CALL FOR CONTENT
2025

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“For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its reader’s space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy—nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship...Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.”

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction / 1936) ——Walter Benjamin


About: The Center For Book Technology (CFBT) is interested in how texts, images, and content are displayed and presented to readers. While exploring relationships of: author and designer, author and content, author and reader, designer and author, designer and content, designer and reader. The CFBT is soliciting content for a study into how and what the reader reads into a text. This project is interested in design's relationship to its content, and content's relationship to design. A project conceived while maintaining a Visiting Research Professor position at the University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign.