The bones of the book: schematic structure and meaning made from books.

Books are more than the written texts they present (White 2005; Hayler 2015), they offer readers an array of different semiotic resources from which to make meaning. These include, not only text but imagery, typography, layout, paper, varnishes, cut apertures, and so forth. But how are these resources blended in cognition to make coherent meanings? This practice-based research analyses nine codices which were designed to evoke experiences of moving through, over, or around books, and in addition, experiences of pages 'facing' opposite directions. It addresses the extent to which such experiences can form the basis of metaphorical and metonymical association, and how meanings emerge in relation to the codex as single entity. The research question is: in what ways do written, spatial, visual, tactile and kinaesthetic cues, linked to the metaphors tunnel-book, concertina-book and flag-book, facilitate reasoning about book texts? The argumentation is based on theory from the cognitive linguistic enterprise and assumes that meaning making is an embodied dynamic process, made in situ. The codices designed were treated as data and analysed using a conceptual framework developed by Talmy (2000) and through the diagramming of conceptual integration networks (Fauconnier and Turner 2002; Turner 2014). Additional evidence was sought through the identification of conventional and conceptual metaphors in texts about books. The research concludes that the different semiotic resources in these nine codices were able to facilitate conceptual blending as they were all aligned to a single spatial scene. Furthermore, that a range of different spatial scenes are available which can be used to structure information in a codex offering new possibilities for design and layout that go beyond conventional approaches to book design.