The Grid Book wants to show us that the history of building, composing, computing, mapping, lending, painting, printing, trading, and writing—the history of modern existence, in other words—is really a history of the grid.

This is ambitious. By a bit too much, as it turns out. The author, Hannah Higgins, isn’t quite able to map out all the facts she needs, nor always plot a convincing narrative course between the ones she does locate. The result is a breezy survey, accessibly written and sometimes provocative, but lacking the rigor and regularity of the grid itself.

Still, The Grid Book deserves attention for its glimpses into the secret life of this ever-present meme, which is central to the image of modern networked society. Going “off the grid,” after all, is an act of cultural as well as technological subversion. And aren’t all grids made to be broken?

Higgins defines the grid as “an organized set of modules that allow for manipulation and creativity.” Her first chapters, which postulate brick walls and tablet writing as proto-grids that have been with us for thousands of years, suggest that this modularity has an instinctual appeal to humans. City plans and map projections formalized the grid as a field of intersecting lines, which gave us the Mercator projection. This gridded worldview is everywhere—and The Grid Book is at its most intriguing uncovering some of the less obvious manifestations. Read more…