The Book as Idea

Artist and theorist Johanna Drucker, one of the field’s foremost scholars and practitioners, has called the artist’s book the “twentieth-century art form par excellence”¹—both because it threads its way through every artistic movement from Futurism onward, and because the principles with which it is bound up (collaboration, institutional critique, alternative economies, and the dematerialization of the work of art) reflect a suite of concerns that mark the period’s artistic production. These works interrogate the codex, calling into question how books communicate and how we read, using every aspect of their structure, form, and content to make meaning. Engaging with the book as an idea brings its material form back into the conversation in ways that can be productive, exciting, perplexing, and at times problematic. When the aesthetic of bookness itself is fetishized to such a degree that it can be bought and sold (as cell phone cases, home safes, and printed sportswear, for example), we’ve come full circle to the commodification of the book object.

Defining the Artist’s Book

The term “artist’s book” is a contentious one, and each theorist and maker feels the need to weigh in on its definition. I hew to Drucker’s formulation of the artist’s book as a “zone of activity”² by artists and writers who create books as original works of art that “integrate the formal means of [their] realization and production with [their] thematic or aesthetic issues.”³ By this definition, the artist’s book is not a catalog, a book containing images of artworks, or a fine press production of a novel with illustrations by a celebrated artist, exquisitely tooled leather covers, and marbled endpapers. It can be one of those things, but only if those choices are interrogated and integrated into the way the work makes meaning. For instance, the book’s producer may behave like an editor, archivist, or anthologist, collecting material and assembling it in book form, as artist Erik Kessels does in his series In Almost Every Picture, volumes of vernacular photographs arranged thematically—from photos of a family’s black dog to images in which the anonymous photographer’s finger has accidentally entered the frame.⁴ As long as the impulse is to create an original work of art through the accumulation and juxtaposition of these materials, the work is within the zone.

The artist’s book might have text, but it can be, like the works scholar Craig Dworkin adeptly discusses in his book No Medium, entirely blank.⁵ It can also be purposefully illegible, its pages torn or carefully cut to make volumetric forms, as in Doug Beube’s work. It can be a sculptural object, like Alisa Banks’s altered book series Edges in which the artist treats the hardbound codex’s fore-edge as hairline, gathering groups of pages with synthetic hair in (Cornrow), (Lace Braid), (Thread Wrap), and (Twist)—styles that celebrate the tradition of African braiding while commenting on the intolerance that shuts “others” out and pushes them to the margins.⁶ It can be bound or unbound, like Yoko Ono’s and Alison Knowles’s event scores—typed on postcards—or Ray Johnson’s Book About Death (1963–1965), whose thirteen loose pages the author mailed piecemeal to friends and offered for sale in the Village Voice classified section. It can be collaborative—like the books of the Russian Futurists, created with wallpaper and rubber stamps—a portable, ephemeral means of self-publishing. It can be editioned or unique, produced by hand or machine, as compact as a walnut or as large as a house. It can include sound art, video, tactile objects, and artifacts, like Doc/Undoc: Ars Shamánica Perfomormática (2014), a collaboration between Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Gustavo Vazquez, Zachary James Watkins, Jennifer A. González, and Felicia Rice that combines an altar and a cabinet of curiosities to provide readers with “a toolbox for self-transformation.”⁷ If the activating energy is to explore what a book can be or do, rather than to take advantage of a particular market, then it is in the zone.

When we trace the history of the artist’s book, several flashpoints are often given, though the motivation to work with and against the codex arises simultaneously in a number of different twentieth-century art and literary movements. Still, for the purposes of essential knowledge, it is worth briefly noting these works and their makers. Rather than presenting these texts as the “lineage” of the artist’s book, I mention them here as useful representatives of the energies motivating artwork in book form.

An Aside on Printing Methods: Intaglio and Relief Printing

Blake’s innovation melded his experience as an engraver with the techniques of letterpress printing by “melting apparent surfaces away.” In intaglio printing (his method of printing from engravings), the surface of a copper plate is treated with an acid-resistant coating or wax and the design scratched into this surface. When acid is applied, it etches the design into the plate, allowing for very fine line-work. A printer then removes the coating, applies ink to the plate, and wipes the excess away, leaving the etched lines filled. The printer then places dampened paper onto the inked plate, along with thick felt pads, and rolls the ensemble through a press that applies high pressure, forcing the ink up into the paper’s fibers. The extreme force both transfers the image and leaves behind a slight indentation the size and shape of the plate.

In relief printing, such as letterpress, the image and text are raised rather than recessed, which requires less force to transfer to the paper and means the edges of the plate do not bite into it, as they do in etching. This allows for the clean, two-sided printing we associate with the codex; it can create a continuous reading experience across every turning. Blake’s innovation was to treat his copper plates as relief surfaces, painting his designs and texts directly onto them using an acid-resistant varnish. Acid then “melt[ed] away” the exposed surface, and his designs and text were left behind.¹⁰ For this technique to work, Blake must have been highly skilled at writing backward, since, as in printing from movable type, the art transferred to the page was a mirror image of the art on the plate.

This innovation had numerous benefits, both financial and artistic. It allowed Blake to use both sides of his engraving plates—since they were etched shallowly—and to print on both sides of the leaf, saving money on both copper and fine engraving paper. It also spared the expense of having texts letterpress-printed at another shop. Uniting manuscript tradition and mechanical reproduction, Blake’s technique allowed for a more calligraphic writing style and a harmony between reading and looking, rather than relegating text and image to separate pages. By extension, it brought the hand back into the book, so his manual effort and artistry showed on every page. The Blakes worked together, hand-tinting each leaf with washes of color to create depth and complexity. Later, Blake applied colored inks directly to the plate, allowing variation each time it was printed.¹¹ Perhaps most importantly, illuminated printing allowed Blake to conceive of text and image simultaneously—creating what scholar W. J. T. Mitchell has called an “imagetext,” a design to be both read and looked at—and to work expressively with their merger.¹² Because he drew his designs directly on the plate, invention and fabrication became inseparable.

Blake’s first two books created with this technique, All Religions Are One (1788) and There Is No Natural Religion (1788) used aphorisms to refute eighteenth-century rationalism, which sought a scientific basis for God through evidence in the natural world. These books are emblematic of Blake’s relationship to print—he believed in the power of poetic genius, and in printing as a visionary art form with the capacity for social change. Blake was connected to many radical thinkers of his time, and the work he is best known for, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), reflects his own critiques of eighteenth-century London through sweetly rhymed poems in his expressive handwriting surrounded by illustrations of the loss of innocence and destruction of the natural world. Much like an illuminated manuscript, Blake’s illustrations fill the margins and negative space of each page, merging text and design, as when, for instance, the title grows out of a tree’s gnarled trunk on the book’s frontispiece (see figure 9). Incidentally, on that page, Blake refers to himself as “The Author & Printer W. Blake,” making clear the union of creativity and craft in his work. Blake’s engagement with the social issues of his day, and his use of book form to respond to child labor, urban squalor, and slavery, established an important trend in both artists’ books and independent publishing—the utility of the book as a means of spreading social justice.

Figure 9 The title page from William Blake’s *Songs of Innocence and of Experience* (Yale Center for British Art, Bentley Copy L) demonstrating illuminated printing. Public domain image courtesy the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Through my mis-education I have arrived at the conclusion that the book is a political tool.

—Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., “Social Book Building”

Some might quibble with the notion of the Blakes as book artists, since they didn’t actually bind their works but sold to collectors the unbound leaves enclosed in paper folios.¹³ As a result, extant copies of some books can differ in their ordering of the prints, suggesting the arc of the collected poems was not integral to Blake’s vision. He was, however, acting in accord with his time and the expectations of his buyers, who would have had their books bound to order. The eighteenth-century codex was a personal artifact, and a collection was made uniform with this finishing step so that the library reflected its reader rather than the whims of the publisher. Whether the page order was changed by the Blakes or the binders, these works were printed and conceived as “Illuminated Books” according to Blake’s own 1793 prospectus advertising them for sale, and Blake produced an order list for the Songs of Innocence and of Experience for at least one buyer to facilitate the book’s binding.¹⁴ It would have been a huge leap for Blake to bind them himself, requiring great expense and making it significantly harder to find collectors.

One of the chief reasons Blake might be considered a progenitor of the artist’s book, however, is his rationale for making books in the first place. The production and sale of the books did not make him wealthy (Blake worked as an engraver to support his family throughout his life), but it did disseminate his work more broadly than exhibition could. As he confided to one buyer: “The Few I have Printed and Sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an Artist which was the chief thing Intended.”¹⁵ They were limited-edition books, labor-intensive to produce, through which he realized his vision for the best presentation of his subversive, visionary ideas.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s Book as “Spiritual Instrument”

While Blake’s artistry and control of each aspect of his books gives us a deep history of creators blurring the line between writer and bookmaker, some point to French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) the twentieth century’s first true book artist for his thorough break from Victorian typographic tradition. In his 1897 book-length poem Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance), the page is not a vessel, but an ocean; and the text, tossed on its waves, is a shipwreck in language that draws the reader’s eye across its shimmering surface. In a way, Mallarmé continued Blake’s work to return power to the idea of the book, but rather than taking the illuminated manuscript as a model, Mallarmé looked to a more widespread medium—contemporary newsprint—to revivify poetry.

Mallarmé was writing a century after Blake, at a time of greater typographic intensity. The late nineteenth century saw an explosion in signage, visible in photographs of the period depicting city streets crowded with signboards and advertisements pasted and painted on the sides of buildings.¹⁶ The period also saw an increase in the availability and quantity of print, thanks in part to the advent of typesetting machines, which allowed compositors to set type using a keyboard, rather than hunting through the cases. From these machines came hot metal typesetting, which combined type casting and setting, vastly increasing the speed and efficiency of composition. The Linotype (1886), as its name homophonically implies, allowed compositors to produce a complete line of text that could be melted down and reused—no time-consuming distribution back to the cases required. Developed by Ottmar Mergenthaler for the New York Tribune, the machine sped up production so significantly—with a Linotype operator working five times as fast as a hand compositor ¹⁷—that Thomas Edison reportedly called it the eighth wonder of the world. While Linotype was swiftly adopted for news, a slightly different system took hold in publishing. Monotype, invented by Tolbert Lanston in 1896, cast letters individually and composed them, giving book printers greater control of the look of each line and offering them a number of typefaces to choose from.

Seeing this proliferation of language in the landscape and in the pages of the daily newspaper, Mallarmé perceived what he called a “crisis in poetry.”¹⁸ The workmanlike columns of the newspaper made text available and accessible on a scale that he felt threatened the power of the book. It also made language a tool of commerce and mass culture, displacing its expressive power. In response to this crisis, he called for a poetry that would use the space of the page to bring mystery and expressivity back to type and to language, adopting the very techniques of that intrusive newspaper. He outlined this vision of the book’s potential power in his essay “The Book, Spiritual Instrument,” which advocated newsprint’s large headings and use of uppercase: “a burst of grandeur, of thought or of emotion, eminent, a sentence pursued in large letters, one line per page, in a graduated arrangement—wouldn’t this keep the reader in suspense throughout the whole book … [while] all around, minor clusters … explicatory or derivative—an array of flourishes.”¹⁹ This arrangement of eye-catching headings with smaller texts bubbling up around them would, he felt, charge the book with spiritual energy.

In Un coup de Dés, the book he was working on up to his death and that only appeared in its intended form posthumously, Mallarmé would realize this vision.²⁰ He planned each page carefully, scoring it as one might a piece of music, with words and phrases scattered fragmentarily across each spread. In his preface, he refers to these line breaks as “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.”²¹ Eschewing the tradition of contained stanzas surrounded by white margins, he dispersed the text, allowing space to play an expressive role so “that it seems to sometimes accelerate and slow the movement, articulating it, even intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the page.”²² Dropping punctuation, using multiple type sizes to emphasize particular words, and interspersing phrases in all caps with those in lower case, he guides the reader’s eye through the text, with special attention to the interaction between facing pages.

Mallarmé’s was not the first visual treatment of poetry, since it was preceded by acrostics and shaped poems depicting crosses, seraphim, monks, and other figures known as “carmina figurata” in medieval codices from the ninth century onward. The use of such patterns for devotional poetry extends to Welsh poet George Herbert’s seventeenth-century collection The Temple (1633), which includes an altar, a pair of wings, and other forms that illustrate the text. However, in these earlier works the visual design spoke to the content of a single poem, not the book as a whole. These shaped poems imitated their subject matter, while Mallarmé’s text enacted it.

Even to readers of French, the free verse of Un coup de Dés is complex and hard to follow—some scholars believe we have yet to truly understand or explicate it. The text refuses narrative in favor of, in Mallarmé’s words, “retreats, prolongations, flights.”²³ He suggested that readers view Un coup de Dés—a complex poem whose imagery suggests shipwreck but whose language seems to refer to the act of writing itself—as a musical score, making the page into a stage on which language performs. Typeset in Didot, the early nineteenth-century font associated with literary publishing, the text disrupts the lyric expectations it sets up. Instead of a poem of individual experience voiced by a speaker recollecting and reflecting upon it, Mallarmé gives us a tumbling series of images suggesting a captain who goes down with his ship.

The lines’ fragmentation forces one to read across the book’s gutter in search of connection, so that one sees, for example, on facing pages, a “corpse by the arm” across from “detached from the secret it holds.” Much as the text is likewise “detached” by the seam of the gutter where verso and recto meet, the ship going “into the storm / reopen[s] the seam and pass[es] proudly” into the unknown space suggested by that furrow—a whirlpool, a waterwall, a place where there be dragons.²⁴ The captain’s body, too, is severed by that “seam,” his arm gripping the helm as waves crash over (see figure 10a, b). Mallarmé’s language animates the book and makes the reader complicit in this shipwreck. Our eye’s movements back and forth, our hand turning the pages in crests that fall back on the text, and the very sound of those pages fluttering and falling create the storm it describes. By the end of the text, we are holding the open book as a buoy or flotation device we hope will take us, as the penultimate line suggests, to “some final place of consecration.”²⁵

Figures 10a (pages 130–131) and 10b (above) *A Roll of the Dice* (*Un coup de Dés*) by Stéphane Mallarmé, translation copyright 2015 by Jeff Clark and Robert Bononno. Reprinted with permission of the translator and Wave Books.

To translate Un coup de Dés requires not only a playful understanding of the text’s swirling sense, but a sensitivity to Mallarmé’s intent. The images presented here, from a collaboration between Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark, reflect a thoughtful approach to the relationship between form and content. While the French text adheres to the specifications in Mallarmé’s notes on the 1897 Vollard edition he was working on at his death, the English is set in Helvetica. This divergence is designed to strike contemporary eyes the way Mallarmé’s evocation of newsprint shook his own readers. The ubiquitous font brings the voice of street signs, logos, and government forms into the text, rupturing the space of the page with public flotsam that drifts across its surface. The volume includes surreal black-and-white photographs that evoke the sea floor, the surface of the waves, and the cosmos in homage to three lithographs by Odilon Redon that were to be included in the 1897 printing. A modern interpretation, it translates not only the work’s content but also its form for contemporary English readers.

When Mallarmé died, he was only beginning the experimentation suggested by his manifesto, a throw of the dice that would change poets’ relation to the page forever. It would be up to the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, including the Futurists, Vorticists, Lettrists, and Concrete Poets, to continue his explorations of the page and book as spaces of play and visual communication. His establishment of the page as a musical score would go on to influence a range of practices, from Kurt Schwitters’s Dada sound poetry to Charles Olson’s typewritten projective verse. These later writers embraced the techniques of advertising, incorporating it into and subverting it with their own works. In “The Book, Spiritual Instrument,” Mallarmé suggested “everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”²⁶ That proposition, in a less mystic formulation, would come to fruition in the middle of the twentieth century.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

—Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book, Spiritual Instrument”

Ed Ruscha’s Democratic Multiples

Unlike Mallarmé or Blake, Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) wasn’t interested in language when he began making books, but in their capacity to serve as conceptual artworks. His artists’ books of the 1960s and 1970s are deadpan photographic collections produced inexpensively and distributed, at least initially, outside the bookstore and publishing system—inaugurating what Drucker refers to as “the artist’s book as democratic multiple.”²⁷ Producing a book as an artwork, in this case, was thought by artists of the 1960s to be “democratic” because it was inexpensive, allowed wider dissemination of the work, and bypassed the gallery system, severing the division between high and low culture such institutions were thought to represent. As curator, critic, and artist Lucy Lippard put it, the artist’s book of the 1960s was conceived as “a portable exhibition … considered by many the easiest way out of the art world and into the heart of a broader audience.”²⁸

As its title suggests, Ruscha’s first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), is a collection of photographs of filling stations on Route 66 between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City. The book is an exhibition between covers, one that requires no gallery, no commission, and no art-world reviews. As an artifact, it looks like a standard paperback, yet it plays with the codex’s features—the opening, juxtaposition, sequence—drawing attention to the ways we read its form, even when we think we are reading the images or text within it.

Ruscha’s black-and-white photographs look distinctly unimposing, and in some cases, unplanned. Signage is cut off by the frame’s edge. The photographer casts a shadow on his subject. Some photos, taken at night, are blurry. And in others, the station itself is obscured by cars. The design, too, gives the impression of informality. Some stations take up a two-page spread, while others are confined to a half page, leaving significant white space in which a caption consisting of the station name and location floats free. The individual photographs are not presented as fine artworks. They must be read together to achieve the artist’s intentionally cheeky effect.

Though Ruscha provides no framing text, in still after still he implies a kind of armchair travel. Where would one encounter so many different gas stations but on the road? Reading the book as travelogue, however, seems absurd, given the banality of these stops. The codex’s inherent sequentiality (we can view only one opening at a time, and glimpse a second spread only in the process of turning the page) provides the metaphor of movement in spite of the static nature of the shots. If we mapped the cities named, we could seemingly track the absent photographer’s path. In fact, these images were taken on a road trip Ruscha made to his parents’ Oklahoma City home, but he has placed some out of order, troubling our assumptions about the relationship between sequence and temporality: to move forward in the book is not necessarily to move forward in space or time.

Ruscha would go on to explore travel more linearly in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-folded filmstrip-like document of one of LA’s best known thoroughfares. The twenty-five-foot long book consists of panoramic portraits of the north and south sides of the street, stitched together from discrete images—a precursor to the Google Street View perspective to which we are now accustomed. As predigitally montages, Ruscha’s photographs show their seams: sometimes cars are cut off or repeated, and occasionally misaligned shots do not precisely match. These cinematic strips run along the top and bottom of the page, facing one another, with numbers and cross-streets providing captions that locate us spatially. A generous swath of white space running horizontally through the book implies the reader’s path—of our eyes moving forward through the planes of the book, and, metaphorically, of our imagined car, cruising past pharmacies and restaurants, billboards and phone poles as we head west down the boulevard.

In addition to Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha published a number of photographic artist’s books in the sixties and seventies, including Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965), and Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968), in each case playing with the page opening and our expectations regarding sequence. His use of declarative titles, typeset in three lines that lend each word extra emphasis, suggest the works’ deadpan humor (see figure 11). These books, produced cheaply and distributed outside the gallery system, have become such important touchstones among artists that an entire anthology, Various Small Books (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), has been devoted to the numerous artist publications riffing on his theme.

Figure 11 Ed Ruscha’s artists’ books *Twentysix Gasoline Stations*, 1962 (7" × × ); *Various Small Fires and Milk*, 1964 ( × × ); and *Some Los Angeles Apartments*, 1965 ( × × ). ©Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Four hundred signed and numbered copies of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, its first run, were sold for $3 each according to an ad in Artforum—democratic indeed. Yet anyone familiar with Ruscha’s body of work will tell you that those cheaply produced books went through several printings in increasingly larger runs (as high as 3,000 in 1969), and are now out of print, with copies selling for thousands of dollars.²⁹ Ruscha intended to keep the book available in an open edition, but he eventually had to move on. The “democratic multiple” couldn’t prevent the artist from being absorbed back into the art world’s celebrity system. Still, Ruscha’s work, tied to art’s dematerialization (to use Lucy Lippard’s term for the conceptual art movement)—prioritizing idea over artifact and concept over craft—reflects the values of the moment in which it arose.

In each of these three cases, an artist took control of the bookmaking process to create a work of art in book form. Had they been produced as broadsides or gallery exhibitions, these books would have functioned differently, and their intervention into commerce would have been less apparent. Blake used his craftsmanship to develop the relationship between word and image. Mallarmé used the design of his text to resist the absorption of language into consumer culture. Ruscha used his books to create exhibitions outside the gallery setting. While the types of books they created were quite different from one another, as progenitors of artists’ books, they shared a concern with the commodification of the codex.

The New Art of Making Books

The ubiquity of the book as a marketable artifact led Mexican author and artist Ulises Carrión (1941–1989) to write rebelliously in 1975, “A book may be the accidental container of a text, the structure of which is irrelevant to the book: these are the books of bookshops and libraries.”³⁰ We have to imagine a long pause where that colon hinges the sentence together—one heavy with sarcasm. Carrión’s tongue-in-cheek dig at the book as a commercial artifact reflects on the separation of form and content he perceived in the writing and publishing of his time. Carrión was not opposed to bookshops altogether, and in fact founded one himself, Other Books and So, in Amsterdam that same year. Specializing in artists’ books and multiples, the shop was also an artist-run exhibition and event space that distributed the kind of work he wanted to see more of in the world: books conceived of as a whole, rather than “texts” bestowed by the author on a publisher for dissemination to a reading public. In an advertisement for the space, he called them “non books, anti books, pseudo books, quasi books, concrete books, visual books, conceptual books, structural books, project books, statement books, instruction books,”³¹ a list suggestive of his vexed relationship with the marketplace. Ultimately, he would coin a new term to describe the kind of artists’ publications he championed: bookworks. In part, Carrión’s was a clarion call for authors to be more attuned to the book’s materiality and impact on meaning, but it was also a demand for a breakdown of the system that privileged writing as intellectual labor and denigrated the physical aspect of book production.

Like Mallarmé, Carrión perceived a crisis in literature, and for him that crisis arose from its place in the publishing system. He knew this system firsthand, having achieved early success by winning the state prize for short stories in 1960, publishing work in periodicals, and ultimately releasing two successful story collections, in 1966 and 1970. Carrión had studied literature and philosophy at UNAM, and he gained enough acclaim to receive grants for graduate study in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. While in England he began to envision a different approach to the book and publishing, thanks to Mexican artists Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion, whose Beau Geste Press (founded in 1970) introduced him to mimeographed books by members of Fluxus, a loose collective of artists interested in chance operations, ephemeral performances, conceptual practice, and participatory works that blur the line between art and life. When he moved to Amsterdam in 1972, Carrión began producing artists’ books of his own, the first of which, Sonnets, provided forty-four iterations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Heart’s Compass.” In the manner of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), Carrión played with his source text, rewriting it in different styles to amusing ends. It was in this context of experimentation with poetry, and a move from narrative toward conceptual art, that Carrión began to formulate the notion of the bookwork.

Demanding that writers take a more active role in the conceptualization of their books, he published “The New Art of Making Books” (1975), a manifesto whose polemical tone served as a provocation that still irks some readers today. Originally written in Spanish and published in Plural, the magazine founded by Octavio Paz, it was aimed at a literary audience Carrión felt needed a jolt. Disavowing the novel as “a book where nothing happens,” and proclaiming “there is not and will not be new literature anymore,” he clearly hoped to ruffle feathers.³² The novel, of course, is not dead, and it still serves an important expressive purpose, but Carrión’s reenvisioning of the capacities of the book show us much about the ways artists’ books have helped multiply its possibilities by treating the book as an intermedial space.

Like Mallarmé, Carrión saw the page’s spatial potential. His manifesto opens, “A book is a sequence of spaces,”³³ a definition so porous as to allow for any number of objects or artifacts we might think of as books: a bound codex, a deck of cards, or a series of rooms. But his definition stretches still further:

Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments.

• • • •

A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.

• • • •

… A book is a space-time sequence.³⁴

If a book is a space-time sequence, it is also a kind of film. It can be animated, rather than static. By the time Carrión penned this statement, creators of flip-books and their precursor, the nickelodeon, had exploited this aspect of the book’s sequential potential for just over a century (the flip-book having been patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnett as the kineograph). This notion, though, that the page is more than simply “a bag of words” suggests that writers must stop treating language as transparent, utilitarian, and direct. Only in the old art could one believe “the meanings of the words are the bearers of the author’s intentions.”³⁵ Clearly, Carrión’s thinking bears the hallmarks of poststructural theory, which by this point had shaken up notions of meaning and authorship.

In lieu of such “boring” books “of 500 pages, or of 100, or even of 25 wherein all the pages are similar,”³⁶ Carrión called for books “conceived as an expressive unity,” as he would write in a 1978 exhibition catalog.³⁷ While calling pages of justified prose “boring” sounds purposefully bombastic, we ought to consider the role page numbers and running heads play in facilitating reading and revisiting a work. These signposts help us navigate a text that looks the same from page to page, though its words may vary. “In a bookwork,” by Carrión’s definition, “the message is the sum of all the material and formal elements.”³⁸ The bookwork, thus, engages in a critique of the book and an exploration of its affordances. It takes nothing at face value and asks the reader to remain attentive not only to the text but also to its physicality. As scholar Garrett Stewart writes, a bookwork is “not for normal reading, but for thinking about.”³⁹ It represents a conceptual approach to bookmaking, and one that relies on the viewer’s interaction with the object to make meaning. For this reason Carrión called such works “anti books”—because they refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form, separating the idea of the book from the object.

In a 1986 video recorded in Olympia, Washington, where Carrión was to speak at The Evergreen State College, he professes a perspective common today, “I firmly believe that every book that now exists will eventually disappear.” And true to form, he expresses little sadness over the loss: “And I see here no reason for lamentation. Like any other living organism, books will grow, multiply, change color, and, eventually, die. At the moment, bookworks represent the final phase of this irrevocable process. Libraries, museums, archives are the perfect cemeteries for books.”⁴⁰

Sounding a death knell for books that has since become a refrain, Carrión suggests that bookworks take on greater importance when the codex itself seems to be imperiled. This feels especially true at our current moment, when publishers are taking greater risks with artistic publications and conceptually inventive books like Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut erasure Tree of Codes (Visual Editions, 2010), Mark Danielewski’s typographically complex House of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000), Anne Carson’s accordion-bound Nox (New Directions, 2010), and Jen Bervin’s collection of Emily Dickinson’s envelope fragments, Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions, 2013), a volume that feels like a coffee-table book. As the material form of the codex threatens to disintegrate into the digital, works highly attuned to materiality give us a chance to think about and savor the physical artifact, precisely by asking us to reflect on the very immaterial “idea” of the book.

The Book as Virtual Reality

Carrión’s initial definition of the book as a “sequence of spaces” sounds like an abstraction, but it can, in fact, be taken literally. Each opening of the codex is a unique space, and when we turn the page we leave that space and enter a new one. Book artists have explored this spatiality by creating virtual realities that puncture the two-dimensional plane of the page. The book is, after all, a volume, a term suggesting both sequence (volume 1, volume 2, etc.) and space.

