{"id":123,"date":"2022-01-24T18:19:11","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T23:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/?page_id=123"},"modified":"2022-01-25T11:27:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-25T16:27:02","slug":"how-to-make-something-useful-with-books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/how-to-make-something-useful-with-books\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Make Something Useful with Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are you tired of those musty, unread, and unreadable books taking up space in your home? Are you skeptical of the notion that these books merit preservation for antiquarian value alone? Do you wish you could put them to some, any use? With our handy assembly guide, now you finally can! Turn those impractical assemblages of ink, paper, cardstock, clothette, and glue into a comfortable chair through following our DIY instructions below.<\/p>\n

Nick Barone and Utku Cansu<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Our installation meditates on the materiality of deaccessed and forgotten books. Playfully riffing on the question \u201cwhat are these books any good for?,\u201d our DIY furniture-assembly guide explicitly disregards the substantive content of these books, as well as the cultural capital or authorial identity they may signify, by attending to their extra-textual features and functions. In doing so, it hopes to call attention to the alternative forms of cognition and intellection that this kind of physical engagement with books demand of us, beyond the act of reading and interpretation. In addition, questions of \u201cutility\u201d and \u201crelevance\u201d which define contemporary debates within and outside the humanistic disciplines partially animated our project. How does shifting our interpretive gaze away from the textual and ideational dimensions of a book and towards its potential physical function as, say, the leg of a chair reframe our understanding of what makes a book \u201crelevant\u201d or not? What ontological change does the deaccessioned book undergo in the process of being transfigured from mere decoration or antiquarian metonym into a usable piece of furniture? What emotional and psychic investments do we bring to books, as commodities, as physical objects, as repositories of knowledge and cultural meaning?<\/p>\n

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Are you tired of those musty, unread, and unreadable books taking up space in your…<\/p>\n

Read the postHow to Make Something Useful with Books<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-123","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","excerpt","zoom","full-without-featured","even","excerpt-0"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/379"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/123\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/deaccession\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}