Book, book, goose!

I have to sympathize with this author; there surely was no better way to say this, about the use of books in or as artworks (for example, the work on the right, a copy of Janson's Key Monuments in the History of Art, 1959, which has had each of the "key monuments" carved out by the artist Brian Dettmer):

What stands denied by the unapproachable book shape of gallery rather than conservationist display, and thus gets all the more forcefully identified by negation, are the instrumental and informational processes alike of literacy’s social function. Two levels of praxis are thus overruled, while also reasserted, by such disuse, such dysfunction: physical uptake as well as discursive intake. So if demediation has its place in media theory, the diverse objects to be contemplated in the coming pages, in whatever numbers or at whatever scale, are—and in the venerable aesthetic as well as historical and disciplinary sense of the term— each in themselves book studies.

Garrett Stewart, "Bookwork as Demediation" Critical Inquiry 36:3 (Spring 2010), p. 414

But still.