Learning by the book

What do photographers and poets have in common? Despite the contemporary ease of digital publishing, they both yearn for the authority of a physical book. Funnily enough, this is also the case with academics, but here we are thinking about non-traditional outputs, so I won’t go there. Photo albums are out, photobooks are in, and Print-on-Demand (PoD) services are booming as individuals and small publishers revel in the ability to print one or fifty copies without breaking the bank. I read somewhere that the most famous photobook in art history, Ed Ruscha’s Twenty six Gasoline Stations, spent a lot of time boxed under his bed before they started selling, because in the old days of offset printing you had to get things printed in bulk to make them affordable, and as every poetry publisher knows, 500 copies of anything isn’t really “affordable” unless you sell them all. Boxes of books languishing under beds is another thing they have in common.