We see the book’s depth most readily in pop-up books, which unfold to fill each opening with material that pulls itself up off the page. One way book artists make us confront the voluminous potential of the book is through the tunnel binding style, also known as the peep-show, a form that originated during the Italian Renaissance. Familiar to anyone who has played with a cut-paper stage set as a child, the tunnel book developed from Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404–1472) optical experiments, for which he built a peep-show box with a perspective scene inside.⁴² By the seventeenth century, similar devices developed as traveling peep-shows invited viewers to look into boxes with layers of cut-out characters and landscapes depicting scenes from the Bible, mythology, and history. These theaters-in-a-box became increasingly complex, with strings the presenter could pull to animate the scene.⁴³ By the eighteenth century, such peep-shows were being printed on a smaller scale for sale to individuals, bound with paper accordions along both sides. They became popular in the mid-nineteenth century as souvenirs for events like the opening of the Thames Tunnel (1851), which ostensibly provides the name by which we now know them.

When fully extended and viewed through an opening in the cover, the tunnel book’s superimposed flat planes create the illusion of depth—successive layers adding detail to the scene. Such books can include text around their borders, or they can be wordless. They can be printed or blank. They can even accommodate projection to animate their surfaces, as in artist William Kentridge’s video installation Preparing the Flute (2005). Built as a working model for the Brussels Opera’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, the series of charcoal, pastel, and pencil drawings frame a miniature stage, serving as backdrop for a series of animated films that deepen their illusion.

Another model of projection-animated pop-up structures might be found in The Icebook (2011) by Davy and Kristin McGuire. Described by its creators as “a miniature theatre show made of paper and light,” the book uses projection mapping to play a fairy tale across a series of eleven blank pop-up pages. The projected video adds characters, detail, and lighting effects to a wooded landscape, a Victorian mansion, a lighthouse, a church, and other settings. Like Kentridge’s miniature theater, The Icebook began as a maquette for stage performance, and its success has led the McGuires to collaborate with theater companies and advertisers to create paper/projection spectacles, including the rear projection–mapped Theater Book—Macbeth, a battery-powered cinematic pop-up book depicting scenes from the Scottish play, created with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

This theatrical component of the book has been realized on a much larger scale by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, who creates books as sets activated by the viewer. The first of these installations, The Big Book (1967), was an eight-foot-tall codex described by Bill Wilson in Art in America as “a work of art to be lived in.”⁴⁴ Knowles installed The Big Book, constructed with her spouse Dick Higgins and sculptor Masami Kodama, at Something Else Gallery, the exhibition space of Higgins’s Something Else Press, on the first floor of their Chelsea brownstone. Something Else Press is notable as a pioneer of innovative small-press publishing, putting out books of Fluxus art and concrete poetry from 1963 to 1974 as an affordable means of disseminating this work and creating a community of practitioners. A precursor to Carrión’s Other Books and So bookshop, it joined a tradition of artist-run presses of the 1960s, which served as not only venues for distributing artwork but also gathering and exhibition spaces for experimental book forms.⁴⁵

Critic Howard Junker praised Knowles’s project, which he called a “Pandora’s Book,” as the realization of Mallarmé’s dream and a response to McLuhan’s admonitions about the “post-literate” age, writing in Newsweek, “Freed from the linearity of type and the one-at-a-time strictures of pages bound together, the book is again a contemporary medium.”⁴⁶ A series of giant pages attached at a central hinge, the book didn’t dispense with seriality so much as exploit it to remind us just how bound the codex is (we might say boundedness is one of the book’s key characteristics). Some read the work as taking part in the feminist critique of the restrictive domestic sphere prevalent at the time. No matter how “big” the book is, its pathways are limited.

Visitors entering The Big Book pass through eight pages, with each opening immersing them in a different scene (see figure 12). To get from one to the next, one might crawl through a four-foot tunnel of grass, enter an open window, or climb a ladder. The scenes include a library, gallery, working kitchen, and even a chemical toilet. The “pages,” made of bonded sheeting, are slightly translucent, allowing a preview of the opening to come. Knowles’s big book is bounded but offers everything the artist might need, including artifacts from her own home meant to nurture creativity (a typewriter, a gallery of work by her friends, and a kitchen for the sustenance to go on). Whether it revalues or critiques the domestic sphere, The Big Book turns it into a site of reading and interpretation, highlighting the way the codex structure uses sequence to make meaning.

Figure 12 Alison Knowles, *The Big Book*, University Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, 1969. Image used with permission of the artist and the University Art Gallery.

Much of Knowles’s work explores the intersection between the book and performance. She revisited the life-size book in her 1982 Book of Bean, another walk-through installation meditating on the bean’s cross-cultural and personal significance. Built with artist Yoshi Wada and installed at avant-garde art space Franklin Furnace, the multisensory installation invites viewers traversing the sequence of spaces to read translations of the word bean across languages from Arabic to Swahili. They hear a soundscape that includes a poem composed of the names of every Bean in the phone book read alongside those of actual legumes, listen to a bean orchestra created by rattling beans inside different objects, exit through a window encircled by text about dreams and beans, and in the end are offered a dish of beans to eat.

Knowles’s books, like her artistic practice, offer readers nourishment, reminding us that the book is an exchange, and one that is only completed when we arrive. In her own words: “You have to get right into it, as you do with any good book, and you must become involved and experience it yourself. Then you will know something and feel something. Let us say that it provides a milieu for your experience but what you bring to it is the biggest ingredient, far more important than what is there.”⁴⁷ Crawling through The Big Book, Book of Bean, or a new incarnation, Boat Book (2014), the visitor’s body stands in for the reader’s eye. As we traverse the pages, our experience is itself the text, which will be different for each viewer because of what we have seen before, between, and after these pages.

You have to get right into it, as you do with any good book, and you must become involved and experience it yourself. Then you will know something and feel something. Let us say that it provides a milieu for your experience but what you bring to it is the biggest ingredient, far more important than what is there.

—Alison Knowles, The Big Book

The book’s virtual realities can also take digital shape, as they do in the works of Caitlin Fisher, founder of York University’s Future Cinema Lab. Fisher has been working with digital media since 2000, when she published her dissertation on feminist theory in hypertext form. She has gone on to work in augmented reality (AR), which uses a computer or phone’s camera to layer digital media onto live video, techniques at the intersection of performance, pop-up books, and installation art. Her AR installation Circle (2012) consists of an open suitcase whose family heirlooms—a teacup, Victorian postcards, and other ephemera—inspire us to imagine their history. When viewed through an iPad or iPhone using Fisher’s app, the screen becomes a “magic looking glass” and short videos and animations spring from each piece, accompanied by haunting audio describing the memories of three generations of women embedded in these domestic objects.⁴⁸ The book, distributed across them, becomes a multimedia and multi-navigable space: a virtual reality layered onto our own. AR works can be more codex-like in shape, as with Carla Gannis’s Lumen Award–winning Selfie Drawings (2016), a hardcover book of fifty-two AR portraits that animate and change when viewed through an app on one’s smart device.⁴⁹ Like Knowles and Fisher, Gannis explores femininity and self-representation in her work, using AR to construct new worlds for the artist to inhabit.

The Book as Cinematic Space

The notion of the book as a sequence of spaces also implies its capacity for animation. When books consist of images, it is easy to picture them as little films—whether those illustrations depict vignettes from the text, as in Lewis Carroll’s illustrations of Alice’s adventures, or they comprise the text, as in a flip-book where image succeeds image, creating the illusion of movement. Flip-books, of course, were the precursor to cinema, with Victorian experiments in sequential photography by Edweard Muybridge and others creating proto-movies thanks to the persistence of vision.

The flip-book and peep-show box meet in the Mutoscope, an early cinematic technology for extremely short vignettes of about a minute each. Patented by Herman Casler in 1894, the Mutoscope, whose name is a Latin borrowing that suggests “changing-views,”⁵⁰ was a box of standing height with a hooded glass lens. Viewers who turned the machine’s crank were treated to a private show as a sequence of around 850 cards on a central reel flicked before their eyes. The book’s role in the development of film adds a layer of irony to 1950s fears that books simply couldn’t compete with cinema. Similar complaints arise with each new technology—will video games, the computer, the dramatic miniseries, streaming video, or the latest media consumption technology signal the death of the book? That question isn’t as interesting, though, as the question of how each of these technologies has been, and will continue to be, part of the book’s development.

Book artists have examined the page’s potential for animation in a number of projects exploiting the codex’s flippable structure. Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975), for instance, confronts the reader with a door through which, it seems, we are invited to enter the volume—a subtle reference to the architectural metaphors for the book that arose in the Renaissance.⁵¹ The black-and-white world between these covers plays with verso and recto as the back and front of a single plane, so that we are continually seeing things from both sides in a manner that suggests movement, though we are, in fact, going nowhere. When we open the front door we find, on the inside cover, an image of its reverse, a black door against which the artist stands, in a neatly tucked collared dress shirt, with his back to us. Is he waiting for us to open the door? Is he trying to get out? At recto we find another door upon which are printed the artist’s name and title. Opening that, we find yet another spread in which the artist has his back to us at verso and a door appears at recto. It feels like a funhouse, with each door leading only to another door.

