Books by Design

Maybe digital competition will lead ink-on-paper books to become art objects, both beautiful and meaningful. Even the most seemingly mundane details need to be decided, and it's those tiny particulars--the placement of light switches in a house, the placement of running heads in a book--that make a design successful. The translation of the text into e-book form--the future that is quickly impinging on the present--is an aspect of Aspects. Hendel finds the answer in, naturally, a book, one that collects the writings of Marshall McLuhan, who observed: "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace.