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Thijs Verbeek www.thijsverbeek.nl

Book Burnings: an anthology

By 31-05-2018

The project ‘Boekverbrandingen: een bloemlezing’ (Book Burnings: an anthology) consists of a performance by Yuri Veerman and a book with folding sheet. The starting point of the project are several books that in the course of history have been banned or burned for various reasons because political or religious entities considered the content dangerous or undesirable. The book contains a collection of fragments from books that were once banned or burned; during the performance, a book was read out loud at a campfire. The publication contains fragments from 20 different books such as: The Anarchist Cookbook, Alice in Wonderland, Mein Kampf, The Green Book, American Psycho and Harry Potter. The book has a Japanese binding method: on the outside of the pages you can read an encoded version of the fragments, on the inside you will find the readable version. For the coded version, a font has been designed that consists of uniform rectangles in different shades of gray; from a light gray ‘A’ to a black ‘Z’. The 26 shades of gray are reminiscent of the shades of gray seen in ashes. The coded text thus forms a subtle visual reference to the prohibition or destruction of the actual text. To be able to read the real text, the reader has to tear the pages open.

Project initiative and commissioned by: Yuri Veerman
Book design: Thijs Verbeek