Kick, Tempo, Match, Tip, Du, Sie, Er, Wir, Alle, Eh?, Uh?, Ruck, Zuck, Bim, Bam, Bumm?
‘Summaries of summaries, summaries of summaries of summaries. [...] And then, in the middle of it all, suddenly there is nothing left.’ Due to the media overload and overstimulation, there is a lack of time and attention to really read books. Many people’s attention span is no longer even enough to read an entire book. The classic dramas are more and more forgotten in this way. In order to spread the content nonetheless, it is condensed and shortened. What is unimportant for the plot is sifted out and left out. The reader does not remember this anyway. ‘Books are shortened, abstract, overview, summary, the best in pictures. Everything boils down to the moment of surprise, the bang ... Classics are cut down to quarter-hour radio plays, then shortened again to fill a column of two minutes to read in a book, and finally end up as a table of contents of ten or twelve lines in a lexicon ...’ What happens when content is ultimately shortened so much that the textual level gives way to a simple symbol? The material for the book was taken from the dramas of the Gutenberg project (gutenberg.org). The quotations in the text above are from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury. The book made the Shortlist (16 of 148 books submitted) at the ‘Prize for Young Book Design’ (Förderpreis für junge Buchgestaltung) of the Book Art Foundation (Stiftung Buchkunst) 2015 in Frankfurt.