Inside the White Box.(Brian O'Doherty's "Aspen 5+6")

STEPHANE MALLARME'S DREAM of the ideal book, a book capable of encapsulating the entire universe, depended on a recognition of the meaning of format that moved against the "artificial unity that used to be based on the square measurements of the book" The late-nineteenth-century poet called for a precisely reckoned and designed volume in which everything was to be "hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships"-- one in which typography and even the folding of the pages would achieve an ideational, analytic, and expressive significance.

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