At once matter and site of imagination and knowledge, the book first offers itself in its physical form, a promise of what the mind will find within; arriving at the library it becomes more than itself, matter to be catalogued, classified, shelved and preserved, found again as a graceful or stiffened silhouette on shelves, pressed against others in the stillness of vibrations held between pages. This photographic work was made in four libraries and one bookshop, a moment of extreme closeness to the book regarded here as object: intimate, palpable, carnal, aligned against others, limited, mysterious, the volume including extracts from writers who wrote about the book, from Jorge Luis Borges and Montaigne to Marguerite Duras and Marcel Proust.