Book-Objects
When asking “what is a book-object” the first question is “what is a book” which can be a hard one to answer. But once you’re holding something that is a book-object, say Ulysses, you can establish what parts of it are the book: the text itself. When you’re talking about Ulysses, you’re talking about what Joyce wrote. The pages and binding, what you’re left holding in your hand if the words on the pages that Joyce wrote floated into the ontological realm of the ideas where the book is, those aren’t what you’re talking about when you say Ulysses.
And so the rest of it, what’s left over if the words were gone, is the book object. But of course the words aren’t gone, and that’s what makes the book-object special. Other art has associated art-objects: movies have a DVD case and a DVD with a picture on it and that’s the movie-object. The resurgence of vinyl can be almost entirely explained as an attempt to manifest a corresponding music-object for the increasingly digitally distributed art form that doesn’t allow for generation of identity through objects naturally any longer. The book-object is unique in that you can open it and the book is in there easily accessible: for the record and DVD you need a record player or DVD player to convert the music-object into music or the movie-object into a movie. When you carry around a book-object, you could open it and access the book at any time. Book objects are portable and self-contained.
Because book-objects are portable and self-contained, they allow for greater projection of identity than the others. You can carry around a copy of Infinite Jest and and at any point you could be reading it or just have been reading it and you could be the type of person who reads Infinite Jest and the people around you know that and you know that they know that. (And people realize that you don’t have to bereading Infinite Jest or reading it well or fast to be carrying it around and that’s part of why the book has the reputation it does.)
Book-objects more evocatively create identity through photos of the book, where the book-object can be crystalized alongside other objects or in a location to create a reading scene. When a sixteen year old girl takes a picture of The Bell Jar (the edition with the rose of course) next to her coffee on the glass table on her parents’ balcony on a cloudy day, she’s creating a reading scene: permanently capturing what could be a moment of reading but also saying that this is how she reads. The book-object integrates the book alongside other objects, showing how the book itself fits into her life, and how her life fits into the book.
The Bronze Age Mindset beach girls use Bronze Age Mindset as a book-object to make a reading scene knowingly: there isn’t any implication that they sat on there on the beach reading a twitter nudist bodybuilder manifesto for a few hours. But that’s the text of the image, that they did that. The subtext is that the kind of people who read Bronze Age Mindset can get girls to pose on the beach with a twitter nudist bodybuilder manifesto for a few minutes, and identity is still being generated, but the first layer of the image is a joke on the type of reading scene that’s normally photographed.
Bookshelves are the final resting place of book-objects for identity. The book-objects are pressed next to each other. Now, instead of each individual book generating identity, it’s the vector sum of every book object, “what kind of person would have read all of these books” instead of “what kind of person is reading this book”. I and may others prefer purchasing books to checking them out from the library because of my shelf, my collection of book-objects. I want to project what I have read as part of my identity. I don’t think it’s entirely selfish or narcissistic: if it’s part of my identity it becomes part of my memory and I understand it better by assimilating it into my identity. I remember the books that I checked out from the library as a kid far less than the books I owned. But it’s maybe a bit narcissistic. Bookshelves always generate identity, even if the bookshelf is not consciously curated, because the spins of the books are always facing outward (and if they’re facing inward it creates a different identity which is a dumb one.) That’s why it’s so enticing to pause a YouTube video to look at someone’s bookshelf: it’s going to say something about them. Uncurated bookshelves of unread book-objects gifted or obtained through random means sometimes project the most interesting identities precisely because the books that the book-objects contain are not important to the owner’s identity.
Rainbow bookshelves are book-objects taken to its farthest extent: the book-object itself is sorted among other book-objects not at all by its book. Normal shelves are sorted by author or publishing year or genre, all features of the book contained inside. The rainbow bookshelf solely by how the book-objects appear. You can buy bricks of books by the foot online in a certain color if you want your bookshelf to have more of that color, and you definitely aren’t going to be reading those random books. I don’t like that but I do like rainbow bookshelves, I have my bookshelves sorted in a rainbow. By taking away the book itself when sorting them you have books of completely different genres and years and authors pressed against each other in a colorful gradient and I like that. It’s for my identity.
Generating or judging identity through book-objects is incomplete, but that’s just like every other way of forming or judging identity. Book-object identities are fun and playful and one of the best ways to let art flow through you. But they can be problematic if they lead to too rigid generation of identity, like constraining what you read as to not be seen with certain book-objects, or too rigid judgement of identity, since other people are probably less consciously generating identity through book-objects than I am and so I shouldn’t let the book-objects define their identity more than they mean it to.
