The rhetoric of the page (Broché)

This wide-ranging and entertaining book explores blank space from incunabula to Google books. Each chapter focuses on one typographical form of what is not there on the page : physical gaps (Chapter 1), marks of incompletion such as & (Chapter 2), and the asterisk as a stand-in for things that cannot be said (Chapter 3). Blanks are a paradox - simultaneously nothing and something, gesturing to what was once there or might be there.
They are also a creative opportunity for readers as well as writers : readers respond to what is not there and writers come to anticipate that response. Thus, blank space develops literary and ludic applications. By looking at the early modem page as a visual as well as a verbal unit, the book shows how the relationship between textual layout and textual content is as productive for writers as it is for readers.
Mise-en page influences readers in the same way that rhetoric influences readers. It is thus possible to speak of'the rhetoric of the page'.