The Death of Books

It seems to go without saying that The End of Art would also include mention of The Death of Books. I have started a 3-D series entitled just that - The Death of Books.

Make no doubt about it, I am a serious bibliophile. I have been a lover of books my whole life. Not only the texts and fonts that I have examined a little in earlier blog posts, but the fine art of reading itself. I love to read. In addition to graphic design, the colors, the texture of the covers - nothing is equivalent to the pleasure of opening a book and embracing a new story. Not just fiction, but non-fiction and all kinds of reference books are coveted and revered in my world. I have my own little collection of children's books from the 40's, 50's, and 60's. But above all else, it is dictionaries that I lust after. Especially vintage dictionaries. It makes me tremble and shudder to find an old dictionary on the shelf of a thrift store or in a box of books on the ground at a yard-sale. I gather it carefully, I lift it gently into my arms, and I lovingly cradle it in my arms until I have purchased it for a pittance. I actually think I drive a little more carefully on my way home, until I can place it with reverence in a position of honor on my shelves, safe at last at home. I use these old dictionaries - I actually take them up and look up a word's meaning, and then compare it to the modern dictionary I use to home school my young boys. It is fascinating to see the way a word's meaning has changed over time.

As I have returned to higher education as an adult, it has taken me quite some time to "hush" the rest of my life and concentrate on really creating again. Oh I've had the chance now and then over the years to create "art for art's sake", but not near often enough. I can now concentrate on what I want to create for my senior seminar, my senior art show, and my final year as an undergrad in the visual art field. I knew that the art I would be working on would simply have to include books.

It is precisely because I love books that I must work with them. It is not just for their raw materials. I don't just want to use the pages or the spines for something else clever and unique. I wanted to express my utter

horror at the fact that people do not know how to look up a word in a paper dictionary. I wanted to express my revulsion at the proliferation of kindles and nooks and whatever other evil devices are out there now, or will be out there in the near future, that prevents people from picking up a real book. With pages that you really turn, not an app that spews the sound effect of a crisp, turned page.

I had to attach old doorknobs. This is to illustrate the very obvious fact that books used to be accessed universally "to open the doors of knowledge". They used to be so rare that only people of status could afford them. Later, many would have collections, especially if you were a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor. Your prestige would be measured by the size of your library.  Now, nearly everyone is able to access information world wide at the touch of a keyboard.

Sadly, the doorknobs on my books don't open anymore. They don't even turn - they are fixed and dilated, just like a dead man's eyes. I have actually envisioned this point of the series for many years, and I thought this would be the finished stage of these pieces - books with fixed doorknobs. Simple. Telling. But I realized it was not enough. It wasn't tragic enough or traumatic enough. E-readers have killed our pleasure in holding real books. Spell-check has killed our dictionaries. Wikipedia has killed our encyclopedias. So I had to kill these books adorned with antique doorknobs. Euthanasia. I had to put these books out of their misery.

These books in the series The Death of Books have been shot with a handgun, but not just any handgun. It is Cimarron's 100th Anniversary reproduction of the  original Colt 1911. All of the rounds are .45 caliber. Most of the rounds have full metal jackets, which is the only type of ammunition approved by the Geneva Convention as a "humane" way to kill a man in wartime with the least amount of tissue damage.

As you look at these books, know the awful pain I suffered in pulling the trigger. Know how horrifying it was for me to destroy a dictionary that has survived for decades.

To end this post I will share a partial quote from Martin Luther that comes into my mind often when I am working on my art: "...I can do no other..."