JW: What practical problems did you encounter in attaching the books to the surface? JL: I used canvas to key to board surfaces with household materials like Polyfilla. I anchored books with. screws and wire.

JL: Mostly from Peter Eaton's, a second-hand bookseller in Holland Park Avenue. He had bins of very cheap books outside his shop. I just delved, picking out titles or compact shapes that interested me.

JL: Sometimes. If the title wasn't relevant I might obliterate it or remove the spine. You see, I detected a consistency between the black on white of the printed pages and the 'geometry' - the spatial relations of points - in my spray paintings, though, of course, in the case of books, the former angular geometry becomes linear and time-determined. On the outside a book is part of the world of appearances, but

inside it is governed by a code. So, in a way, a book is like the human organism with its genetic code. And aren't such organisms anchored in a whole event - Nature? That's what the questioning and examination of the form was about. I was finding out more by this approach than by reading.

JL: The ground, if it is white, stands for 'no action' - the zero state of action. Art's blank canvas as a work was equivalent to Einstein's conclusion that gravitational collapse of the universe would proceed to nothing.

JL: In the beginning I wanted to concentrate on the white to the black because
that's the sculptural element - a dynamic, autogenerative relation. Only later, in
1959, did the coloured pages come into it. This was a response to a film made in my
studio by Pathe News. My idea was to have an unmoving object - the book relief -
animated by changes of pages and colour. That is, a universe which provides a
stable framework but within which there are changes of state. Pathe News proved
uncooperative so I made the film myself. It's called Unclassified Material. You can
run the film in reverse and it still works.