THE BOOK, SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT

Prefaced by Mallarmé’s famous dictum that ‘everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book,’ this spirited collection demonstrates the reverse as well: everything in the book exists in order to end up in the world. In a series of exemplary essays on, and demonstrations of, what might be called the ethnopoetics of the book, books from a wide range of cultural traditions are portrayed as radical extenders of form rather than neutral vessels of content. The result is a vision of books as laboratories for the invention and performance of perceptual systems: new worlds carved out of the wilderness of human thought and language.