"Rejecting technology is not the point. In contemporary craft there are tremendously productive frictions to be found in the porous boundaries between 21st century technologies and 500 year-old ones, technology tempered and informed by work of the hand. That is the rich landscape of the contemporary artist book." 

—Ken Botnick, Craft as Catalyst 
CODE(X)+1 #18 Monograph

"A book is a knot"

—Dieter Roth, 246 Little Clouds

"And now the book marches on toward an imaginary boundary / More significant in its life than passing through the looking glass / It's no longer the same book / Before, it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory, where all books are equal ... Here it's indispensable to its reader, torn from its galaxy ... This and other universes offer up their keys to us ... simply because these readers / Each working on their slice of universal memory / Will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to an end."

– Alan Resnais, Tout la mémoire du monde (1956)

The biennial CODEX International Book Fair plays a key role in connecting finely crafted books with their readers. As noted in the 2016 MIT Press publications, Fantasies of the Library, "in the final scene of Alain Resnais's meditative short film on the French National Library of Paris, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), the narrator's voice-over highlights the crucial shift of value that occurs as soon as a specific book has been selected and requested from storage by an individual user." This relfection highlights how critical it is for a book to be activated and engaged with by an individual or community. Something the CODEX Foundation hopes to encourage and cultivate with your participation.

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for its destruction.
– Rachel Carson

"When I got back from New York in March, in the wake of the Novel Corona bloom out there, I found this matted crow feather in the wake of receding snow on the floor of Glen’s woods. As Glen has been dead for years, and I still think of them as Glen’s woods, I thought it an interesting image, given our pandemic reality and the growing list of the dead. They say we die twice, once when we do, and a second time when no one remembers us. Well I still remember Glen, and though the crow has likely long forgotten its lost feather, here it is—wonder and reality."
— Gaylord Schanilec

Quote paraphrased from Rachel Carson’s address for The John Burroughs Medal, awarded for excellence in nature writing. New York, April 1952.

Designed and Printed at Peter Koch, Printers; Berkeley, California. Wood engraving by Gaylord Schanilec, Midnight Paper Sales; Stockholm, Wisconsin. 

"There are books that radiate light into the world–luminous objects that relfect the hands that made them. Everything depends upon the right relationship between an idea and its maker. Everything depends upon the light."

– Peter Koch

"My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. No doubt these stories exist on the page equally during the day but, perhaps because of nighttime's acquaintance with phantom appearances and telltale dreams, they become more vividly present after the sun has set....

At night, here in the library the ghosts have voices."

– Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

"Artists are not journalists; the meaning they infuse in their work does not come with a set of directions. Artists' intentions are inbued in the physical details of the book. As discerning readers we need to look at the visual book for color, light, shadow, texture, sound, weight, structure, materials, pace, scale, etc.; the devil and, in fact, the intention is in the details. In some cases, for many contemporary fine press and visual books, the compelling nature of the work is in the aesthetic experience–emotional, intuitive. But there is another aspect of the experience that I believe is important to explore. What I'm concerned about as a curator is the space between the act of creating and the act of reading. This is the delicate moment in which an artist's wok is transmitted, released, comprehended. So much is invested in creating the book that it's well worth extending our efforts to assure that the artist's intentions are being read correctly. Reading is, in fact, a conversation."

– Mark Dimunation, CODEX MMXIII