Bibliophiles have long enjoyed fore-edge painting, in which the pages of a book opposite the spine were fanned and painted with images invisible when the book was at rest. It was common to have two images: one visible when the back cover was held and the pages fanned forward, the other when the front was held and the pages fanned backward. The images were sometimes supportive of the contents and sometimes subversive: bawdy paintings on pious books, for instance.

This book has black bars variously deployed on the outer margins of the pages, so that fanned from the back the word “writing” appears, and fanned from the front “machines.” This playfulness enforces the claim made in the book itself, that the “medium is the message,” or at least adjacent to it in ways that may be dissonant (like the bawdy fore-edge) or consonant (like an idyllic scene on a book of rural lyrics). This work is a collaboration of the verbalist Hayles and the visualist Burdick, who employs innovative typefaces, tumescent balloons of graded type sizes, and barcodes on each page, to assert a meaning that is fugal to Hayle’s prose. Sometimes these bulges come at crescendos in the prose, reminiscent of the tootles of the arriving cavalry in an old-time western.

Although McLuhan’s ideas are essential to it, just as are the earlier predictions of Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, this book is no rehash of Understanding media [1]. In her own concluding words, Hayles invites people to think, as we “redefine what it means to write, to read, and to be human” (p. 131). She regrets the overzealous claims made by theorists of the media, but she cannot entirely resist their technobabble in coining words like “endtroduction,” for “postscript.” She doesn’t think we have seen the end of the book, as some recent prophets are inclined to do (p. 33). And she is not entirely daunted by the decision of two eminent practitioners (Michael Joyce and Robert Coover) to give up writing in hypertext.

Hayles correctly notes that there is a disjunction of expertise in this area. People from literature departments often excel “in the close reading of difficult texts but often [do] not have high technical competence or extensive visual skills.” People in design and media arts are “usually sophisticated and had technical chops but often quailed at reading hundreds of pages of dense theoretical texts” (p. 101). Hayles teaches in both departments at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Hayles feels obliged to create a fictional persona, Kaye, and to sketch the autobiography of this persona while not revealing very much about either herself or the persona. Kaye had a scientific education at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Caltech, but is then struck by the epiphany that literature and the study of it is more to her taste. (The fictional Kaye is led in this direction by professors who are actual named professors). Soon, she finds herself te aching at what appears to be Harvard.

Eventually, Kaye is drawn to the study of “artists’ books,” objects that may resemble, or even be, books, but which are to be viewed as at least partly (or maybe entirely) as objects. Such books led her to spend time with collections of them at the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty, and they forced her to think in new ways about “normal” books. (Kaye has a taste for buying artists’ books and frets about the financial consequences of spending so much money at the Printed Matter Bookstore in New York, a specialist source of such things). If Kaye had vanished into cyberspace, I doubt she would have been much missed in the book. Hayles herself seems far more engaging, though perhaps not as smart or colorfully credentialed as her brilliant twin Kaye.

Eventually, Hayles turns to works involving multimedia: Lexia to perplexia [2], A humument [3], and Danielewski’s “post print cult novel” House of leaves [4]. The status of the last of these is evidenced by the response to a five-minute long reading from it at a rock concert in Dallas; when the piece had been performed, eleven thousand young fans “rose to their feet and gave [the reader] a standing ovation” (p. 125). That got Kaye’s attention; this book should get ours. In it, there is a clear and articulate vision of what “post print” might be like.