>> Tiny little drawing.
It looks like someone's about to
draw a profile of someone,
but I don't what this is on the bottom.
Oh, that's astrolabe.
The writing on the sides is interesting,
but the whole life of the book
is really interesting to me.
The notes that people leave in it,
the stains, the tears,
the repairs, inscriptions,
that all adds to the psychology of the reader.
So this opens up a whole new world.
Notes from college.
[inaudible] and he died really young.
And according to [inaudible],
she said that his mother over the years
put newspaper articles over his notes,
if someone passed away,
it's family things, all these obituaries,
over his engineering notes.
My purpose is to
focus on marginalia and focus on my product,
but then this is so fascinating. I want to know more.
It's almost making me want to turn
this concept around or
switch it up because I find this to be so fascinating.
There's something so sad about this.
So I was really interested in this idea of the covering
up of someone else's work or
writing that was the original book.
I've just gone through the process of messing around.
So it's almost like a studio practice where
you come in and you have to do a little warm up.
You can't just get
right into it when you're starting something.
So this is a textbook, that was my dad's,
Negotiable Instruments, which I love
the title. It can be anything.
I think this was for banking.
I started thinking of the idea of covering all of
the text except for marginalia.
With this, I got a little more of it being an art object,
covering the words with paint,
except for the marginalia and the pieces
of the text that the reader found important.
So that it just becomes a book about the reader.
And this will be just the book that I
keep working with because it's not
the most interesting topic.
Sorry, dad. There's enough in here
that he did that I can mess
with and I can tear it apart
and hang it on the wall and see
if that has a good effect.
So there's a lot of play involved in this,
maybe more than I've ever done before, which is fun.
The search will be on for more books.
I have been searching
through used books to find marginalia,
people's reactions to the text.
I really don't want to rip up old antiquarian books.
They're just so beautiful,
and I really don't want to tear them up.
These are all paperbacks of
classical literature that one
might be assigned in school.
That seems to be
the most readily available marginalia in these books.
So that's where I have stayed.
So this is just what I do.
I just go to the bookstore
and stand there for a couple of hours.
I'm sure they wonder what I'm doing,
but they don't say anything.
I think that says emperor .
So this is really just summarizing
what this paragraph is about,
but it says, appeal for burlesque,
which is really interesting.
So I'm going to keep this one.
Boys, girls, men, women,
I want to have lots of different voices.
It just takes one page.
I've bought a lot of these used books just because
of one little thing and I've
been slicing out the pages that are the most
interesting and painting over the entire text.
We are at the Decatur Book Festival,
one of the talks just let out.
We're going to give a talk about
what the Bentley is and what
it does and how I've partnered with
the Bentley to make a new project.
Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for coming.
So I've created these pieces.
Sometimes they're funny, the ending sucks.
He didn't win, they did, they changed him.
And it's vague enough for
you to read anything into it that you want.
Cruel or practical. Nightmare house.
Pathetic fallacy. Most of the time,
nobody writes over the text,
but I really like this one because
this is a very strong reaction.
As you think about what's under there,
but the only thing that's left
is what the reader is doing.