The Book: 123 Definitions

123 artists, bookbinders, publishers, librarians, and scholars answer a deceptively simple question: What is a/the book?

In April 2018, after publishing The Book in The MIT Press’ Essential Knowledge Series, Amaranth Borsuk began to approach artists, bookbinders, publishers, librarians, and scholars to inquire about their definition of the/a book. This collection, originally published in 2021 with 101 definitions and now expanded to 123, documents the responses and decentres the author’s voice to draw attention to the many other formulations of what the book is and can be.

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. Her most recent book, W/\SH (Anhinga, 2026), is a work of speculative poetry created with poet and artist Terri Witek. The book includes visual poems, fragments, and epistles envisioning a correspondence between women in two disastrous climate futures who reach for one another across their worlds, hoping to course-correct for the sake of their children. Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016) and Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), as well as three other collaborative books of poems including: Abra (1913 Press, 2016), with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher; As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), with Andy Fitch; and Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012, SpringGun Press, 2016) with Brad Bouse. Her contribution to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, The Book, is a concise introduction to the book’s changing technologies that bridges book history, artists’ books, and electronic literature to reconsider an object we think we know intimately. She has collaborated on installations, art bookmarklets, interactive works, and poems, and is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.