Tag Archives: book

History of an image scraper

“Shinn’s motel room contained 26 stolen books and a file full of inventory cards for another 154 volumes. He was well-educated in book history, restoration and binding, and the tools of his trade filled the room: color-stained cloths and Q-tips with jars of shoe polish, used to color-match and conceal library markings on book spines. […]

SICV in Barcelona

Tras poner en marcha mi Instituto Escandinavo de Vandalismo Comparado, muchos se preguntan por qué le puse un nombre tan peculiar, sin llegar a tener del todo claro si tomárselo en serio o no. “Giving the Finger (Back) to the Digital: The Art and Politics of Archival Practice”. Presentation at the MACBA symposium La condició de […]

The importance of punctuation

The typesetters at Sytin’s print-works in Moscow struck on September 19. They demanded a shorter working day and a higher piecework rate per 1,000 letters set, not excluding punctuation marks. This small event set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike – the strike which started over punctuation marks and ended by […]

A printing press of one’s own

A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer is within their walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press. Museum Without Walls, André Malraux.

A book worm’s micrography

From http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/hooke.html Hooke’s reputation in the history of biology largely rests on his book Micrographia, published in 1665. Hooke devised […] one of the best such microscopes of his time, and used it in his demonstrations at the Royal Society’s meetings. With it he observed organisms as diverse as insects, sponges, bryozoans, foraminifera, and bird […]

The index at work

Erasmus censored The censorship of books by the Catholic Church has been a complex process. The list of books to be banned is first compiled in an Index, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Then the books are physically altered. Various censored specimens have been kept and give us the chance to see the index at work.

Bindings II (nobody knows what a book is)

The Book as Diagram

“People say that nobody knows what a book is any more. It is observed that people sit on trains, or buses and in waiting rooms and where a few years ago they would have been reading a book, they will instead be consoled at their phone doing some data processing. This might be the case, […]

Bindings

Many books are depicted on the photos of the Guttormsgaard’s collection. Their view is standardized. The book is displayed wide-open. The binding occupies the centre of the image. The binding is the invisible element that distributes the symmetry between two pages. This probe extracts the bindings of the books and display them side by side.