Reading William Gass

New iPad E-Book Featuring Gass & Michael Eastman

I am happy to announce that a personal project I’ve been working on for a few months is ready to meet the public: Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time (iTunes link), an iPad-only book pairing a previously unpublished 15,000-word essay by William H. Gass with a series of abstract photographs by Michael Eastman. I am the book’s editor and publisher, and I’m honored to have had the enthusiastic participation of both Gass and Eastman. The price we are charging for this interactive book: $6.99. 

Bill and Michael have long hatched creative plans together, and back in 2009, one of them was this book. But in print form. I helped edit a version that was made privately, for a small group of people. Earlier this year, I proposed to both of them that we make an e-book version for the larger reading public (especially this site’s readers), using Apple’s new iBooks Author software. They were game. (Yes, Gass authored the famous “In Defense of the Book” essay in Harper’s, but, well, he was still game.)

I realize I’m limiting the audience for this project by using iBooks Author, making a book that’s readable only by owners of the iPad 2 or later. But it’s the route I wanted to go in this publishing experiment, particularly since it afforded full-screen images and multi-photo galleries.

I’ll be posting next month a bit about my experience using iBooks Author Itself — there were both ups and downs. For now, though, here’s the book’s official description, as well as some screenshots taken on my own iPad:

This iPad-only volume pairs a penetrating 15,000-word essay on modern art and photography by William H. Gass — a writer Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt has called “our greatest living writer of prose in America” — with the “Abstractions” series of photographs by internationally collected photographer Michael Eastman. Gass and Eastman are friends, neighbors, and collaborators, having partnered on, among other projects, Auguste Rodin (Archipelago Books, 2004). The writing in Abstractions Arrive is quintessential Gass — erudite, playful, probing, fun. Eastman’s images, which iPad users can tap to isolate and make larger, are some of the most striking in his decades-long oeuvre.

The book, as it appears in the Apple Store

A table of contents-like view for Chapter 3

A representative spread

The Notes page

Portrait mode

Made it all the way here? Yes, I will happily provide you with the link to buy, preview, or download a sample of the book. Questions? Comments? Write me at stephen @ stephen schenkenberg dot com. Thanks for your interest!