedoms of the act of reading.
To pay close attention to the objects that aid us in our pursuit of knowledge—to their materials and methods of production, to the ways that we use them, and the ways that they use us—can both free us from their confines and illuminate their functions. Next time you open a book, pay attention to where your eyes go first and how they move about the page, what you’re doing with your fingers, and see where this takes you.
Works Consulted
De Certeau, Michel. “Reading as Poaching.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by
Steven Randall, University of California Press, 1984, pp. 165-176.
Jacob, Christian. The Sovereign Map. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Price, Robin. 43, According to Robin Price, with Annotated Bibliography. 2007. Robin Price. Rare
Books Vault, Special Collections Library, University of Georgia.