Oct 05, 2016 Burned! — Celsius 233

“Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned too.” — Heinrich Heine, 1823

Celsius 233
Philip Zimmermann
Tuscon, AZ: Spaceheater Editions, 2015
N7433.4 Z55 C45 2015

From the artist: I started doing research on the history of book-burning after seeing a video posted by the Islamic State/Daesh showing jihadists burning all the books from the Mosul Library in Iraq. I found that burning books has a long and infamous history dating back a couple of thousand years. Most people know about the Nazi’s burning books as well as the famous Ray Bradbury book ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ but it turns out that almost every authoritarian regime (and some are nominally not authoritarian like the United States) has burnt books that do not agree with cultural and political viewpoints. The book contains 40 pages displaying acts of libricide in chronological order. The title page spread includes a famous quote by Heinrich Heine, whose own literary work was included in some of the book burnings orchestrated by the Nazis in the 1930s. Inserted small orange laser-cut tongues of flame describe the date and action of each image through time. The images were obtained on-line, mostly from the Library of Congress, the National Archive, and the National Holocaust Museum, plus some educational Institutional archives.”

Images printed using archival inkjet ink with three-color foil stamping on the cover, title-page, and back cover. Interior flame sheets are loose-inserted in a slot in each interior folio. Includes blu-ray DVD “to be used as viewing environment.” Multi-needle coptic binding with sewn-on hard covers made of acid-free solid-core black museum board. Housed in grey cardboard container with red and black illustration on cover. Edition of fifty copies. Rare Books copy is no. 22, signed by the author.

View the original article on the OpenBook Blog