The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl

The First Thing About a Book
An Introduction to Steidl-Miles
The first thing about a book is the way that it feels in your hand. That way is halfway. The other half is what it says
to your head. Consider the book as an object: all the time it’s speaking to you, you’re holding it. If it’s fighting your
fingertips, then your head doesn’t have a chance.
This relationship between object and subject is at its strongest when extreme content arrives in accessible form, one
that makes the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. A few years ago, my first significant project with Steidl aspired
to this. The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia sampled from thousands of tattoos observed over decades at a
St. Petersburg prison. A format of standardized representation, repetition, variation, and vast accumulation produced a
document of disturbing comprehensibility.
The first three titles under the Steidl-Miles imprint extend this sensibility: Street Photographs features the polite
invasions between proximity and intimacy within the work of photographer Annabel Elston; Red Breathing surveys the
intricately disciplined line-scapes of artist Daniel Brush; New York City Museum of Complaint reproduces letters of
complaint sent, over centuries, to the office of the Mayor of New York. The intention in each case is not merely archival,
but indexical: to discover moments of measurement, nomenclature, and meaning within vastly murky histories,
collections, and atmospheres. To find numbers and names.
Such precision requires uncertainty. It’s a form of uncertainty that emerges from the inky process of bookmaking itself.
It’s a process of getting the design, and the content, to ask enough questions of itself. During an era in which mere
information is infinitely available in unbound and disembodied media, the book is not a nostalgic item but a form of
exactitude. All books are guidebooks. They require of their makers decision after decision. Even a fantastic subject is
something the reader won’t want to go towards if it isn’t stripped down, thrown open, put together.
“Books do furnish a room,” wrote the novelist Anthony Powell. But to be more precise, it’s the spines of books on
shelves that furnish a room, that provide a space with a sense of place, of anticipation, of intent. I look at spines more
than I look at books. I’ll pick up and soon put back a book with a great spine, not because it isn’t a great book, but
because I don’t want to know too much about it–because I want always, at first, to have a foot in the unknown.
Peter Miles