Yet as we get deeper into the book, we realize that though we haven’t moved, the artist is making progress. At verso he opens the door before him. At recto, the door is partly ajar. The book, we realize, is beginning to animate like a flip-book or GIF, and we’re seeing on each verso the reverse shot of the recto image beside it. The book’s conceit is revealed when the door opens fully and we find at recto an image of the photographer documenting the artist’s verso departure. The magician reveals how his trick is done—simultaneous photographs taken from both sides of the door until the two camera operators face one another across the opening. Snow takes the viewer deeper down the rabbit hole as one photographer covers his camera with a piece of paper, which is in turn apparently documented by the other, whose page goes white. An image of the artist’s finger partly obscuring the white page, however, reveals that what has passed for a space has in fact been a surface all along—a photographic print of the supposed photographer, which is then fed into a typewriter and processed into text. Over the course of the book, recto and verso appear to document a series of connected scenes, always from two angles: a record being placed on a phonograph, a window being obscured by branches, the artist leaving the house to go to a gallery, and periodically those hands, ghosted below our own, manipulating the pages. Confused? That’s partly the pleasure of the book, which refuses to let us settle into any one space—like the Mutoscope, Cover to Cover keeps changing the view.

Animation is not, however, limited to images. Poet and artist Emmett Williams (1925–2007) animates text in several books published with Something Else Press (where he served as editor in chief from 1966 to 1970) in the 1960s. Sweethearts (1967), a beguiling book with Marcel Duchamp’s last print, Coeurs Volants, on the cover, tells the story of HE and SHE, two characters whose appearance is made possible by the presence of the letters S, H, and E in the title. Printed in sans-serif lowercase type whose widely set letters are arranged in a grid, the book’s text appears only at verso, requiring readers to start at the back and flip their way forward. On each page, words are formed from letters floating in an invisible net of SWEETHEARTS, simulating movement like letters flicking on and off in a neon sign. As Williams describes in the preface, “No single poem can be more than 11 letters wide or 11 letters deep” (see figure 13).⁵² As we turn the pages, HE and SHE engage in a courtship full of innuendo composed from the letters of SWEETHEARTS in the order in which they appear. They go to the SEA, they have a laugh (HA HA), they SEE THE STARS, pledge their HEARTS, and START A SWEET WAR getting WET on the shore, perhaps reenacting the wave-crashing scene in From Here to Eternity.⁵³ The book’s cheeky humor and visual play connect it to the bawdy history of the Mutoscope and other Nickelodeon machines, which often featured risqué scenes with names like “From Show Girl to Burlesque Queen,” “A Modern Sappho,” and “Her Morning Ablutions.”⁵⁴ In addition to “girlie” films, the Mutoscopes traded on racist tropes, war propaganda, and by the 1920s and 1930s, newsreels and excerpts from popular films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other silent “STARS.” Williams refers to his constellations’ animation as “a primitive cinematic effect,” and because the book is meant to be not only read but watched, the pages go unnumbered: like a flip-book, the poems gain meaning in relation rather than stasis.

Figure 13 A page from Emmett Williams’s *Sweethearts* (Berlin: Verlag der Buchandlung Walther König, [1967] 2010). Image used with grateful permission of Ann-Noël Williams.

A book, in its purest form, is a phenomenon of space and time and dimensionality that is unique unto itself. When we turn the page, the previous page passes into our past and we are confronted by a new world.

—Dick Higgins, “A Book”

Williams’s A Valentine for Noël: Four Variations on A Scheme (1973), dedicated to his wife, artist Ann Noël, includes a series of concrete poems that animate across the page. Among the best known, “Soldier” arose from a screenprint Williams created in protest of the Vietnam War, DIE as in SOLDIER (1970). In the poem, Williams draws our attention to the space of the page. Half an inch from the fore-edge, the word SOLDIER repeats over and over, aligned perfectly like a column of infantry that extends to the page’s limit, suggesting that it stretches infinitely beyond our view. Printed in uppercase lettering in blue ink, the SOLDIERs are uniform, regimental, identical, and upright. Their column, though, is gradually infiltrated over the course of forty pages by red ink, highlighting the DIE in SOLDIER. Page by page, from top to bottom, the DIE turns red, cascading downward as one soldier after another falls, succumbing, it seems, to a fate predetermined in language. No longer “Sweet” or “wet,” the term “war” at this historic moment could not be recuperated for Williams. His DIE/SOLDIER paragram is no joke, but a political commentary on “war as a killing machine,” as publisher Zédélé, who reissued the book in 2015, puts it.⁵⁵

Not only does Williams’s work animate the page, it draws attention to the grid-like structure underlying it—from the screens used to mold the paper to the letterpress printer’s chase. The letters that move across the page in Sweethearts can do so by virtue of the invisible grid of the word S W E E T H E A R T S, repeated over and over, which provides the lattice across which these letters climb. The word page, after all, comes from an Indo-European word root that means “to join or affix.”⁵⁶ That root gives us the Latin pagina, which translates to “trellis,” evoking the page as a fruitful space and training structure to which language is pinned. The SOLDIERs, too, are held in formation, and their advancing line evokes not only the battlefield but also the firing squad. A throw of the die cannot abolish the chance these soldiers will fall.

Williams’s cinematic endeavors are presaged in the work of an early twentieth-century writer who, charmed by the advent of sound film, wanted to embrace the cinematic possibilities of the page. Rather than the flip-book, Robert Carlton (Bob) Brown (1886–1959) looked back to the scroll as a model for a continual moving text. In 1930, he published an article in the avant-garde literary journal transition describing “readies,” a new textual form aided by machine: “a method of enjoying literature in a manner as up-to-date as the lively talkies.”⁵⁷ In talking up his invention, he suggested it would reignite popular interest in reading and bring writing up to date as an “Optical Art.” Unlike Warde, Brown saw the codex as an inadequate vessel: “Writing has been bottled up in books since the start. It is time to pull out the stopper.”⁵⁸

How to let the spirit out of the bottle? Brown devised a machine akin to microfiche or movieola—a narrow ribbon imprinted with tiny text that would be enlarged on an adjustable magnifying lens between it and the reader. The size could be adjusted by moving the lens closer or further from the ribbon, and the text could be sped up, slowed down, advanced, or retracted with the turn of a dial, giving one utmost control over the reading experience (see figure 14). In addition to the entertainment value of such a device, Brown touted the potential cost savings on paper, ink, and binding. His rapid-fire texts omitted connective words, created portmanteaus to speed up the pace of ideas, and used the em dash in place of full stops to score the text.⁵⁹ The claims he made in this manifesto and the subsequent fifty-two-page pamphlet The Readies (1930), published under his imprint Roving Eye Press, were intentionally hyperbolic in their assertions and belied the author’s long-standing relationship with the codex. A collector of rare books, Brown himself had made a comfortable living publishing journalism, fiction and poetry, cookbooks, and pulp stories.⁶⁰ He collaborated with his wife and his mother on books about food and drink, including the popular post-Prohibition history Let There Be Beer! (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932), dedicated to fellow beer-lover H. L. Menken, whose blurb enjoins the reader to buy two copies: “one for himself and one for his pastor.”⁶¹

Figure 14 A prototype of Bob Brown’s Reading Machine constructed by Ross Saunders and Hilaire Hiler (1930–1931). Artwork by Elffin Burrill in Craig Saper’s *Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown* (2016), based on a photograph glued into copies of *Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine* (1931). Image used with permission of the artist and Craig Saper.

Brown had begun making cartoonish visual puns 1912, one of which was published by Marcel Duchamp in Blindman in 1917. Duchamp would be a formative influence on his work, as would Guillaume Apollinaire, whose Calligrammes (1918), visual poems using shape and arrangement to make texts that mimicked their titles, also inspired him.⁶² An American in Europe after the First World War, Brown befriended many expatriate writers, soliciting contributions from Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, F. T. Marinetti, Eugène Jolas, and Paul Bowles, among others, for his 1931 anthology Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine. A prototype machine was built that year, and a digital iteration has been published online by Craig Saper and K. A. Wisniewski, who have revived Roving Eye Press to reissue Brown’s innovative works.⁶³ While the Reading Machine was perhaps more conceptual game than reading revolution, it presages contemporary speed-reading technologies like Spritz, a web app that helps readers quickly absorb texts using an optical system to feed them one word at a time.⁶⁴ Brown’s readies, based on the technologies of his moment, used the paper scroll as an animated surface—one that unrolled before the reader’s eyes in a merger of film and tickertape, turning readers themselves into a kind of machine for making meaning.

The Book as Recombinant Structure

While we might presume the ability to rearrange a book’s parts is an affordance reserved for the digital realm, artists’ books showcase several historical forms that turn the book into a recombinant structure, allowing readers to create new juxtapositions within it. Such interactivity is present already in the accordion book, which, as an intermediate point between scroll and codex, allows readers to open one spread at a time or unfold several, seeing across the folds’ peaks and valleys to survey the text.

