Shelf Awareness for Readers for Friday, August 24, 2012  From My
Shelf  The Art of the Book  Earlier this year, I received a
lovely paperback called What Is Reading For?--$19.95, only 40
pages, but what lovely pages. Written and designed by Robert
Bringhurst, it's a 450-copy limited edition printed on Mohawk
Ticonderoga paper, with French flaps. The cover has archaic
Greek text (in Dan Carr's Parmenides) and Han Chinese phrases
front and back (Adobe Kaiti, Microsoft Mincho and Ryoko
Nishizuka's Kazuraki); the text face is Trinité, the titling
face is Rialto. Font geeks will get it; the rest can "merely"
admire a piece of bookmaking art. The text is an essay about the
future of reading; Bringhurst writes about scribal cultures and
the visceral bond between script and reader, the erosion of the
bond when printing comes to the culture and the future of
reading with the advent of digital books. He says it's natural
to feel anxiety as books "molt from one form or instar to
another" because we know, "in our guts or