For my project I wanted to connect back on my midterm since I really enjoyed the topic and material I was exploring. The change that I saw in Thomas Moffet’s “Insectorum Theatrum” and how to went from a scientific book to a collector’s item shows how the materiality of books not only shapes their preservation but also their meaning. It shows that a text’s physical evolution across time creates layers of interpretation that are just as significant as the content printed on the pages. My midterm focused specifically on the gilt edges as a “hinge point” in the book’s biography, and I found really funny by the irony that this book about collecting and classifying insects was itself collected and reclassified over time. For my final project, I want to make that parallel visual and tangible by literally curating specimens of the book’s material life the same way Moffet curated specimens of insect life.

I’m planning to create a shadow box/display case (think like a specimen box with the glass front and pinned insects) that contains physical samples and artifacts representing different phases of the Insectorum Theatrum’s material transformations. Each specimen will be carefully mounted, labeled with handwritten tags mimicking scientific specimen labels, and arranged to tell the story of the book’s evolution. The “specimens” I plan to include are marbled paper samples, gilded paper edges, tea-stained pages with insect illustration, fragments of Latin text, mock library materials, and “damage” samples. Each specimen will have a label card that identifies what material element it represents and what that element tells us about how the book was valued at that moment in history.

My purpose is to argue that we can’t separate the “text” of Moffet’s entomology from its physical forms, and that each material change represents a different reader claiming ownership over how the book should be valued. By presenting these material elements as “specimens” worthy of scientific examination, I’m making the case that a book’s physical biography deserves the same careful observation and classification that Moffet applied to beetles and butterflies. The book itself becomes the insect under study.

When perusing a library or bookstore, after admiring the initial books on the tables for display, one is met with shelves of books filed with their spines out. Though today we might not think anything about this choice of organization, this method of storing books is relatively new. Historically, books were stored in various ways, like horizontally, with fore-edges out, on lecterns, and many other ways, except for spine facing outwards like we see commonly today. The shift to storing books vertically and with the spine out came out of necessity during the mid-sixteenth century as more books were being printed and bought. As books became more accessible, one’s collection of books was not enough to show off wealth, intellect, and power. Instead, money was spent on binding book collections in a beautiful and uniform way, with the only way to show off these indicators of high status being through the book spine. 

The purpose of this essay is to explore how books are and remain status symbols. Books were, and still are, objects that require lots of labor and money. Owning books when they were more scarce was enough to place someone on the social hierarchy ladder, but with Gutenberg’s printing press, books became more accessible, and people were able to build their collection. Within the next century of the Gutenberg press, book storing methods changed to have the spine facing outwards, showing off one’s uniform collection. In this new method, one would not only be showing off their wealth, as books were bound in leather, gilded, and decorated, but also showing off their intellect and worldliness. Today, this idea is still put into practice through shelfies as people curate their online personas.  

This project will be presented as a research essay that includes works like Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library,” The Book by Amarath Borsuk, Henry Petroski’s Book on the Bookshelf, The Book by Keith Houston, and Dr Pressman’s Bookishness to explore how the organisation of books have changed and has become a reflection of personal personas. I could turn this essay into a book and bind it myself, but I think I’d rather concentrate on the research going into this essay.

My final project explores Dr. Pressman’s concept of bookishness, and everything we have learned in class so far, by diving into how books work as extensions of identity, memory, and the body in a digital age. My overall argument is that books function not only as vessels of textual information but as material carriers of personal identity. In a way, books act like genetic code that shapes, reflects, and preserves who we are. I argue that bookishness operates through materiality rather than meaning. The physical book holds emotional and bodily significance that exists beyond its written content.

To portray this argument, I will create a sculpture bookwork project titled The Book Helix, a double-helix structure constructed from strips of book pages. Each strip will represent a specific strand of my identity, different pages of books that I have on my collection on my shelves. I will most likely photocopy and print the pages so I don’t have to mess up or repurchase the certain book. By piecing these strips together into a three-dimensional DNA form, the project visually and conceptually connects the ideas of biological identity with the physical material of the book. The helix design symbolizes how books act as genetic material in the cultural sense because they encode memory, personality, values, nostalgia, and emotion. 

The media format of sculptural bookwork not only looks like fun to make, but it is also inspired by my love for Beube’s book work. Throughout our time in Special Collections, I have been immensely intrigued by the different creative book forms that have sparked my creative inspirations for this project. This medium allows me to demonstrate how bookishness turns books into living extensions of the body and human memory reinforcing that the significance of books lie not within the text inside, but in the ways we use them to create who we are.

