this is not a signature?
In my Text and Image course as well as in the Research methods class I teach at Goldsmiths, we have been discussing authors, owners, objects, collecting, the museification of the world, signatures, authentication, unravelling and so on.
Today, I received a book in the post - Edward R. Tufte’s Envisioning Information. It is a beautiful, custom-made book (with bits of folded paper and such like)…
A second hand copy cost about two thirds of a new copy. However, I was seduced into paying slightly more for what claimed to be a ‘collector’s’ copy because it had been signed by the author. On the cover of the book I received was a price tag, setting the price at about 10% of what I paid.
Inside the author’s inscription was far from convincing…
Which led me to consider the following:
- why did I think the book was worth more because someone, somewhere in hyperspace ‘claimed’ it was signed by the author? I don’t know what Tufte’s signature looks like but yet I feel the starring of his printed name on the page is an act of bad faith rather than an assertion of authenticity. Which highlights the importance and validity we attach to other forms of signature, the ones Agamben speaks of, practices of authentication which we accept without question despite the fact these are both arbitrary and historically contingent.
- why was I (at least temporarily) so annoyed about having paid ten times as much for a book than the price tag stuck on the cover? It’s not out of print or particularly rare but at the same time, I didn’t spend any time or effort trawling second hand book stores in the U.S. to find it, store it, inventory it, package it up and it still cost less than a new copy. We willingly pay more for labels and packaging which offer up certain myths. While we acknowledge our complicity in buying into the myths we don’t really believe in we resent having such foolishness pointed out to us by others. It is unacceptable to be directly reminded of this and, worse still, that we might have actually paid someone, somewhere for the time and labour that went into perpetuating the myth.
Given the subject-matter of the book, there is a further irony to all of this…
