The Space Between

Curiosity Killed the Tradition

Just like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, readers are curious. Given the opportunity to peer into or partake in a world that was previously unknown or poorly understood, like the publishing world, they will take that opportunity. It is similar to the idea put forth by feminist author Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. She asserts that in the relationship between women and men, men often play the role of masters and women the role of slaves, and in that slave/master dynamic, “Mystery belongs to the slave” (259). She argues that rather than admit the weakness of not understanding women, men invented the myth of the feminine mystique to place the blame on natural phenomena instead of human fallibility.

In complex relationships like the ones between authors and readers, it is hard to draw a line between masters and slaves. Certainly there is give and take on both sides. One is tempted to say that readers are slaves to the author’s will as it is expressed in print, but authors also cater on some levels to their readers—else their profits drop and they cease to be authors. As such, both sides have some wonder and mystery about them; their processes are mysterious and hard to crack. Authors and publishers obsess over what readers want, trying through audience polls and market research to predefine the next breakout genre. The average reader, though, has a harder time learning the ins and outs of writing a book. All the reader typically sees is the inside of a bookstore; the process of writing and making books remains mysterious, and a reader’s experience with that world is almost always mediated by someone else: booksellers or distributors or printers or editors. The line of communication between authors and readers are crowded with middlemen.

But even the most basic of mediation, like alphabetical order, can be circumvented by a hypertextual document, like a printed encyclopedia. In 1974, the Encyclopaedia Britannica published its fifteenth edition, which included a volume known as the Propaedia. This volume fought the notion of an encyclopedia as a depository for short, alphabetized articles by providing readers with an alternative order for the articles. The Propaedia was a “vast outline” that reorganized all the knowledge contained in the Macropaedia, the more traditional set of volumes (Bolter Writing Space 93). Instead of using the encyclopedia as a reference volume, the Propaedia encourages readers to follow a thread of knowledge that wound through the main volumes, constructing cogent, informative essays out of particular paragraphs and entries. Bolter writes that the Propaedia challeneged the assertion that alphabetical order is the “canonical” arrangement of Britannica (Writing Space 94). Other equally useful orders coexist with the authorial vision, reminiscent of Nelson’s idea of parallel document structure.

Unfortunately, the Propaedia was dropped from subsequent editions. Readers found it hard to use, and more often than not it stood unused next to the well-worn Macropaedia volumes. Still, it stands as an example of a hypertext in print form and as proof that alternate reading orders and even “incomplete” readings of a major text can still be viable and useful. It also demonstrates that, given the tools to change the texts and the will to use them, readers will seize the opportunity to author part of the reading experience, as Web users do today with the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.