On living with books

December 26, 2025

I wrote this in late August and didn’t publish it then.

I am on the precipice of another cross-country move, back to the place, roughly, where I am from, and there are multiple places for my things to go. We are moving into a furnished sublet for a year in north Jersey, on the wrong side of the Lincoln Tunnel. There is one bookshelf in the apartment and a clear view of the Manhattan skyline and a Peloton. Last month, surgeons removed my gallbladder via my belly button on the fourth of July, and I am still restricted from lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk. Last week I tried finding the plastic guillotine at BAB to trim down test prints and instead struggled with the heavy wooden one; I felt the strain in my left side and the bottom of my belly.

Packing to move has been put off, partially out of denial and partially due to the gallbladder. It was emergency surgery and I did not clean the house beforehand; now the house will enter a permanent state of disarray and eventual emptiness. It was a dirty house when we moved in, the main doors left open to the screened porches for a month and one window missing, and it’s a dirty house now. In the five years between then and now it has been dirty and clean and calamitous and it has required regular caretaking to make up for years of neglect before we arrived. Etched into the wood of the bathroom’s doorframe is evidence of the previous family’s small anxiety-ridden dog, deep gashes a foot or two off the ground and paler wood shining through. There are glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the ceiling of my closet. Termites have hollowed out the garage, which the landlords keep promising to fix; during the summer that we decided to get married, they swarmed in our bathroom and died on sticky rectangle traps Jeremy placed on the window.

The view of my bookshelves from the sidewalk of our house, June 2025.

The apartment has one bookshelf. Books are divided mentally into three main categories: to be given to bookstores, to be stored for the year, and to keep with me. A Post-It stuck to the Matisse poster above my desk: books are limitless / space is not. I don’t remember where that came from. I’ve been spoiled with a two-bedroom house in a beautiful neighborhood with relatively cheap rent. The books will not all fit into a subleased apartment in Union City, or in an apartment in New York the following year. I ask Will what I’ll want to read next year, and he suggests things that situate me once again in New York. I suggest Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany.

The boxes of books have gone to the bookstores owned by friends. Every time someone comes into the house, I point at things and ask if they want it. My friend Jill takes a beautiful mug that I don’t use because I hate the feeling of unglazed clay in my mouth. I am barely off lifting restrictions from surgery, so everyone hauls boxes.

In February, I filled out a questionnaire about artists’ books and made an accidental image of the negative space in our home, what is shaped around the books. That space has already shifted; some of the books are gone, or waiting to be gone.

1. Are you an artist, collector, publisher, or reader?

I am an artist and a reader. Technically I collect books, because I purchase them and bring them into one place (my home, my brain). Technically I also publish via a small, inactive press called Elementary Press, and as a writer, printer, and assembler for Burn All Books’ monthly Mail Mag. I don’t view collecting as my primary purpose for having books — they are not trophies or objects waiting to be sold, or swapped out for better ones. I do not think of the books on my shelves as potential money (nor do I think this way about any of my possessions; they are not investments). I have them because I want to be able to access them to read, think, and write about.

2. How do you engage with artists’ books?

I live with them, and since I currently live in a place with a small photographic community, they are the primary way I engage with, and experience, photography. I write about them. I have, at various jobs, catalogued them, published them, and archived them. Currently I volunteer at a risograph studio and community archive where I help publish a monthly printed newsletter and catalogue the zine collection. I also engage with them by discussing them with others; there is nothing quite like excitedly flipping through a book to show someone else.

I care very deeply about books.

3. What attracts you to read, pick up, or purchase a book?

I prefer books that fit nicely in the hand: books that are portable and can be read like a book-book. I take friends’ recommendations for reading seriously and the Internet’s recommendations much less seriously, and I hardly buy an artists’ book without touching it first. How a book feels in the hand impacts how you interact with it! Paper quality, printing quality, production quality: these are things you cannot tell without holding the book in your hands. I don’t have a lot of money to make gambles on books I haven’t seen. If I can, I request the book from my city’s library or through inter-library loan or from the library of the university where my partner is a PhD student.

I strongly dislike buying books online unless they’re books I’ve wanted for a while, and I use AbeBooks for price research but almost never for purchasing, since Abe is owned by Amazon. My father taught me how to use eBay when I was a child (and third-party eBay sniping websites), and it is one of my favorite websites. The chronology of my watch list on eBay is the chronology of certain thought strands. When I spend time with friends who are also book-inclined, I’m more likely to spend money on a book.

When I am in a bookstore, I am impacted by: how the books are displayed, whether the pricing seems exorbitant, the small spark I feel that leads me to pick up a book (this spark is hard to identify), whether the shopkeeper or bookseller has helped me find something or guided me to something I would not have otherwise looked for, if the books are standing straight on the shelves (not slouching and causing spine damage), if the books are piled multiple stacks deep and require attention and sorting (if it feels like a bit of a game to find something), if the walls are not completely white. A minimalist bookstore freaks me out.

