After taking over The Surreal Arts Club and running it for fifteen months, has stepped down and started a new club from scratch. The Lost Book Club & Museum is inspired by such things as the imaginary books in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges; the books in Peter Greenaway's film "Prospero's Books"; the projects and writings of Hakim Bey, including "Incunabula", a whole catalog of imaginary books; and the current special exhibit at the Seattle Asian Art Museum: "Shu: Reinventing the Book in Contemporary Chinese Art.

WHAT IS IT?

It is a gallery of fragments, both text and image artifacts, connected by a common thread: The Deconstruction and Re-imagining of Books and Book Culture in our Post-Literate Age, or something like that.

EXAMPLES: Fragments of ancient texts in forgotten languages, scientific & technical illustrations from unknown sciences and technologies, false starts of books, covers or title pages for non-existent books, impossible bindings, enigmatic fragments of torn burned or rotted pages from mysterious religious works, histories, cosmologies, fragments of art, diaries, found poetry, interesting scraps of paper found in the street, books made of unexpected materials or hollowed out to contain unexpected objects, banned, burned, forbidden, unfinished, unwritten books, unidentified alphabets, hieroglyphs, ideograms, iconography, books from prehistory, books from the future, books from parallel universes, books with built-in lenses and peep-holes, pop-up books with animated scenes, magical books, books of pressed flowers, pressed bugs, pressed dreams and nightmares, catalogs of stains and odors, unnatural histories, abnormal philosophies, Readers' Digress condensed and compacted books, Books of tree rings and geological strata, books of Tibetan sand paintings that spill into the gutters as you turn the pages, broken books exposing their inner workings, or with their guts spilling out, neo-dada collage, putting bits of image and text together haphazardly like the early attempts to reassemble dinosaur bones, books made of folded-spindled-mutilated IBM punch-cards, books written in UPC code, suggestive receipts and office memos, shopping lists and telephone doodles, fragments of catalogs of fragments of catalogs of fragments, et cetera, et cetera...

(The above list of examples is, itself, a good example of an acceptable text submission)

SUBMISSIONS: Entries may take the form of images of these artifacts, text descriptions of physical artifacts, text excerpts from lost books, and/or image and/or text explorations of things related to the main themes of this club. As with other clubs, you submit via note with a link to the image or text already placed in your personal gallery. Anything accepted will be posted with links to the artist/writer as well as to the work in his or her gallery.

james119 expects this project to be slow getting off the ground, but hopes that, between his future work, work he discovers around dA and brings in, and actual submissions, eventually there will be enough really solid material to consider publishing a quality exhibition catalog of the best of the virtual museum (This would never happen without the full participation and approval of the artists and writers involved, of course).

If this club seems at all interesting to you, take a look at the humble beginnings, and consider submitting something to help it grow.