That Place on Grand, Chariton, Iowa

The Death of Books is now featured at That Place on Grand in Chariton, Iowa, located at 118 North Grand. This is an eclectic store that offers antiques, consignment items, new products, and gently used articles.

I am happy to be able to display this body of conceptual art in part of the store's main display windows - giant glass panes at street level of this old brick building built in 1894 for the Knights of Pythias Lodge. It's a great location on the east side of the square at the foot of the Lucas County courthouse. 

These are the very last pieces of the conceptual book art that was originally displayed at the Des Moines Arts Festival in 2012, and again at Greater Des Moines Exhibited at the Polk County Heritage Gallery in 2013, where I received a Special Mention. If you have seen this work before and passed up the opportunity to purchase one for your own library, don't miss your chance now to own a truly one-of-a-kind piece of art.

I love books. I love to read them. I love to hold them.   
I confess … I am a book sniffer.

This body of work represents my sadness for

the fact that we don’t open dictionaries anymore. Spell check has made the entire next generation practically incapable of spelling. Word programs on our computers not only flag a word for being spelled incorrectly, it will correct it for us. Our smart phones automatically anticipate the word we might be starting to type, and then will finish spelling it for us.

Dictionaries once held a position of power and authority in the library. Usually the largest book in the building, it was sometimes grandly displayed on an oak podium. I wanted to create artwork that would illustrate the fact that we never open these great old books anymore. These were once our doorways to knowledge – we opened a book to find answers. Not just dictionaries, but encyclopedias and many other reference books.

Now, with e-readers, even printed fiction books are in danger. It was just in 2011 that Amazon.com announced that they sell more e-books than they do paper books. 2010 was the last year that Encyclopedia Brittanica printed their beautifully bound sets for your library shelves. We just no longer open paper books as much as we once did – for pleasure or for research. 

I have collected many antique dictionaries over the years, and I actually use them. I like to see how the definition of a word has changed over one hundred years. I knew I had a duplicate of a 1949 Webster’s, so The Death of Books began with one of those copies. I attached antique doorknobs to the book in a way so that they no longer turned, to show that we don’t open these old books anymore. After I did that, I decided that it simply wasn’t tragic enough – it wasn’t traumatic enough to express how strongly I felt. So I decided the noble thing to do was to put this book out of its misery. I didn’t want this antique dictionary to die a death of neglect on the shelf, or worse yet, in a box somewhere getting dusty. I wanted to elevate it to the height of conceptual art in the hopes that someone else would put it out on their desk or their coffee table and have this discussion with someone else. So I shot it. I euthanized my antique dictionary to give it an honorable death.

This body of work includes many reference books, as well as several groupings of fiction. Each piece is completely one-of-a-kind. All of them have doorknobs that seal their fate. All of them have their own toe-tag hanging from a knob that details their name (book title), DOB (date of birth), DOD (date of death), Place of Death, and Cause of Death (homicide). Every piece is unique and includes an evidence bag that contains the round that went through that book, along with the brass casing found at the scene. Some of the books have the bullet in situ, or in position, trapped inside the book.

There are other issues at play in this conceptual art.

The Death of Books touches on the topic of the desensitization of violence in our culture, particularly of our children. It also skims the surface of the sociology and psychology of the community and how our families are affected by it. It reaches into our pasts, and makes us question our futures.

See The Death of Books at That Place on Grand, 118 N. Grand, Chariton, IA.