“Withdrawn from Circulation (detail)” (2010), by Wendy Kawabata. Courtesy Wendy Kawabata/Corban Estate.
A perennial topic of conversation among people who debate literature on the Internet is the relative importance of books as physical objects. Foremost among defenders of the printed book are those who extol the sensual pleasures of reading—the feel of the pages, the heft of the object, the smell of the paper—and maintain that it is impossible to experience those pleasures digitally. “The tangible reality of books defines us.… We believe that the objects themselves have magical powers,” writes the columnist Joe Queenan in his recent “One for the Books.” “The touch of the page brings us into the world, while the screen keeps us out,” argues the scholar Andrew Piper in “Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times.” (For paper partisans, there’s also a book-scented perfume called Paper Passion, and, for those not averse to screens, a spray you can apply to your e-reader to make it smell more like a book.)
In a related, but separate, camp are those attracted not to the tactile pleasures of books but to their beauty as objects. This includes bookshelf taxonomists: “My Ideal Bookshelf” pairs interviews with major writers and cultural figures with illustrations of their favorite books; “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books” spotlights the book collections of thirteen renowned novelists. (A writer on The Rumpus calls this “library porn”). Some lavish their attention on books that belong to no one, as in the photo series “Expired,” by Kerry Mansfield, which documents discarded or withdrawn library books, or a Tumblr entirely devoted to photos of the abandoned books found on Brooklyn stoops. These book-portraiture projects all in engage in anthropomorphizing: a sense that books have personalities that can be captured through their physical appearance. Through the medium of film, books have been made to come fully to life, as in the Oscar-winning 2011 animated short, “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” or a two-minute video that uses a bookshop’s inventory to produce a charming stop-motion animation.
Then there are the dissenters and skeptics who think that excessive focus on the physical beauty of books undermines the real purpose of literature, which can be found in the text and not in the vessel that delivers it. In a video interview about the publishing house McSweeney’s, n+1’s Keith Gessen criticizes the tendency in our culture to turn literature into a “pretty object that you buy.” The reverence for books as objects, writes James Gleick in a New York Times op-ed about the digitization of historical documents, is “sentimentalism, and even fetishization.” The physical book “is like the coffin at a funeral,” he continued. “It deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on.”
Alongside the fetishists and anti-fetishists, Internet literary culture has also seen the flourishing of a third group, one that celebrates books neither as precious physical objects nor as utilitarian vessels but uses them as the raw materials for works of art. The forms are varied—some are sculptures made from individual books, others use books as the building blocks for larger structures, while still others make books the canvas for paintings or drawings—but these projects have in common a way of playing off the near-spiritual aura that many of us associate with physical books, both augmenting books’ specialness by using them to make something beautiful, and undercutting it by ignoring their original purpose.
This genre of work, known as “altered-book art,” is not a new phenomenon. The British artist Tom Phillips's page-by-page transformation of a Victorian novel, beginning in the nineteen-sixties, was a pioneering example; the contemporary American sculptor Donald Lipski has an extensive body of book-related art. But Tumblrs like Fuck Yeah, Book Arts! and various other art and literary blogs have made it easy to view altered-book art by lesser-known artists from all over the world. Below, you can view a slide show featuring some of these book-related works of art: delicate paper constructions by an anonymous sculptor who delivers her work as gifts to libraries around Edinburgh; the geometric paper installations of an artist who uses the dog-eared pages of withdrawn-from-circulation books from Honolulu libraries; the sculptures of a Montreal-based artist who carves intricate topographies into the pages of intact volumes; a copy of “Leaves of Grass” transformed into a “Field of Greens” as part of a joint project between the Maine College of Art and the Portland Public Library; a South Korean artist’s digitally illuminated “electronic books (made not from actual books but from cast resin simulacra).”
The paper fetishists and text fetishists alike might view this kind of work as sacrilege—it does, after all, involve the destruction or deconstruction of books, and the disconnection of books from the act of reading. And yet, these works serve, perhaps more effectively than more straightforward forms of book worship, as moving expressions of our transforming relationship to books—and the potential for beauty, as well as loss, in that change.
“Wagnalls Wheel” (2010), by Brian Dettmer. Courtesy Brian Dettmer/Toomey Tourell.
“Library of American History (detail)” (2012), by Brian Dettmer. Courtesy Brian Dettmer/Toomey Tourell.
“Travel Plans (Barcelona)” (2008), by Brian Dettmer. Courtesy Brian Dettmer/Mito.
“Tract” (2008), by Doug Beube.
“Hurly Burly” (2008), by Cara Barer.
“Full of Smiles and Soft Attentions” (2012), by Michael Stilkey.
“Field of Greens” (2006), by Susan Winn.
“Le Pont [The Bridge]” (2008), by Guy Laramée. Courtesy Guy Laramée/Foster/White.
“Students of the Law” (2007), by Jonathan Callan. Courtesy Johnathan Callan/Hopstreet.
“The Library of Past Choices” (2007), by Jonathan Callan. Courtesy Johnathan Callan/Hopstreet.
“Preparing to Fly” (2013), by Anonymous. Courtesy Chris Scott.
“Poetree” (2011), by Anonymous. Courtesy Chris Scott.
“Lighting Books” (2013), by Airan Kang. Courtesy Airan Kang/Bryce Wolkowitz.
“Withdrawn from Circulation (detail)” (2010), by Wendy Kawabata. Courtesy Wendy Kawabata/Corban Estate.
