This chapter revolves around a retrospective tour of recent book arts expositions where the material vehicle – the physical platform – of codex objects gets appropriated, reworked, simulated, or digitally remade in various combinations of analytic and figurative rigor in the bibliobjet: first the “Odd Volumes” curation at Yale in 2014–15, then “The Internal Machine” show at the Center for Books Arts in Manhattan in 2017. Exhibits range from a pre-Kindle irony of electronically activated video “reading,” through books as sounding boards for acoustic synthesizers, to a sonnet anthology accessed only by an embedded microphone. In such exaggerated “platformatics,” repeatedly the interplay between sound and text is displaced from the normal subvocal enunciation of written script – as is more recently the case in a “volume” of spectrogram rather than script lines, transferred from digital audio, that goes out of its way to correlate the prehistory of binary computing with its vestigial codex form.

Oriented by theoretical work form C. S. Peirce and Walter Ong through conceptual poet John Cayley, from John Stuart Mill on poetry as ‘overheard’ to Steven Connor on the ‘white voice’ of silent enunciation – as well as, in contrast, by book sculpture in the conceptual mode of the bibliobjet, closed to all reading – this essay lends intensive granular audition to passages from Dickens through Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison. Its effort is to register, and further to generalise, the phonemic dimension of what, loosely but famously called ‘secret prose’ in Dickens by Graham Greene, I will be identifying (after Ong’s ‘secondary orality’) as the ‘secondary vocality’ of the reading event in cases of uniquely impacted audiovisual overlap identified as ‘graphonic’ wording.