Kenneth Goldsmith

A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books' scanning process in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitalization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble on some glitch that hasn't yet been unearthed. This phenomenon is most thoroughly documented on a Tumblr called "The Art of Google Books," which collects two types of images: analog stains that are emblems of a paper book's history and digital glitches that result from the scanning. On the site, the analog images show scads of marginalia written in antique script, library DATE DUE stamps from the midcentury, tobacco stains, wormholes, dust motes, and ghosts of flowers pressed between pages. On the digital side are pages photographed while being turned, resulting in radical warping and distortion; the solarizing of woodcuts owing to low-resolution imaging; sonnets transformed by software bugs into pixelated psychedelic patterns; and the ubiquitous images of workers' hands.