A Note on the Header Image

The header image for the site, “A Bookmark Would Be Better!” is a Works Projects Administration poster created by Arlington Gregg sometime between 1936 and 1940. This poster, among others, is housed at the Library of Congress. The stylized person in this image is ironing down a dogeared corner of a book on which he is standing, though the book itself is not fully visible. Presumably, this poster was made for libraries. This image highlights how individualized reading and its significance can be while the caption suggests that leaving traces of an individual’s reading, such as a crease, is not always preferable, especially when a single copy of a text might be shared among many people. Nevertheless—and without question—readers leave physical reminders of what they have found meaningful, and this makes reading a multimodal experience that layers readerly and writerly conversations. The original writer created the text, conveying a message to a reader about ideas or sources of provocation; a reader then converses with the writer whom s/he is reading, noting passages that invoke meaning; and, a reader of a reader reproduces this process, though s/he might find alternate passages and annotations of the writer or the previous reader resonant. This is what historians do. They attempt to reconstruct meaning of texts given the traces that past people have left behind. This process is accretive and perhaps akin to geologic phenomena.

Header Image:  Arlington Gregg.   A Book Mark Would Be Better!  January 1, 1936.  The Library of Congress: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/6629878315/in/faves-16954284@N02/.