When I am in a library or at the library book sale, I look at spines. I love looking at spines. A former boss used to ask people to just send photographs of the spines of books, that he would know what to buy from that alone, and this confused me until it made sense to me. Seeing the spine of an old, once-known book feels warm. I like the feeling of sliding a book out of the lineup to see its cover. Sometimes the cover is such a surprise — if I’m at the library book sale and like the cover or design of a book, I’ll buy it, because it’s only a dollar.

As for the books themselves: who knows? I do not know why I own all of the books that I do, or why I have read all of the books that I have read. That is part of the point of reading them and of living with them.

4. Where do you keep your books?

My books take up space in the whole house. The house that we rent came with a hutch in the dining room, so most of the artists’ books are lined up on two shelves on the hutch, which does not receive any direct sunlight. (The other shelves hold glassware and board games, and the cabinet below holds my photographic negatives.) The bar cart in this room holds our cookbooks. A secondhand shelf in my office holds photo theory and writing-on-writing books, along with empty notebooks, half-full notebooks, and half-full binders, and self-published books. My second desk (and sometimes the spare bed in my office) holds piles of books that I am writing about. One bookshelf in the living room holds poetry and alphabetized “general literature.” The bottom shelf holds books about New Jersey and landscape, as well as every book I’ve self-published or been printed in. The other bookshelf in the living room is a mess: there are more artists’ books, books about art, books about artists’ books, books about socialism and shared society, books about New York City, books about cities and transportation, books about nature, and on the shelf below, three stacks of to-be-read books: fiction, nonfiction, and photography-specific books. There’s also a record shelf that holds my partner’s records and his books about audio production. The coffee table in the living room usually holds library books and books I’m currently reading. There’s a pile of books on the television console that need to be taken to the little free library down the block, and one corner of the kitchen counter is reserved for books that need to be returned to the public library. Zines are stored with no organizational methods in two IKEA children’s shelves (sadly discontinued) and a slotted bookend.

To read (mostly fiction), newer zines, DVDs, records, and multiple dying plants, July 2025.

5. How do you read artists’ books? What physical space do you read in?

I read “book-books” (non-artists’ books) mostly on the couch. I have terrible posture. Sometimes I move to the beanbag chair in the corner, but my ass falls asleep when reading here for too long, and the corner is cut off from the heating and cooling system in the house, so it’s most comfortable in the spring and fall when the window is open. The living room receives beautiful light in the afternoon.

I read artists’ books at my desk in my office, normally leaning back in my desk chair with my feet up on the bright orange-red stool that I bought for myself when I received a small settlement after getting sick at work. I like having my feet up. When I sit at my desk chair, I normally have a shoulder massager on, which is an incentive to sit at my desk and work, and there is a CD player and a small stack of CDs. Normally the books are open in my lap, and I have a notebook open on my desk. (I try to observe the library rule of pencils-only when I have artists’ books out, but I prefer writing with fountain pens.) Reading artists’ books usually goes alongside writing about them, so I use bookmarks to keep my place(s), and am usually flipping back and forth. If I have the computer open and am writing on the computer, I tend to open up a lot of tabs.

If someone is visiting and we are talking about books, I wipe down the kitchen table and remove the placemats so that multiple books can be open at once.

6. What materials are you drawn to? What histories are these tied to?

If a book has library binding (Buckram cloth with that sort of coated exterior and stamped lettering), I am very drawn to it. I own Zoe Leonard’s You See I Am Here After All for this reason; I learned to love the innards later. In general, I prefer matte paper to something glossy. There is a delicate threshold where handmade artists’ books begin to rely on sentimentality as a means of interpreting the work, but this is subjective. I like kraft paper. I like spiral binding, despite the impracticality in terms of shelving. I prefer books that feel like they can be handled; I don’t like books that feel too precious. I do not like books that require support to use them. (The smaller books are, the more space you may have for them.) Despite the feelings I have about handmade books, I love zines and their histories. They are a messy medium, and I respect their messiness. They have let me be a little less precious with myself and my work.

7. How does criticism impact your reading, collecting, or making?

I think photography and artists’ book criticism is severely lacking at this time, which is related to the lack of funding for the arts in the United States in general. (Everything I have written here is from the point of view of someone born and raised in the United States, a country that is currently hostile to the arts and a country that has been hostile since its conception. The structure of my adult life has centered around access to healthcare, which has dictated when I went to grad school and when I married my spouse. Staying on my father’s health insurance until age 26 allowed me to work at a bookstore that provided no benefits or sick leave.) Criticism impacts my reading more than either my collecting or making: good criticism usually makes me want to read the work in question, whether out of interest or curiosity or need to understand. I always feel grateful to encounter something that makes me want to write, or make something. In college, a professor I had pushed back on me saying that I “hated” things — she forced me to explain what I didn’t like and why. And though I’ve responded to most of this questionnaire with my own opinions, learning to understand the difference between personal distaste and hastily made work has changed how I look at books, how I talk about them, and how I live with them. It is possible, as that professor reminded me, to dislike something but respect it.