Imagine a library holding all the significant books you have ever read. Imagine the catalog for that library. It exists in your memory much as information about library collections now floats in cyberspace.
Book Marks: Escapades in the Library of the Mind is a visual survey of my reading history. To make physically manifest the contents of my mental library, I convert library charge cards into small works of art representing books that have made an impression on me. I mark them with drawings, rubber-stamping, and collage elements encoding my memories and file them in a library case labeled BOOK MARKS. If these hundreds of cards are arranged in the approximate order that I read the book each represents, they reflect a pictorial version of my intellectual development in the context of American culture since WWII.
Library card catalogs were our original search engines. Ranks of drawers, replete with cards filed by subject, gave substance to the vast and complex history of human endeavor that storage of information in “the cloud” cannot. The Book Marks cards are artifacts, tokens, and souvenirs that give material substance to seven decades of my life as a curious cross-disciplinary reader.
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