Touch and Tender Readings, Books as Archives

The publication is developed as a reflection on books as archives of touch. Visiting our local public library, the Philipp Schaeffer Bibliothek in Berlin, we checked out a selection of books that caught our attention. Bringing them home, we took photographs of handling and reading the books, which we then printed out and inserted back into the books. Following this, we returned books to the library with these hidden pages added.

Books come and go, are taken out and brought back; they are cared for, monitored, catalogued, administered, while brought into numerous private lives. The library serves a reading public, all the while producing a collection of strange inscriptions. It is there, under the palm and along the fingertip, where we may find another story, a narrative of skin, and the joys of reading. An archive which is more biological and fantastical and living. It is a residual archive, one of epidermal flecks. The archive that is the book itself, is one of touch, skin, oil; it is one of affect and affection, neglect and sudden embrace, it is a dance of reading that has a life beyond language.