The ability to completely open this structure makes it especially useful for topographic work like Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 collaboration La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), a vertical cityscape of colorful pochoir paintings and poetry where the eye’s traversal of word and image suggest the simultaneity of a dark past and a vivid present for the poem’s speaker as he recalls a railroad journey from Moscow to Harbin during the Russian-Japanese war of 1905; or like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, which allows a kind of armchair tourism across the Los Angeles landscape. The form lends itself to exhibition for this reason—we can see more of its contents at a glance than a codex if the accordion is stood on end and extended, revealing every peak and valley, front and back. When the accordion’s ends are attached to a cover, it creates a loop, potentially inviting us to start again. But the accordion need not be a linear or landscape experience. It also permits new juxtapositions by allowing readers to refold peaks into valleys and bring distant pages close to one another. Artists’ books in accordion form remind us that the book is, as Stewart notes, “Western culture’s first interactive medium.”⁶⁵

This recombinant quality of the book takes place not only across but within the page. The technique, in fact, appears in some of the earliest movable books, which use volvelles, turnable discs affixed to the page with a pin or piece of string, to facilitate calculation and navigation. The earliest volvelles, those of thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramon Lull, precede print, and the technique rose in prominence during the incunable period for its scholarly utility. The Regiomontanus Kalendarium (1476), whose frontispiece was discussed in chapter 2, for example, also included volvelles for astrological calculation.⁶⁶ Another important recombinant tool appears in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of flap books or turn-up books composed of a printed page with a sequence of flaps that alter the narrative each time the reader lifts a hinge. Also known as transformation books or Harlequinades, for the London pantomime figure they often depict, such eighteenth-century novelty books were among the first marketed to children (by London bookseller Robert Sayer around 1765) offering morals and lessons through the transformations they depicted. The harlequinade’s legacy continues in children’s mix-and-match books that use sliced pages and a spiral binding to allow one to swap a face’s features, create hybrid bodies, or otherwise interchange an image or text’s parts.

The recombinant form lends itself to text as well. French author Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), inspired by such childlike “têtes folles”⁶⁷ and intrigued by the possibilities offered by a series of cut pages hinged along a spine, composed fourteen Petrarchan sonnets with the identical rhyme scheme, bound them, and sliced the lines apart. Published in 1961, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred thousand billion poems) offers the reader 10¹⁴ different poems, accessed by turning the lines one at a time to make new texts. To read them all, Queneau calculated, would take more than two hundred million years of devoted study.⁶⁸ The work is thus a conceptual one but also offers a pleasurable reading experience borne of the novelty inherent in using the author’s text to generate new poems. No wonder, then, that this work is popular with coders, whose digital implementations enact its computational potential. Such remediations, however, lack the tactile pleasure of the interlocking strips that compose the book. They also cannot replicate the sense of potential made palpable by seeing these strips in front of you, lifting themselves away from the spine of the open book and fluttering apart.

My definition of a book grew until I realized, there can be none. To define anything limits it to your past resolutions with no room to expand.

—Keith A. Smith, “Struggling to See”

Queneau joined forces with a group of French writers in the 1960s who were interested in creating new literary forms based on scientific and mathematical principles, and this text is seminal to the movement. Dubbed Oulipo, short for Ouvoir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), the group pioneered constraint-based writing, which set up a rigid conceptual basis for the production of a work, but one that could yield any number of potential results. Cent mille milliards is rife with potential, and the interactivity through which we activate that potential, while it gives some agency to the reader, also highlights Queneau’s authorial genius. The task of composing interchangeable sonnets in the identical meter and rhyme scheme draws attention to his authorship, as does much Oulipo work, including Georges Perec’s La disparition (Editions Denoël, 1969), a novel composed without the letter “e” that provides a parable for the disappearance of millions of Jews, including the author’s own parents, during the Second World War; and Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), which remains silent throughout about the gender of its protagonist. Members of Oulipo would go on to generate recombinant and computational poetry under the auspices of Alamo, short for Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (Workshop for Literature Assisted by Mathematics and Computers), founded by Paul Braffort and Jacques Roubaud in 1981.⁶⁹

Such game-like recombinant texts are not limited to artists’ books, of course. Many of us enjoyed interactive books published for a mass audience in the 1970s and 1980s. These multisequential books, perhaps the best known being the Choose Your Own Adventure series, offered the reader a series of vignettes, each followed by a choice about what to do next. One path through the book led to the best of all possible endings, while the rest led to trouble, heartbreak, even death. These interactive books—while suggesting that there are many paths, but that we, like Robert Frost, cannot travel them and “be one traveler”⁷⁰—actually allowed readers to pursue them all, thanks to the ability to bookmark the choice point with a finger or slip of paper and read each of the potential outcomes before moving on. One such book, Inside UFO 54–40, took advantage of readers’ tendency to cheat by including a page spread inaccessible through any of the reading paths. To reach the miraculous planet Ultima it described, you had to break the rules.

The legacy of these multisequential books lives on in digital interactive fiction (IF), which was among the first game genres made possible by computing. IF, which can be presented on the web, in standalone apps, and even in print, presents readers with choices that alter their path through a work. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile (2010), a graphic novel boasting 3,856 possible readings, uses a print analogue to hypertext: pipes that extend from a sequence of panels off the edge of the page to create a kind of tabbed thumb index by which one can leap to other points in the book.⁷¹ Designed to emulate what comic book artist and theorist Scott McCloud calls an “infinite canvas,” Meanwhile also exists as an app in which all potential paths are available in an interface that scrolls in every direction.⁷²

Interactive books come in other game-like forms, including Mad Libs, storytelling dice and decks, and magnetic poetry. Publishers and book artists have used the deck of cards as another playful model for the book that can be sequenced by the reader. John Cage’s work with indeterminacy in the 1960s might be included among such works; as would French author Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (Éditions du Seuil, 1961), a box of 150 leaves printed on only one side that the reader is instructed to shuffle at the outset; and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (Panther Books, 1969), whose opening and closing quires enclose twenty-five sections that may be read in any order. This bracketing method, in which the story’s opening and closing are set, was used by Robert Coover for “Heart Suit,” a story in McSweeney’s Issue 16 (May 2005) printed on fifteen oversized heart-suited cards including a title card and a joker providing the tale’s introduction and conclusion. Artist Christian Marclay, whose work focuses on found and appropriated materials, published a deck of cards called Shuffle in 2007 that, in Cagean fashion, presents the reader with seventy-five images of musical notation in situ (as a decorative element on mugs, jackets, murals, and the like), which are meant to be shuffled to create a playable score.

Artist Carolee Schneeman’s ABC—We Print Anything—In the Cards (1977) is seminal in this regard. Consisting of 158 color-coded cards in a blue cloth box, the work was intended as a score that could be variously interpreted by the reader. Including dream and diary excerpts on yellow cards, quotes by characters A, B, and C (based on Schneeman; her soon-to-be ex, Anthony; and her new lover Bruce) on blue cards, and comments from friends on pink cards, the book suggests that as a relationship ends, it can feel as if every possibility were predetermined, or “in the cards.” “We print anything,” perhaps the slogan of a print shop or tabloid, tells us that this ABC, far from rudimentary schoolbook, is for an adult audience, and that it holds nothing back, just as Schneeman kept little off-limits in her body art and performance work. Black-and-white photographic cards intersperse images of her nude body, her domestic space, and erotic artwork as if to reinforce the fact that the book lays all her cards on the table.

What happens, though, when a book is boxed and unbound? Do we still recognize it as a book? Of course we do—the box acts like a familiar slipcase for a hardbound book. It presents a rectilinear volume that can be arrayed on a bookshelf, and it contains the pages or cards that come together in its content. Yet, while it looks like a codex from outside, the moment we open the box something changes. These pages can be “turned” in that they can be flipped over, creating two stacks of loose sheets facing one another. Is the space between them properly an “opening” as one finds in a codex or accordion book? Yes. And no. In an accordion or codex, the author and designer have conceived of the opening and the interplay between the facing pages. In an unbound book, that interplay will be different each time it is read, since we can shuffle and reorder them at will. If the cards or pages are not numbered, then the order is truly left up to the reader, and perhaps even the orientation—the page can now be rotated (though in some cases, this will render its text illegible without a mirror or Blake’s skills).

Some of the loveliest works to play with this potentiality are Swiss-German poet Dieter Roth’s (born Karl Dietrich Roth, 1930–1998) series titled simply Bok (Book) from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Germany, Roth was sent by his parents to Switzerland in 1943 for the duration of the war (his family reunited there in 1946) and there he trained as a graphic designer, met concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, and began experimenting with visual poems and artists’ books. When he moved to Reykjavik in 1957, Roth created his own small press, forlag ed., and began to issue books in a variety of cut-paper formats. Famously playful with book form, his first publication, Kinderbuch (Children’s Book), originated as a gift for his friend Claus Bremer’s son and consisted of twenty-eight 32 × 32 cm pages letterpress-printed with red, yellow, black, and blue circles and squares in a variety of arrangements and sizes. The spiral-bound book was produced in an edition of one hundred, twenty-five of which also had die-cut shapes, which would become a technique of great interest to him.

That playful spirit continues in the schlitzbücher (slot-books) he began work on in 1959. These collections of loose cardstock pages, each around fifteen inches square with a smaller central square of hand-cut slots varying in width and orientation, have an immediately cheeky quality. Rather than titling them, each bok was given a number or double-letter designation. Minimalist in aesthetic, they consist of ten to twenty-four leaves of cardstock in two or three colors (black and white, red and blue, red and green, blue and orange, and in one case, red, green, and blue) encased in a portfolio. When stacked and turned by the reader, they alternately reveal and conceal portions of the pages below, creating a variety of optical effects and transformations. The portfolio format, here as in Blake’s illuminated prints, reminds us that our definition of the book cannot rely on formal qualities alone—a book’s meaning arises through use and through the apparatus set up to shape our interpretation of it.

