I ask Frank if he is optimistic about the future of the book. “Right now, we’re at a moment when, for political reasons, there is a tendency to see art entirely in terms of its representativeness,” he says. “I could imagine that slowly unmaking a certain understanding of art. If you see all speech as an action, then speech could become really limited.” He goes on to say that “books exist in a larger cosmos of information, which seems to be expanding at a terrifying speed that could make art as it emerged between the 18th and 20th centuries seem like a relic.”
Glancing around Frank’s office, its shelves containing many first editions of future NYRB Classics, I point out that the bound book, like the bicycle, has proved to be a surprisingly hardy technology. “It’s sort of vaguely reassuring,” he says, “to think that at the end of civilization, amongst all the plastic bags, there’ll probably still be some books too.”
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Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
December 2020
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