The Book, Amaranth Borsuk (MIT Press, 2018)

Borsuk brings a creative perspective to the existential question -- What is the book? -- and,
with an artist's perception of her medium of choice, displaces the old companion existential
question -- Is the end of the book nigh? -- with an altogether more interesting one -- Where
next for the book?

Borsuk starts with the invention of the alphabet to set the scene for the advent of “The Book
as Object”, as the first chapter is entitled. In this chapter and the next (“The Book as
Content”), Borsuk reminds us -- from Sumer's clay to Amazon's Kindle, from Johannes
Gutenberg to Project Gutenberg – that who may make a book, how it is transacted, how and
where we use it, how we perceive and speak of it -- all have affected the physicality of the
book object and what it contains. This first half of The Book steers us through these
interdependencies to a turning point where the pinnacle of the book arts -- Beatrice Warde's
vision of the book as a crystalline container of content -- and the book's commodification
combine to cause the book's physicality to disappear because it is so taken for granted,
leaving us with "the book as idea".

Here "The Book as Idea" -- the longest chapter -- introduces book art. It is a wry pivot: the
artistic genius supplants the authorial genius; what the latter takes as invisible background,
the former re-makes as self-regarding foreground. Works of book art are inevitably self-
referential and self-aware and, for that reason, have much “to teach us about a path forward
for the book". To explore this, Borsuk offers four flashpoints that highlight "the energies
motivating artwork in book form": William Blake, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ed Ruscha and Ulises
Carrión.
Blake’s work represents three of these "energies”: centering the production processes on the
author/artist; using the book as a sociopolitical and visionary platform; and redefining the
relationship between text and image. These energies or themes show themselves in
Borsuk’s contemporary examples and others that come readily to mind: Xu Bing (China),
Sam Winston (UK) and Tim Mosely (Australia).

Mallarmé, like Blake, was reacting to his own perceived Satanic mills – the Linotype and
newsprint -- draining poetry of its spirituality. With his visionary dictum -- “everything in the
world exists in order to end up as a book” -- Mallarmé nudged the book toward pure concept
and opened its mystical covers to the Surrealists, Conceptualists and biblioclasts.
Foreshadowing the Concretists’ mixing fonts and sizes, breaking up the line and even
breaking the page -- Mallarmé used text to evoke image and, in his view, remake the book
as a "spiritual instrument".

Ed Ruscha's flashpoint illuminates a Zen-like vision and a different way of changing the
relationship of text to image. For Ruscha and many book artists he influenced, the text is
restricted to the book's title, interacting with deadpan photos and their layout to deliver a
tongue-in-cheek work of book art. Ruscha's spatiotemporal play manifests itself across the
accordion book format and out-of-sequence juxtapositions. Ironically for Ruscha's work,
intended for the democratic end of the spectrum far from Mallarmé's rarefied intent, one has
more chance of seeing them in an exhibition than in a roadside stop's rack of print.

Display of Ruscha's Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at the Gulbenkian's Pliure: Prologue
(la Part du Feu), 2015, Paris. Reflected in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut's
1966 Fahrenheit 451; in the lower left, Bruce Nauman's 1968 Burning Small Fires; in the
upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva's 1974 La bibliotheque en feu.

Carrión is a counter-flashpoint to Ruscha. Where Ruscha reveled in self-publishing

commodification, Carrión sneered at the commercial form. Where Ruscha resisted the label
"conceptual artist", Carrión played it to the hilt. Where Ruscha's work elicited homages and a
high profile, Carrión's work, much lower in profile, provided a compelling range of hooks or
influences on which to hang different manifestations of book art. In fact, Borsuk uses those
hooks to organize the examples in the rest of this chapter.

The final chapter -- "The Book as Interface" -- traces the book's digital history from the
Memex in Vannevar Bush's 1945 classic "As we may think" to T.L. Uglow's 100-author
blockchain collaboration in 2017, A Universe Explodes from Visual Editions' series Editions
at Play. In it, Borsuk reminds us:

Our current moment appears to be much like the first centuries of movable type, a
cusp. Just as manuscript books persisted into the Gutenberg era, books currently
exist in multiple forms simultaneously: as paperbacks, audiobooks, EPUB
downloads, and, in rare cases, interactive digital experiences. (p. 244)

The Book is an excellent introductory textbook for courses on book art or the history of the
book and, by virtue of its style and artist's perspective, will appeal to anyone with an interest
in this essential technology of civilization and its growing role as a material and focus of art
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.