Warren Lehrer

Clifton Meador is a writer, photographer, typographer, and printer—a book artist whose career and evolution has a long, slow (fascinating) march of its own. This 1996 reflection on the legacy of slavery and the struggle for civil rights in America begins with a Talmudic structure (which places a passage from the Bible between opposing commentaries). Here it is used to pair slave narratives with slave owners’ rationalizations for slavery. The next section takes up most of this slow, rhythmic book. It is paced, spread by spread, by full-bleed photographs that Meador took every mile along the route of the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, led by Martin Luther King Jr. After a while, title pages from slave narratives superimpose the roadscapes, floating like ghostly witnesses across the monochromatic Alabama sky. As the book travels toward Montgomery, racist newspaper articles hover in the air, KKK pictograms are knocked out of documentary photographs of the ‘65 march, and the book’s color scheme evolves from black-and-white with a yellow cast, to a greenish duotone, to black and blood/rust red as the arc of time bends toward progress, but only through struggle and a confrontation of competing narratives. Meador grew up in the South, in the 1950s and ’60s, and his own memory and conscience shepherds us through this exquisite, haunting book. Melding the traditions of auteur and Renaissance person, Meador did the photography, designed the typefaces, wrote, compiled, offset-printed, and published this work.

In his movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen—while standing on line to see a movie—gets into an argument with an overly pontificating college professor about the meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. To settle the argument, Allen gets the real McLuhan (who happens to be in the lobby) to tell the guy that he knows nothing of his work. This scene was/is so funny partially because McLuhan’s writings were once seen as incomprehensible. In real life, the graphic designer Quentin Fiore initiated the idea to make a book of McLuhan’s writings that would look and feel more like what he was saying. The resulting Medium is the Massage superimposed text and image in ways that parallel the transition of text-based media to “bard” media (radio) and image-based movies and television. The book visualized notions of hot versus cool mediums, how technologies from the wheel to the telephone are extensions of our bodies and create a sense of comfort as well as anxiety. Some pages were printed backward and were meant to be read in a mirror; others were left completely blank. This “experimental” paperback published by Bantam became a best seller and helped popularize McLuhan’s ideas.

This 1991 book, published by the University of Nebraska Press, is a breakthrough work within the universe of academic publications. In The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell uses a switchboard as a metaphor for connecting different fields of knowledge. Her interdisciplinary approach in this book (written before the I-word was all the rage in academia) resulted in a philosophical, technological, literary, psychoanalytic, and political history of the telephone. It raises questions about self and other, the impact and use of the telephone in shaping the modern era, and its connection to deeper human yearnings and disorders. Ronell’s daring approach can also be seen in her open-minded collaboration with designer Richard Eckersley (designer of Derrida’s polyvalent Glas). Together, Ronell and Eckersley created a book whose agitated pages, like “the electronic impulses” described within are “flooded with signals.” Interline, interword, and interletter spacing are continuously changing. Words swell and ebb, go in and out of focus, and create the kind of interferences that people with schizophrenia experience when unwanted voices interfere with their own, much like trying to have a conversation on lines whose signals are crossed with others. In the words of Rick Poynor, “The Telephone Book’s lasting impact derives from the playful intelligence and systematic critical purpose with which it puts ‘under erasure’ every rule in the book.”