Review: Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, by Whitney Trettien

As we move further into a digitally assisted and digitally enabled (and sometimes, it seems, digitally dominated) future, we inevitably are compelled to return to the past, seeking older ancestors to make sense of new media. Whitney Trettien’s Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork carves another path into our current media landscape, this time beginning in the seventeenth century. Trettien, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, tends to create work that bridges the critical and the creative, including digitally born publications and the well-regarded digital literature piece Gaffe/Stutter (2003). With Cut/Copy/Paste her project is twofold: not only to add a link in the evolutionary history of the book, but also to suggest gentle revisions to our concept of book historical evolution as a whole. Focusing on bookwork at the margins, largely forgotten and ignored, Trettien gracefully draws out an argument for complicating our idea of book history with...