Rothenberg Jerome, Clay Steven (eds.) A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book & Writing

Granary Books, 2000. — 580 p.A collection for the general reader and the specialist, A Book of the Book is an accessible and erudite set of readings on the book as a mythic and material object. These texts comprise a vivid exploration of the poetics of the book, a multifaceted study nurtured by the literary and ethnographic scope of its editors' vision, that argues compellingly for the continued survival of this most mundane and metaphoric of artifacts. In a moment when irresponsibly inflammatory ravings about the demise of print rage through the cultural landscape, this collection offers serious reflection upon the real profundity of the book as a symbolic force within the poetic and spiritual imagination that remains the wellspring of human culture. Drawn from diverse realms-of avant-garde art, anthropology, textual criticism, literature, and speculative thought-this will be the definitive collection for decades to come-a volume whose very physical presence in the hand performs the rhetoric of its pages in offering its riches to the reader.