95 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 40, No. 1, 2020 • doi 10.1215/1089201X-8186104 • © 2020 by Duke University Press T echnologies of printing, widening spheres of literacy, and capitalist economies of publishing, among other global dimensions of modernit, have altered conceptions of the book and, arguably, standardized its visual and material form: binding, paper, size, tpography, and page layout. But still, the aesthetic form of books has been the object of modernist experimentation throughout the twentieth century. Poets, artists, and designers, in association with editors and publishers, sought to rekindle experiences of reading and seeing, text and image, knowledge and afect along specifc philosophical or political visions and in (subversive or nostalgic) responses to particular traditions of bookmaking. Johanna Drucker contends that the artist’s book is “the twentieth-century art- form par excellence,” 1 and George Bornstein, in Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, urges us “to recognize that the literary text consists not only of words (its linguistic code) but also of the semantic features of its material instantiations (its bibliographic code).” 2 Scholarship concerned with modernist aesthetic explorations of the visual and material form of the book, however, has excluded from its modernist framing book cultures that lie outside the geography of the West. Yet this very geography of margins, as Partha Mitter has argued, ofers a vantage point from which a critical decentering of the exclusionary Western foundation of modernism can be mounted. 3 Shedding light on the postcolonial Arabic book, this article contributes to a growing scholarship seeking precisely to “decenter modernism” 4 and expands the latter feld of inquiry by bringing into play the design and visual economy of modern art books. In her recent Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut, Hala Auji centers her argument on how visualit, ofen disregarded, is crucial to the social history of the Arabic press. She rightly notes that the much-privileged textualit of books, and of print culture more broadly, has to a great extent overshadowed the visual and material dimensions of printed books. Through this framework, the book’s tpogra- phy, layout design, binding, and size are examined as crucial markers of “visual literacy” in a moment of transi- tion from scribal to print culture. 5 The same problem can be extended to the study of Arabic publications from the mid-twentieth century onward, when, even more crucially, “vision was nominally ascendant,” 6 and new techniques of image making and reproduction transformed the press and everyday media in the Arab world. Scholars of post- colonial Arabic literature, however, have repeatedly disembodied the texts they study from the visual and material form of the books and journals in which these have been published. Historians of modern art, on the other hand, have paid limited attention, and even then only tangentially, to artists’ books. In these approaches, bookmaking as an aesthetic practice is removed from the economy of publishing and the politics of the reproducible printed arti- fact. 7 But we need to understand how engagements with the book as a modern artistic medium are productive of new conceptions and visual economies of Arabic books. What role does this aesthetic practice play in a capitalist economy of publishing and in an everyday visualit of reading? The Visual Economy of “Precious Books” Publishing, Modern Art, and the Design of Arabic Books Zeina Maasri D E S I G N a n d C A N O N Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/40/1/95/800708/95maasri.pdf by UNIV OF TORONTO LIBRARIES user on 15 May 2020