I get up and walk to my library shelf. I reach for a book, one that I cherish. Samuel Beckett – a biography by Deidre Blair. The 700 or so yellowing pages of this 1978 first edition are encased in two slabs of grey marbled hardcover (my dislike of dustsheets reminding me that the loss was surely intentional). A black adhesive strip joins the two slabs together along the bookʼs spine. The strip features the necessary title and author information as well as the Jonathan Cape publishing logo (some sort of ornate pot). These text and graphic features are embossed in silver.
Enough for now
What I have provided is a very ʻthinʼ description of the thingness of a particular book. The old adage “donʼt judge a book by its cover” is of course wrong. We all do. Always. We also judge it by its weight, its smell (that old book smell), and so on… We might again emphasise. These are also coordinates of a bookʼs thingness.
Freefall – a series of book interventions by Adam Thomas precisely operates in the space occupied by a bookʼs thingness. Whereas my above description is – as already mentioned - thin, what Thomas appears to aim towards is something considerably thicker.
In critical theoretical terms – as notably developed by American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his Interpretations of Cultures (1973) – a ʻthick descriptionʼ moves beyond neutral observation (cover, weight – that old book smell) in order to capture the layers of meaning and implication inherent in a speech, gesture or, in terms of our concern here, an object. For Geertz, thick description, attempts to understand meaning as it is bound up in stratified hermeneutic structures (be they symbolic, physical or other).
I would argue, that it is with some ease that one is able to align Thomasʼs productive process in the Freefall series – which involves the physical cutting into the paperback surface of period book covers to reveal new and alternative text/image relations – with the notion of a critical description that is concerned with drawing deeply from a given structure to reveal new meanings from within it.
Indeed, books serve as exemplary structures for this comparison. After all, we need not look any further for our multiple stratified levels of meaning that in the very pages of a book. However set in place, remaining in order – in succession – the opportunity for thick description remains somewhat limited (…instead linear interpretation is suggested: by the formal relationship of one page to another and by the very cover-to-cover codifications of reading). It is only when a bookʼs content is dragged onto its surface – when foreign particulars from the hidden depths of a book, or perhaps its Untersinn, a place beneath immediate sense and far from the surface, are set amongst the native (peacock-like) components of a bookʼs cover (cover art, bold titles and other eye catching features) that Thomasʼ genial intervention – his clarity in recalibrating a bookʼs thingness – really sparks into life…
Paul Pieroni 2011
