Back in November 2017, I created my first piece of book art, an altered book project that I titled Spark Unnecessary, based on a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

It was inspired in part by a book design by Elizabeth Perez, this book experiment from Holland-based Charles Nypels Laboratory of the Jan van Eyck Academiet using heat-sensitive ink, and my many visits to the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta. It explored a bucketload of themes and ideas that I have been pondering since my early days in university, and that continue to spark my curiosity.

This is the story of that project.

Content Warning: The following post and gallery includes images of a book being physically altered, by which I mean getting cut up.

Ray Bradbury famously once said "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." That quote was bouncing around in my head, along with examples of other custom designs and book art treatments for this book, when I walked into a bookstore on Edmonton’s Whyte Ave that had a shelf covered in copies of this 60th Anniversary Edition of Fahrenheit 451. I picked one up without really knowing what I was going to do with it.

A few blocks down the street, I wandered into a sort of hipster shaving supplies, pipe, and axe shop, looking for a cool box of matches or something of the sort. The shopkeep said they didn't have matches or lighters, but they did have some camping supplies at the back. To my surprise, I found this flint campfire starter, took it off the shelf for a closer look, and promptly dropped it by accident and broke open the packaging. I took that as a sign and bought it.

Once I got home, I began assembling my tools.

And this is when it started to get scary: my ruler, locking blade utility knife, new razor blade...

I took a deep breath.

And here we go…

So this edition of the book included a new introduction by Neil Gaiman at the front, and I had in my head that I only wanted to obscure the original text. Back in grad school, I wrote a paper in my Shakespeare class about how in successive editions of Shakespeare's works, the more 'authoritative' the text got, the more buried it got by the 'proof' of said authority... the intros and footnotes and end notes and appendices.

Playing on those ideas, the first thing I did was 'extract' the introduction for preservation. Went with a staple to keep the now extracted introduction intact... paper clips fall out, and generally speaking tape and most regular glues are bad!

At this point I didn't know what I would do with it, so I set it aside.

Next I disassembled the firestarter, then turned to the book.

Was totally vibing Arthur C. Clarke's monolith from 2001 right about now.

But at this point, it was still hypothetical... what if it was here? Or here? Or here? But I started taking measurements, then took another deep breath...

Right about now would be my first "OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING?" moment...

I used a piece of white cardstock to segment off pages for cutting, just using the initial cut to the cover as a guide.

I didn't plan this, but I ended up taking each cutout and simply turning them upside down onto that pile on the side, so they accidentally stayed in order. This proved to be important later in the project.

Another "wow, I'm really doing this" moment...

I stopped cutting once I got through the primary text, stopping at the title page for the back matter: "History, Context, and Criticism" edited by Jonathan R. Eller. As with the preservation of the introduction, I only wanted to obscure the story itself.

I have a fascinating book called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard that I think had a lot to do with this idea. Chapter IV, in particular, is titled "Encounters with Professors (in which we confirm, along with the Tiv tribe of western Africa, that it is wholly unnecessary to have opened a book in order to deliver an enlightened opinion on it, even if you displease the specialists in the process)."

(That chapter title could also be the title for my entire graduate degree in English…)

I inserted the cutting board into this dividing line between text and intertext in order to finish trimming the inset for the flint.

A moment of inspiration as I looked at the pile of extracted pieces of text, and then at the chain that held the striker to the flint! Out came my hole punch.

Note the small indent cut out at the top left of the inset in the book, made to accommodate that same chain. The tiny square bits mixed in with the hole punch rounds come from that extra bit of surgery on the book.

My home could not be described as 'minimalist.' At this point I remembered this little jar that I knew I had in one of several junk drawers and boxes of stuff I have throughout my house. Took a moment to find, but it was perfect.

(It's moments like this that unfortunately reinforce my habit of not throwing out anything I don't have to. I'm getting better about that. A little.)

So aside from a few tiny threads of paper from the trimming of the inset, which I still regret having casually swept off the cutting board, the whole of Bradbury’s book is still technically here in this picture…

So what about that previously extracted introduction? I could probably say something arty about maintaining the disconnectedness of the commentary that surrounds a text and demonstrating how such things can take on a life of their own, separate from that which inspired it, but truthfully I just got lazy and simply tucked it into the back.

It's still there, just tucked in the back, included but not connected. Which actually does turn out to be a bit of an arty comment on the disconnectedness of the commentary that surrounds a text and a demonstration of how such things can take on a life of their own.

And there you have it, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in it's entirety, whole but not whole. And equipped not only with it's own firestarter but a small supply of tinder as well.

Happy 60th Anniversary!

Gallery