Reviews:

“The 27 visual artists whose portfolios comprise this exciting collection each work with printed books as their medium. They carve, paint, and repurpose pulp to striking effect, building startling secondary evocations from their material’s primary narratives…. The central message is uplifting and joyous-that a book is a uniquely precious, infinitely malleable treasure chest in the hands of an ambitious artist….A magical collection of paper wonders.” – Publishers Weekly

“Books take on a whole new life in Laura Heyenga’s anthology of groundbreaking artists who’ve stitched, sliced, cut and carved bound literature to create anything from an intricate chess set to a huge area rug to a literary jewelry collection. (Never fear: The artists use recycled or discarded books-that otherwise would end up in landfills!). In fact, the real joy of this book comes from discovering how each individual starts with the same item and yet ends up with vastly different works of art.” – Oprah.com

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (August 20, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-1452117102

Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art/Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts.

From the Introduction by Brian Dillon:

“‘Sorted Books’ is many things at the same time: a series of sculptures, or photographs, or site-specific installations; a collection of short stories, or poems, or jokes; a work in which the “found object” is subject alike to chance and the most painstaking choices; a delicate conceptual game with the horizontal and the vertical. But it is first of all an act of reading.”

Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Chronicle Books (March 5, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1452113296