What exactly is a book? In The Book (MIT Press, 2018) I tried to define it with respect to its status as object, content, idea, and interface. Detailing the book’s history of changing material forms and looking to the limit cases of artists’ books and digital books, The Book acknowledges that its object of inquiry is changeable, contested, and shaped largely through dialogue and experimentation. Rather than staking a claim on a specific definition, I designed the book to include as many voices as possible—where the series had set aside space for pull-quotes from the text, I inserted quotations from the thinkers and makers who inspired my research—a chorus of definitions and re-framings. Yet even as I assembled the manuscript, I knew there were many more people I wanted to talk to—many more possible definitions than could be enclosed within those covers.
In April 2018, I set out to gather some of those definitions, contacting writers, artists, bookbinders, publishers, librarians, and scholars to ask What is the/a book? I viewed the 101 responses I received as a critical companion to The Book, one that would fill gaps both known and unforeseen. I published those definitions at t-h-e-b-o-o-k.com that summer and fall. As they fell into place, the individual voices became a kind of collective, gathered under the banner of the book. Together, we published those definitions in The American Book Review in 2020, and in 2021 The Centre for Expanded Poetics in Montreal brought out a Riso-printed artists’ edition, The Book: 101 Definitions, with their partners at Anteism Press. It felt fitting that these words kept finding their way into the world (and into the hands of readers) in different forms.
This fall, Invisible Books will re-issue the once-again shapeshifting collection as The Book: 123 Definitions. Five years after its first printing, and eight years after these definitions were first formulated feels like an ideal time to widen the circle of possibility and invite new perspectives, particularly as my own understanding of “the book” remains in flux. In 2018, I described the book as a portable information storage and retrieval technology—a material form for the dissemination of text. But that definition fails to encompass all that the word “book” has come to mean to me—a meaning that inheres in the spaces between these definitions and between the people they represent.
In August of 2024 I lost my library, which disintegrated into water and ash when lightning struck the roof of our Seattle home. As I continue to process that loss, I have come to realize how much each book is, to me, a point of contact with another person, a relationship, and a memory. My definition of the book is something like what Marcel Duchamp called the infrathin / inframince. Tangible and intangible at once, he explained the infrathin only through examples, of which my favorite is “La chaleur d’un siège (qui vient d’être quitté)” (the heat of a seat that has just been left). Perhaps the book’s meaning is in the traces of all the hands that touched it, their imperceptible warmth; and perhaps it is also in the minute embrace where the cover of one paperback has laminated to its neighbor as its invisible coating melted, then scorched.
As I gathered new definitions to interweave with those in the original collection, I kept finding the heat where one definition seemed to rub up against another, without the authors knowing whose words just occupied that same imagined page, that saddle, that seat. And I felt a strong sense of hope surrounded by the perspectives of people to whom books continue to matter, ephemeral as they are. In an ideal world, the 101 and 123 definitions will continue to multiply into future gatherings that expand what’s possible for those of us who continue to make, read, savor, and share books.
Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. She is the author of 7 individual and collaborative books, most recently W/\SH with Terri Witek. She is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