Annotated Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” In Illuminations, 1968.
Benjamin discusses collecting books as an autobiographical act. His ideas inform my use of books as repositories of personal memory in the DNA sculpture.

Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press, 2018.
Borsuk examines the book as an evolving technology. Her work helps contextualize my project within larger conversations about book form and transformation.

Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.
Drucker’s analysis of artists’ books provides theoretical grounding for my sculptural approach and supports my use of books as visual art.

Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.
Pressman argues that in the digital era, books function as aesthetic and identity-based objects. This foundational text supports my argument that books become extensions of identity and emotional memory beyond their textual meaning.

Pressman, Jessica. “Bookwork and Bookishness.” Interview with Brian Dettmer and Doug Beube, 2018.

This interview explores how book artists reshape and transform physical books into sculptural works. It supports my project by demonstrating how altering book materials can reveal identity, memory, and symbolic meaning beyond textual content.

Pressman, Jessica. “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness.”, 2018.

Pressman analyzes Foer’s sculptural, cut-out book as a work that transforms the book form into a memorial object. This helps support my argument that physical book material can embody memory, identity, and emotional resonance beyond textual content.

Radway, Janice. “Reading Is Not Eating.” Feminist Studies, 1986.
Radway’s discussion of reading practices reinforces my argument that meaning comes from personal, embodied engagement rather than textual content alone.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.
Stewart’s discussion of souvenirs and material memory informs my idea of books-as-memory-objects.

I feel that one of the main hurdles of this class has been the transition from seeing books for their content to seeing books as artifact and object.

For my final project, I would like to do a deep dive into the publishing of books as collectibles. As opposed to most of the other books we can buy that are being published today, these are meant, from the first view, to be seen as objects, rather than carriers of content. Presses like Folio Society, The Frankin Mint, and Easton Press all produce fine editions of many popular books; their pages are gilded, their bindings harken back to an earlier time, and many of the works are illustrated, but for most consumers, these are not things to be read, they are objects to be kept, looked at occasionally, and mostly, to sit on a shelf and project a measure of learnedness, worldliness, and status.

I will focus my research primarily on the Easton Press, as I have many of their books at home. I will delve into the history of the press, when it came about, and how the culture of the country of the time might have related to bookishness then and how it relates or does not relate now. I will compare collectible versions of books to their “non-collectible,” first edition, and mass-market counterparts when available, evaluating the physical differences and what those differences say about how the book is meant to be owned and shelved.

I will conduct some primary research into the acquisition process for Easton Press editions, looking at discourse communities that revolve around the collecting of these books, what their members’ commonalities and differences are, and what the acquisition process/price says about who these books are intended to be consumed by.

Thesis: The widespread publication of collectible editions speaks to a preference toward the vintage aesthetic in American culture. This is a further proliferation of the bookishness that we have seen on the rise in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. These are books meant to be seen as objects, not reading material, and the people who consume these products choose them for the aesthetics of being well-read and learned, prioritizing these aesthetics over the functionality of the book.

For my final project, I want to take the idea that has basically shaped all my blog posts this semester “Books as spaces“ and turn it into something creative. For weeks, I have been thinking about pages as rooms, chapters as places we move through and reading as a kind of navigation. Now I want to make that idea visual and experiential.

A core part of the project will be a poem. I chose to write a poem because so much of what I have been doing in the blogs has been philosophical and reflective and poetry feels like the form that can hold that best. It lets me continue the same kind of thinking but in a more condensed, atmospheric way. Since all my weeks of writing have revolved around ideas, metaphors and spatial ways of reading, a poem feels like the most natural extension. The poem will describe a journey through different book-spaces, like stepping between pages, entering rooms made of margins. Each section will feel like its own room, matching the movement of the poem.

To go with it, I will create digital images where I place myself inside these imagined book-rooms. One example is the image I already made of myself inside Celestial Navigation. The other images will expand that idea. Maybe a hallway built from stacked lines of text, a room where furniture is shaped out of paragraphs, or a space that folds open as I move through it. These images won’t simply illustrate the poem. They will serve as visual versions of the rooms the poem moves through.

This project builds directly on everything I have written about. Carrión’s “sequence of spaces”, Mak’s trained boundaries of the page and Borsuk’s metaphors of the book as a body. My goal is to turn those concepts into something you can see and something you can feel.

In short, the poem will ask what it feels like to walk inside a book (metaphorically), while the images show what that journey might look and feel like. Together, they bring my semester-long theme to a creative end. Stepping into books, not just reading them.