which is found on the library floor
Volume the Fifty-Fourth is the fictional index of a self-referential library.
I wrote it after visiting a university library in Brighton, which featured a comments book from library visitors,
which (of course, being a comments book about the library) referred only to the library itself.
It set me wondering what a library might be like whose every book was concerned only with the world inside those walls.
A copy of a very small run of hand-bound copies of the text
is currently on display in the exhibition From Book to Book, in Leeds Art Gallery, until April 20th 2008.
You can read a hyperlinked version online on the Goldfish creative writing journal from Goldsmiths College.
There are still some copies available of the limited edition of the book featured in the Book to Book exhibition,
as pictured below. Click on the image of the cover here to get to the shop if you'd like to buy one:
"Volume The Fifty-Fourth is amusing, infuriating, mind-boggling -
and guaranteed to make you struggle to ascertain precisely where imagination ends and reality begins"
- Bypasszine
"Like the TARDIS: I would have thought that restricting the whole universe to 60 books would feel claustrophobic,
but it's amazing how much ground it covers - it just seems to expand further and further out as you go through it"
- James Lappin, World Flapjack Day
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