What Is a Book?
A book is a number of printed sheets of paper, each with words written in them and maybe illustrations drawn, fastened together and fixed inside covers of stronger paper or cardboard. The person who writes the words is called an author and someone who draws pictures in a book is an illustrator. Books are usually made for reading and can be used to convey knowledge or stories. They can also be used to entertain or frighten. A book may contain a single writer’s work or many writers' works.The characteristics that signal "bookness"—format, shape, binding, pages and text—are often taken for granted. But these features are part of a complex set of relationships that form and sustain the concept of book. This exhibition asks you to consider what a book is, and what it might mean in different cultures and contexts.Boundedness, tied with editorial intent, is critical to a book’s essence. When you read a book, you trust that there is a coherent set of things in it that you should know about. This trust is grounded in the authority of the author(s) and/or editor(s). In addition to a coherent content, a book's boundedness requires that there be some kind of editorial determination about what goes in and what comes out—the boundaries of what makes a book.Whether the book you are reading is fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) or nonfiction (containing content intended to be factual truth), it can be read in one sitting, and you will probably want to read it again and again. The enduring popularity of the book is due to its ability to capture the attention of readers, hold their interest and inspire their imagination.In some instances, books can even be used to evoke empathy and create a sense of wonder. The exhibition demonstrates how books can be used to educate, inform and entertain, and to help people learn about the world and themselves.The exhibition also explores how books change over time. They can be revised, reset and republished, and can travel over short or very long distances. This can lead to new interpretations, and it can even change the meaning of a single word or phrase. In this way, a book can be understood as a living entity that is constantly changing and re-forming within a culture and in the global arena. This dynamism is evident in a range of materials, from tortoise shells and deer bones to scrolls, concertina codices and palm leaf manuscripts to bamboo and silk books in Asia, and the evolution of printing on paper. These transformations reflect an underlying relationship of communication and exchange, in which the function and meaning of a book is determined by the nature of the interaction between its producers, its users and its readers.