It's hard to imagine that innocent objects like a pile of dictionaries or the first page of A Tale of Two Cities
would inspire sensual musings, but Morell's lush photographs of books do just that. With these 52 8"×10" duotones, Morell, who teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art, chronicles literary matter in its physical state at all stages of its existence: intense closeups of ink and paper fibers; sunlight falling in dots on a blank book's open pages; Escher-like details of impossibly angled landscape engravings; thick, water damaged volumes whose pages seem to undulate. "You're in the book," writes Baker, author of Vox
and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Book-related quotations from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Francis Bacon and others appear in large type on facing pages, filling out this splendid portrait of the book's life. (Oct. 12)