Because they are unbound, each leaf of the slot-books can be oriented four ways (not all are symmetrically centered) as well as flipped, offering eight possible orientations for each sheet—which in turn are influenced by the arrangement of the pages below. These interactive works play with our notions of the book by presenting us with a space that references text (that central cut-out area evoking a prose block with ample margins), but that only becomes legible through flipping—rather than moving our eye to scan these lines, we move the page to make meaning from it. Though we can examine and appreciate an individual sheet as a work of op art, we must, in fact, look through it for juxtaposition with the page below, much as a single page of text gathers significance through its place in a book’s sequence. One such recombinant book has been remediated by generative artist The55 into a visual simulation that allows us to layer the pages to our heart’s content,⁷³ illuminating the extent and variety possible in the work, which must be activated by a reader to generate meaning, since, after all, the pages contain no text.

The Book as Ephemeral

Some artists have taken the act of cutting up the book to its logical conclusion: destruction, or perhaps less critically, deconstruction. Whether deforming and sculpting the book object to create something new or simply documenting its decomposition, such books draw attention to the format’s ephemerality. Much as we love books, archiving them in libraries for future generations and exhibiting them behind glass as art objects, they are a vulnerable medium. Not only are their physical forms (including the tablet, scroll, codex, and variations) susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by ideological and political difference.⁷⁴ Some artists’ books embrace this impermanence, inviting us to meditate on our fears that books might go up in smoke.

The resurgence of artists’ books in the 1960s is concurrent with the dematerialization of the work of art, a turn away from the gallery system, and a broad artistic interest in the viewer’s participation, decentering the artist. Unlike Oulipo, whose constraints provide opportunities for creative bravado, the instruction-based works of Fluxus artists provide opportunities for critiques of genius and for increased attention to the viewer. In 1968, artist Bruce Nauman created a conceptual artist’s book that epitomizes the concurrent sense of the book’s utility and ephemerality. His Burning Small Fires consists of photographs documenting Nauman burning each page of Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, which he pulled out of the volume and scattered on his studio floor. The glass of milk, however, he spared.

Offset-printed on a single, large foldout poster, the fifteen time-lapse photographs are tipped into a folio whose cover is printed in bright red on white paper, classic Ruscha colors, save a gradient of red ink at the fore-edge that suggests the titular fire licking its way out of its enclosure. The title’s stacked red lettering evokes Ruscha’s typography as well, but plays with it by using lowercase letters and staggering, rather than centering, the words. This alignment breaks each word across the folio’s spine, creating a subtle dig when we realize the front cover reads “urning all ires,” homophonically suggesting Nauman expected an angry reaction to his gesture. Little did he know he would earn not “ire” but adulation. Ruscha, flattered and amused, acquired several copies for his own collection.⁷⁵ Nauman’s book follows through on the implicit burning of Ruscha’s book by not only actualizing it but also revealing the insufficiency of the final image, that cooling glass of milk Ruscha serves up as a comic non sequitur to douse the preceding flames. There’s a lovely ouroboros-like quality to the self-reflexive gesture of extinguishing Ruscha’s fires by setting them. In 2003, Jonathan Monk would chase the tail with Small Fires Burning, a 16mm film in which he burned Nauman’s book.

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang was thinking about the explosive power of books when he created Danger Book: Suicide Fireworks (Ivory Press, 2006), a series of nine unique oversized fifty-page books on handmade paper that contain drawings of fireworks explosions and columns of smoke executed in gunpowder and glue. A bundle of matches precariously adhered to a striking strip inside the book near its spine extends a bit of string from between the closed volume’s pages. This bookmark, when pulled, sets the dangerous book ablaze.⁷⁶ The artist’s statement warns, “Be careful of books. Be careful with books. Be careful or one can become a weapon-wielder. Be careful or one can become the victim.”⁷⁷ Books are, as biblioclasts well know, highly combustible in both material form and content.

In spite of its vulnerability to flame, insects, water, and sun damage, the codex is, in fact, a wonderful archival medium. It requires no software updates, can hold up in hot and cold climates, and, if printed and bound with quality acid-free materials, can withstand the oil of readers’ hands, the jostling of being taken up and put back down, and numerous openings and closings that gradually break its spine. But the codex is vulnerable to both political and market forces. As ideologies shift, as data is updated, and as libraries become more cluttered, books are deaccessioned, sold, and in some cases thrown away. In 2013, the Libraries of Fisheries and Oceans Canada underwent a massive digitization process before closing seven of its eleven branches to reduce operating costs. The digitization was never completed, however, and stores of ecological research from the nineteenth century forward were simply sold to third parties, given away, or tossed in landfills.⁷⁸ Libraries throughout the United States have, for the last decade, focused spending on creating comfortable social and collaboration spaces, providing access to computers and the internet, and facilitating meetings and events. In many cases stacks get hidden underground or off-site, limiting what we can easily access. We can’t save all information forever, and writers can’t necessarily presume their work will last through the ages. While we might assume that digital books will have a longer shelf life than print, the proliferation of reading devices coupled with the pace of technological development virtually ensures the obsolescence of e-books tied to particular software or hardware. Ephemerality is thus a concern shared by physical and digital books.

Libraries’ practice of selling and discarding books has directly fed an important current in contemporary book arts, since artists can get their hands on “unwanted” tomes extremely affordably. The twenty-first century has seen a surge of interest in altered books and book sculpture, facilitated by the overarching notion that the book is an artifact not long for this world, something Renaissance authors like Shakespeare sensed with their repeated punning on tome and tomb.⁷⁹ Artist Brian Dettmer, who carves away at encyclopedias, dictionaries, and old hardbound volumes to create visual palimpsests, talks about his practice as one of liberating books rendered outmoded by the digital age. His carefully scalpeled sculptures treat the book as a body—Stewart refers to such works as “vivisections,”⁸⁰ since these books are not, in fact, as dead as their destroyers would like to believe. In Bookworks, a thoughtful study of de-mediated or unreadable books, Stewart attributes the volume of altered bookworks to a popular belief that the book’s information storage and retrieval function has been absorbed by digital media. Sculptures like Dettmer’s turn codex books from conveyors of information back into objects. They draw our attention to the ephemerality of the codex and treat the book as material, like clay or stone, to be used in new ways. Inherent in this gesture, however, is the viewer’s knowledge that the book before us is now inaccessible. It is given and taken away at once, and we can’t see it outside the system of communication in which it normally functions.

From scroll to bound folio, books have indeed evolved. And like all things subject to evolution, they can face extinction.

—Garrett Stewart, Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art

Books’ ephemerality, volatility, and potential to “self-destruct” have been activated by many book artists, perhaps first in Marcel Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade (1919), a perverse wedding gift to his sister Suzanne and her husband Jean Crotti, sent to them on their honeymoon in Buenos Aires. His piece consisted of instructions to hang a geometry textbook from strings on their balcony where the elements could gradually wear away at it. Duchamp’s title suggests the piece is itself unhappy—a book mourning its own loss. His intent, however, in asking Suzanne to participate in the creation of the work was not sadness, but humor: “It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea.”⁸¹ All that remains of the work, which has been lost like most of Duchamp’s original readymades, is Suzanne’s painting of it—a book that can truly never be read.

Dieter Roth took a comic perspective on books’ emphemerality in his series Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage, 1961–1970), for which he pulped books and magazines he disliked and cured them, using spices, fat, gelatin, and water to fit Marx, Hegel, and German tabloids into new casings. We ought to remember that a hardback is also known as a case binding because the covers are constructed separately and the book block glued into this case. We also commonly store books on bookcases, once more commonly known as “presses,” perhaps for the way they enclose and contain our ever-expanding libraries.⁸² His “processing” of these texts puns on our “consumption” of literature as well as our desire to “preserve” it, which changes its form entirely by encasing and drying it out. The book on the archival shelf is inactive, heavy, desiccated, unlike the vivid copy in the reader’s hands. While Roth’s intent appears to be preservation, the joke’s on the archivist: unless refrigerated, the shelf life of a dried sausage is approximately six weeks, according to the USDA, and many of the artist’s works are thus highly unstable.

Roth was also, it seems, punning on his own name (he adopted the spelling Diter Rot when he moved to Iceland)—the work would, he knew, undoubtedly decompose. As he famously wrote in his work Snow (1964–1965), “Wait, later this will be nothing,”⁸³ a phrase that would apply equally well to his sculptures made of chocolate, birdseed, and rabbit feces—organic materials making a humble claim for art and the artist’s impermanence. Roth even planned an unrealized series of poems printed on rolling paper to be smoked—an idea that also occurred to Chinese artist Xu Bing, who in 2000 created Tobacco Project, a series of artworks exploring tobacco’s cultural, economic, and historic significance in North Carolina, China, and Virginia. It includes Red Book, a red metal case of Zhonghua-brand cigarettes with quotes from Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book stamped on them; Traveling Down the River, a thirty-foot-long cigarette laid on top of a reproduction of a twelfth-century pictorial scroll and burned; and Tobacco Book, whose pages of compressed tobacco leaves were consumed by beetles during the exhibition.

