This is a continuation of the post, “Between Definitions: The infrathin possibilities of the book,” in which I described the process of assembling 123 definitions of “the book” by artists, librarians, scholars, and booksellers. The more I engage with the book as both object and idea, the more I see its definition in the infrathin spaces where one definition rubs up against the next. Below you will find a series of gatherings that shelve connected definitions alongside one another.
A book is a technology of insurrection, an ungovernable animal.
—Gabriela Jauregui
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The book is the sword in stone nestled in the belly of the empire. Many have sought to wield its power, devouring and destroying it in their quest. But the book resists by remaining dormant—its full powers yet to be revealed by a yearning public.
—Vivian Sming
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A book eludes definition; it is a free being, always open, even in the most hermetic and illegible of cases, even when censored, awaiting to be read, to be listened to. The book is a generous being—a whole universe—that offers itself to you. It shelters you, moves you, sometimes acts as a poetic provocation; at times, it wounds you terribly, always through an intimate, embodied encounter—a place of refuge, a space to honor imagination, to inhabit, to linger in, or perhaps to let go.
—Shirin Salehi
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The book: refuge, dissent, beacon, and nexus.
—Lisa Pearson
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A book is dynamic. It functions as a catalyst: its purpose is to change its reader. A book embodies, suggests, conjures, informs, instructs; it frames alternatives; it provides other ways of knowing, being, and doing.
—Emily Larned
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The book is a living entity. It is an entanglement, an interweaving of different (human and nonhuman) agencies.
The book is a specific material apparatus, of which we are a part. Books as apparatuses are performative; they are active agentic forms that are reality shaping.
Books are always in the process of becoming (albeit a process that is continuously interrupted and disturbed), they cut together and apart. Through these book binding and unbinding practices, both the book as we know it and we ourselves arise.
—Janneke Adema
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A book is an object that invites an experience.
Something must turn for the book to be experienced: pages, leaves, a word, a worm, your head, the room.
—Genevieve Kaplan
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As a network of embodied interactions, the book invites us all to delve into the spatial, temporal, visual, verbal, and tactile experiences it brings together.
—Tatiani Rapatzikou
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The book is our desire to hold together what time pulls apart. It is our collective will to accumulate the fragments of what we know, reassemble them in sensible form, and so come to understand.
—Whitney Trettien
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The book is a time travel device—allowing us to slip into the imagination of a future mind.
—Indira Allegra
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A book is a time machine. The time it takes to conceive and create a book is compressed into a physical form, then expands when the book is read. This compression of time is rarely linear. Nor is its expansion, though it has limits: a book begins and ends. Because it takes time to read a book, its meaning changes as it is read. Because time carries on, a book’s meaning also changes when it is not being read. Copies of a book may survive for some time after its last reading. Or a book may persist conceptually after its last copy is gone. The time it takes to read a book may be a portion of the time it takes to create another book. The same is true of a book’s survival. In this sense, a book neither begins nor ends.
—Levi Sherman
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The book is a dislocation device.
—Travis Shaffer
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.
