A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing

From Blake, Breton, Whitman, Khlebnikov, Blanchot and Duchamp to Artaud, book artist Johanna Drucker and poet-critic Charles Bernstein, this massive collection houses a trove of essays, poems, prose text, illustrations and photographs that ponder just what a book is, isn't or can be. All are provocative. Poet and ethnologist Rothenberg (Technicians of the Sacred) and publisher and book dealer Clay present Derrida writing on Edmond Jab s, examining the differing sources of writing and speech and the role of inscription; critic Richard Sieburth on Mallarm and the latter's contention that the world exists to be in a book; Bernstein proposes language as the technology behind all technologies; and Jorge Luis Borges finds ""the cult of books"" evidenced in the world's religions. Generous excerpts from Jess Collins's O!, Tom Phillips's A Humument and many non-Western texts make this collection an eyeful, including the spectacular carved fonts in an imaginary language by Xu Bing. And bound into A Book of the Book is a gatefold on glossy stock of a poem by Blaise Cendars, illustrated by Sonia Delaunay. Rothenberg and Clay have intelligently structured their book, allowing the reader to move through the four sections and become increasingly grounded in an understanding of what the book qua book has become over two millennia. Just as wisely, they stay away from reducing this great effort to an appeal for recovering a tradition. (Dec.) Forecast: Every piece here deals in one way or the other with the book as objectDwhether phenomenological, cultural, historical, technical or aestheticDat a moment in history when the demise of books as we've come to know them is more than just cocktail-party chatterDit's boardroom chatter. If sought out and handsold, this book could be a hit with any literate reader; it will certainly find its way onto syllabi.