We might equate altered and ephemeral books with recycling—giving old materials new life. Roth frequently reused all kinds of printed matter, creating books from cut-up pages of the London Daily Mirror, discarded Make Ready proofs collected from print shop floors, and pages of comic books with die-cut holes like bubbles popping to reveal the page below. Newsprint and Make Ready are two materials intended to be discarded. The newspaper is relevant today but superseded tomorrow by an entirely new set of news, hence its name. Make Ready, the sheets used in offset production to proof a print before running hundreds of copies, also has a short life span—it is a precursor to the real print, a kind of dress rehearsal for the page’s final performance. Make Ready sheets can be recycled or used for other purposes in the print shop, but they are, by definition, not yet ready for consumption. In bringing them together, Roth highlights the book as a container for even the flimsiest of propositions and makes us think about the status of completion conferred by the act of binding as well as the illusion of permanence it lends its content.

Impermanence need not be read only through the lens of loss. For those altered bookmakers and writers engaged in the poetic process of erasure, systematically obscuring words from a source text in order to draw the reader’s attention to alternative texts embedded within it, destruction is a generative impulse—one that reveals the potentiality inherent in any text. Treating the page as a grid of language, as Williams does in Sweethearts, artists and writers like Tom Phillips, Jen Bervin, and Mary Ruefle unearth new texts that in some cases comment upon, subvert, or renew the books in which they appear.

The Book as Mute Object

Some artists’ books, however, purposefully offer the idea of the book without providing any reading material whatsoever. While many theorists consider such illegible objects “anti books” or book sculpture, separating them from the artist’s book because of their refusal of access, such works remind us that the book is a concept we have imbued with cultural capital and importance by virtue of the resources spent on its production and the prestige associated with authorship. Our contemporary concerns over the death of the book are as bound up in fear of the death of the author or the loss of our intellectual heritage, which books have come to symbolize.

Pamela Paulsrud makes this anxiety palpable with her Touchstones, contemporary codices sanded down into smooth oblong agates, their covers and text revealing bands of color within. We touch such stones to remember, rather than read, just as we keep books on our shelves to remind us who we once were and what mattered to us, even if only to run our fingers along their spines. If a book can be explosive, these rocks feel less dangerous and more elemental. Paulsrud suggests even the silent book might provide an important foundation.

Lisa Kokin takes a more cynical perspective on the mute weight of books, turning them into stones to comment on the ways they weigh us down. In her series Room for Improvement, the artist pulps self-help books and sculpts them into papier-mâché balls, silencing their advice. While they look weighty, these objects are featherlight, ironically revealing these books, which profit off our desire for “improvement,” in fact lack substance. In these balls we catch glimpses of text, headbands, sometimes fragments of titles, but as books they are worth nothing more than the paper and glue they were once made from.

While these artists use stones to draw our attention to the book’s materials, others play with the mute page to draw our attention to text’s own materiality. Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo’s 5 Nights, from his series “The Weight of History,” transfers the entire content of “revolutionary texts that constituted the basis of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century”⁸⁴ into solid rectangular “pages” of ink painted directly on the gallery wall in dimensions equivalent to the ink used in their printing. All we can read are the titles and attribution for works by Hitler, Lenin, Castro, Mao, and Gadhafi with heavy ink above them shimmering like the blue-green surface of an oil slick. Referencing the influence of the written word and the heavy hand of censorship, Novo’s silent texts become imposing monolithic commentaries on the book’s power.

Ann Hamilton reflects on this power as well, but suggests it might heal, rather than wound us in her 1994 work lineament. For the piece, a performer peels text out of hardbound books whose pages are scored boustrophedon-style, allowing line after line to be lifted away in a single strand like an orange peel. These she winds into balls that turn the flat plane of the book into a three-dimensional object, evoking Wallace Stevens’s notion in “The Planet on the Table” that worthy poems contain “some lineament or character … / Of the planet of which they were a part.”⁸⁵ Lines of text with all their characters intact are wound into planets in Hamilton’s hands. The work reveals the volumetric quality of an object we presume to be flat, as the emptied pages form a well and the text accretes into a ball. The performance itself also draws attention to the text as a body, exhumed from that well. Touching it gently, as with liniment, the performer passes each ball through an opening in a small hospital screen to arrive like a patient “on the table” in a new form.

Like Hamilton, Buzz Spector silences the page to draw our attention to the language we use to construct the idea of the book. His A Passage, created the same year as Hamilton’s lineament, consists of a hardbound codex whose pages have been incrementally torn such that the flyleaf is nothing more than a deckled strip extending from the spine, the next page is perhaps a millimeter wider, and so on, each page a plateau extending beyond the one above it. With its cover open, the result is a sloping form our eye descends. This traversal reveals the structure of the page: its fully justified prose block, uniform margins, running title, and page number are so symmetrical they align across each torn edge. One is reminded of Carrión’s comments on the utter sameness of the page in mass-produced books. Not only does taking the pages apart draw attention to the codex’s careful design, it reveals that the same text has been printed on every sheet: page 181 of a book titled A Passage, containing a self-reflexive anecdote about a Jewish scholar who knew the Talmud so well he could identify the letter printed on the reverse of any other in the text.

While the scholar’s mental map implies intensive study and intimacy, the viewer has no hope of achieving such familiarity. The movement of our eyes provides no passage, keeping us in the same place, even as the volume is spent. We become bleary-eyed students reading and rereading the same selection without comprehension. It seems telling that the text refers to Spector’s series of torn books as “wedge shapes,” linking the reduced text to both cuneiform writing and the doorstop.⁸⁶ Perhaps Spector’s self-effacing (literally, the anecdote begins with a friend visiting the artist’s studio) book suggests that while the codex is a helpful structure for the support and transport of ideas, it is also temporary and transitional like the passage of time itself.

Perhaps no book form has been so superseded as the encyclopedia. The first of its kind, Denis Diderot’s seventeen-volume folio-size Encyclopédie, published in 1751, was a massive undertaking that employed a workforce of thousands, from writers to printers and binders. Diderot both contributed and enlisted the greatest minds of the French Enlightenment, including Rousseau and Voltaire, to provide the most current philosophy, science, culture, and mathematics to the masses. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Encyclopédie was both profitable and popular—so much so that quarto and octavo editions were introduced to ensure the book would be affordable to a broad readership. Over the course of the eighteenth century, it sold almost twenty-five thousand copies across Europe.⁸⁷ The encyclopedia was just as popular in the 1950s. A mainstay of the modern home, where bookshelves were proudly devoted to displaying the series of identically bound volumes, such sets now serve mostly as visual filler in furniture showrooms.

With the advent of digital encyclopedias on CD-ROM in the 1990s, and on the web shortly thereafter, the static codex with its periodic revisions and updates gave way to a malleable, living text. The devalued, decommissioned collections of knowledge often find their way into artists’ altered books, perhaps most poignantly in Scott McCarney’s book sculptures, in which large volumes hang open, their contents cascading out like a hypertextual waterfall of interconnected ideas. The volume itself becomes a literal Hanging Index (1992), as its title implies—with pages shredded to interwoven ribbons. McCarney comments directly on the deaccessioning of unpopular books by libraries in Never Read (1988), a sculpture composed of stacked library discards that narrows as it ascends. In his pointed pillar, the artist transforms the “never red” into its opposite—an evergreen. Sited in his garden, the sculpture provides bird nests in springtime, a vine trellis in summer, mouse holes in fall, and a snow-bedecked conifer in winter. Books, for such artists, are perennial spaces of transformation and possibility. Even when their content is not to be trusted, the power with which we imbue them is undeniable.

Muted books take on a totemic significance. Because we can’t “read” a book object or book sculpture, we see the idea of the book, a metaphor that has penetrated our culture so deeply it informs the language we use to describe ourselves. Though we’re taught not to “judge a book by its cover,” an honest person is “an open book” and a perceptive one can “read us like a book,” while we might emulate either by “taking a page out of their book.” “Bookworms” metaphorically consume books’ ideas the way their namesake (actually not a worm but a kind of beetle larva) consumes their pages. Such bibliophiles might find themselves “marginalized.” And we each carry an inner moral tome we consult before passing judgment on others with the phrase “In my book …” We book a trip because such voyages were once entered into a volume, though now such records happen mostly online. Likewise our bookkeeper “balances the books” even when using accounting software like Quickbooks to manage our finances. When studying for an exam, we “pound the books” until we’re expert enough to say we “wrote the book” on the subject. The book looms large in English idiom, standing in for the law (“throw the book at ’em”), history (“one for the books”), and social norms (“by the book”).

The language of the book as a space of fixity, certainty, and order reminds us that the book has been transmuted into an idea and ideal based on the role it plays in culture. Books are bedrock, and the rectilinear form has allowed us to envision them as the foundation of social order and self-actualization. Easily arrayed on shelves as a sign of erudition, capability, or wealth, the codex’s shape props us up not only metaphorically but also quite literally—for instance, when used to raise uneven furniture. It can, itself, serve as a kind of furnishing, offering as it does, a storage and filing system between its pages, in which we might press flowers, copy recipes, keep photographs, or compile clippings—habits of Renaissance readers that continue today.⁸⁸ The book props up its neighbors, too, as we learn pulling books off the shelf and watching the adjoining volumes topple. It can take us down as well, since it’s portability makes it a handy projectile when the moment arises. Defining the book involves consideration for its use as much as its form. Our changing idea of the book is co-constitutive of its changing structure.

3 The Book as Idea