There’s More Than One Way to Skin a Book: Experimental Interfaces for Reading Illustrated Books

Abstract

Different readers approach a text in different ways and for different reasons, so designers of interfaces for electronic reading and scholarship must strive for flexibility. Eric Gill’s illustrations for the Golden Cockerel Press invite exploration into the social function of erotic texts, public versus private reading, fine book-making practices, and more, and we hope to provide the tools to allow scholars to engage with these texts in their multiplicity. There may also be readers who just want to read the texts and look at the pictures, and we need to make sure we do not ignore their needs. Most importantly, there are, or will be, readers who want to interact with the texts in ways that we cannot imagine, and we need to do all we can to make this experimentation possible.