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One form of creativity-through-constraint practised by Jean Lescure and Raymond Queneau and those French writers who in the 1960s styled themselves…
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A brief experiment in cutting up poetry. I wondered what would happen if I tried to patch together an Edmund Spenser poem using William Shakespeare’s…
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If you are having trouble remembering your sins in seventeenth-century France – if you feel you need some kind of spiritual prompt – then you could do…
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In an article called ‘Printers of the Mind’, published in 1969, the bibliographer D.F. McKenzie unraveled certain fundamental assumptions imagined and…
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In a hands-on ritual that has now largely been replaced by the beep of a bar code reader, borrowing a library book for many decades involved the…
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If you are a bibliophile in London in the second half of the nineteenth century – or if you are any kind of reader at all – it’s likely you spend a good…
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In 2016 I bought a 1904 copy of Edinburgh and Its Story by the Scottish journalist and author Oliphant Smeaton. What interested me, apart from the…
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Printing produces large quantities of sheets that are no longer required: trials and drafts and mistakes and various kinds of paths not taken. Printing…
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In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), we follow the life of impetuous, rebellious young Italian aristocrat Fabrice del Dongo during the…
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Here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 126 – ‘O thou my lovely boy who in thy power’ – as it appeared in 1609, in Shake-speares Sonnets: Neuer before Imprinted…
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A book has been left on a wall, open to the elements, near where I live: Tilly Bagshawe’s Adored (2005), the story of Sienna McMahon, granddaughter of…
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What does thought look like? For his 128-screen video work, Solo Scenes (1998), the Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-98) set up cameras in his house and…
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