The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media

A tension runs through Nathan Shockey’s well-researched book of essays on the topic of the medial transition to print culture; it is this: does the value of print material lie within its semantic content or within its market value? Although at several points the book refers to this as a dialectic as though each side of the tension were in equal balance, ultimately Shockey is more concerned with the latter notion of books and print as media objects in the world rather than as conveyors of meaning. This is evidenced by the preponderance of instances in which he highlights that reading does not matter and where writing (in the sense of the noun not the gerund) does or simply is matter.