Essential Knowledge: The Book

A book is not always a book, and a reader is not always a reader. Sometimes a book is a film—and a film projector. Sometimes a reader is a moviegoer—and a film projectionist. Our page turning sets images in motion, pulling us back into the tactile relationship to print we had as children. Or into work that has fallen into history, like the labor of film projectionists rendered obsolete by technological change. When the book is a film, then, it embodies more than a relationship between mediums, more than a mix-up of technologies variously textual and visual. It also materializes a relationship to time. It materializes historical experience in the tempos where mediums meet as we turn the book’s pages: sometimes slower, sometimes faster, sometimes bookishly, sometimes cinematically—but always historically. The book is the place where we are always in history, paging our way through time.

—Joel Burges

Joel Burges is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Rochester. He has written extensively on time, obsolescence, and labor in contemporary culture and critical theory, turning to mediums as varied as the mimeograph, animation, film, television, video games, and the book. He has published Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture (Rutgers UP, 2018) and co-edited, with Amy J. Elias, Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2018). He is at work on Literature after TV, a history of how the rise of television transformed the practice of literary writing in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

A book made of paper means to be consumed until falling apart. Its vitality comes from its circulation among friends, family, strangers. An author often doesn’t know where, when, how. A book may be stolen fairly easily, though I’m not condoning that. But I’d like to point out that electronic versions can be stolen away by companies if you stop paying. A story: It took me ten years to write and publish my first book with a small press. At an open studios event in Lower Manhattan, I displayed a stack of them for sale for $12 each. I also hung up some works on paper—works made quickly, I admit. One work on the wall sold for a pretty hefty amount, and one book was stolen! This is why I keep on writing and making books: for their promiscuity, fluxing values, and because they beg to be well used.

—Jill Magi

Jill Magi’s books include Threads, Torchwood, SLOT, Cadastral Map, LABOR, and Pageviews/Innervisions, a monograph on textimage hybridity. SPEECH is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2019. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Rivulet, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. Jill was a featured blogger for the Poetry Foundation in 2017, and in 2015, she wrote commentaries for Jacket2 on “a textile poetics.” Other essays have appeared in The Edinburgh University Press Critical Medical Humanities Reader, The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-garde, The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind,and The Eco-Language Reader. Jill has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center. She has had solo exhibitions with Tashkeel in Dubai, and with the Project Space Gallery at New York University Abu Dhabi where she joined the faculty in 2013.

jillmagi.net

A book is a magic portal.

—Sarah Bodman

Sarah Bodman is Senior Research Fellow for Artists’ Books at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England, where she runs projects investigating and promoting contemporary book arts. She is also Programme Leader for MA Multi-disciplinary Printmaking at the Bower Ashton Campus. A book artist and researcher, she is the author of Creating Artists’ Books and the editor of the Artist’s Book Yearbook, a biennial reference publication on contemporary book arts. She is also the editor of the Book Arts Newsletter and The Blue Notebook journal for artists’ books. Sarah writes a regular news column on artists’ books for the ARLIS UK and Ireland News-Sheet, and an artists’ books column for the journal Printmaking Today.

bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

The book is a contingency that occurs in any mind where symbolic apparitions stimulate neuronal or heartfelt ruminations.

—Jhave

Alchemy in a word, in the way a sign is scratched into the wet dirt and the dirt starts to dry and the sign is fixed. When the dirt begins to crumble before the wind, intangible, into dust, someone presses a leaf into the impression to hold it and a page is born. Then another pressing to make sure the first will not disappear. Placed one over the other, the silence between the leaves becomes a portal among the pages, leading the eyes to burrow through the opening. A dazzling. Where one listens and eventually closes one’s eyes, forgetting the frame. Such fragile fasteners hold it together, always in decay like the dry and precarious dirt. But the sounds remain. And the glow of singing between the coherence, spoken into the mind, sometimes through the fingertips, sometimes through the breath.

—Samuel Ace

Samuel Ace (formerly Linda Smukler) is a trans and genderqueer author of three collections of poetry: Normal Sex, Home in three days. Don’t wash., and most recently Stealth, with poet Maureen Seaton. A new book of poems, Our Weather Our Sea, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in early 2019. Ace is also a visual artist and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Fund Prize in Poetry, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, Aufgabe, Fence, The Atlas Review, Black Clock, Mandorla, Versal, The Collagist, Posit, Vinyl, Troubling the Line: Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, Best American Experimental Poetry 2016, and many other publications. Ace is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Mount Holyoke College.

samuelace.com

The book is a time travel device—allowing us to slip into the imagination of a future mind.

—Indira Allegra

Indira Allegra works with tension as creative material to investigate themes of haunting and memorial. She is active in a range of fields including sculpture, performance, writing and installation. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Arts Incubator in Chicago, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Mills College Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton, 808 Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery, The Alice Gallery and SOMArts among others. Her commissions include performances for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Allegra’s writing has been widely anthologized, and she has contributed works to Foglifter Magazine, Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift Magazine, and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought among others. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.

indiraallegra.com

Thinking about what the book is, for me, is also thinking about what a publication is, what it means to publish, that is, to deem a work as finished and complete and whole, to then prepare the work to be seen by others, to then share that work with others in some bound or unbound form. The book, then, has something to do with access and accessibility, with readers and readership, with the relationship and traversed distance between a writer’s hand and reader’s eye. The book, then, is the physical manifestation of a relationship between a writer and a reader.

—Janice Lee

The book: refuge, dissent, beacon and nexus.

—Lisa Pearson

Lisa Pearson is the founder and publisher of Siglio Press. This definition is adapted from her essay “On the Small & the Contrary.”

Over Time

• the stories humans told around campfires and the ensuing conversation

then humans found a way to move those stories across time and space
• the stories and ideas humans carved into rocks
• the stories and ideas humans wrote on papyrus scrolls
• the stories and ideas humans hand-wrote and then printed on sheaths of bound paper

then when interactive media was developed
• the notion of the page expanded to include audio/video and limited interaction

and then when interactive media combined with the internet a book became
• a PLACE where humans shared stories and ideas and discussed them, returning us back to the beginning

—Bob Stein

Bob Stein is founder and Co-Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book and founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. 11 years ago, Stein started ‘Night Kitchen’ to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. A 2017 TED Resident, Stein’s recent projects include SocialBook and Lectory.

futureofthebook.org

The book is the most intimate interaction between the animal and the mineral/vegetable kingdoms.

—Robin Price

Robin Price is an artist, editor, designer, letterpress printer & publisher, creating artists’ books since 1984. “A chameleon among book artists,” she has a long history of collaborating with others, resulting in extensive diversity in content and form. Her limited edition press books & unique work are collected and exhibited internationally.

robinpricepublisher.com