There’s a lot of work in books. I mean carrying not reading and writing.

For years I carried a heavy bag to and from work every day, full of, yes, you guessed it books – just in case. I have some books that have been round the world a dozen times. To make books into walls, to indulge in a little cultural brick laying may not be as contrary as it seems.

The book maze at the Breadbox gallery James Street is a memorial to labour just like this, pointless but, at the time, apparently, necessary. These books came from the state library so they form an unflattering archaeology of reading, cheap novels and biographies predominate and after that redundant text books.

One artist found a couple of JG Ballard’s best in the 120,000 tomes but only a couple. 

There was no sign of Ian Fleming.

The books are built in a rising spiral maze  so that at its center one is completely enclosed fossil like in  a tall cylinder of  well worn volumes  that exude the comforting  smell of warm glue bindings and ancient paper. The books form sedimentary layers like alluvial rocks or the slate walls in the pre historic Hebridean settlements. Books too are mazes, a spiral of memories that can turn forever.

Books may or may not be at the end of their 3000 year career as the best, the only way, to find out about life. My new computer came with no manual just an internet number. No one curls up with a book anymore. No one has the time to read long enough to know the landscape, if there is still a landscape, well enough to tell good from bad.

Every new book becomes a one night stand, a gamble, a fashionable performance,

that offers little beyond technique.

In Japan they have huge revolving  bookcases, filled with all the sacred texts.

If you can move the case through one full turn you are credited with having read and studied every book. 

This may be our  solution