This reader is published as part of the annual Independent Publishing Fair at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. This year’s theme, It’s a book, it’s fragmentary, together it’s a library, introduces rather tangible concepts. It’s about books, individual and yet interconnected within libraries. It’s about libraries as places for books, as spaces for people. It’s about dynamics that foster collective knowledge based on certain premises, systems, and structures. Through a range of texts and a comprehensive list representing collaborative research, readers might explore in this volume the intersections of these concepts, addressing social agency, architecture, as well as discourse and theory. Libraries are referenced through the lenses of the history of ideas, as a constellation and as a space of our world of thinking.

With contributions by Gabriela Halac, Alessandro Ludovico, Abigail Reynolds, Yvonne Schürer and Eva Weinmayr, among others.

Reader

open book society e.V., 2025

150 x 160 mm, 344 pp. English & German
Edition of 500 
The dust jacket is numbered from copy 1–500.

Concept: Leonard Siegwardt, Sabine Schmid
Design: Leonard Siegwardt
Editing: Sabine Schmid
Research: Albrecht Gäbel, Annette Gilbert, Claudia de la Torre, Günter Karl Bose, Lam Funke, Leonard Siegwardt, Marion Kliesch, Marion Rothmund, Markus Dreßen, Michael Hagner, Philipp Neumann, Robin Waart, Sabine Schmid
Production: Graphic workshops of the HGB Leipzig (Luise Bartels, Sebastian Cewe, Markus Dreßen, Aurelia Markwalder, Anne Telling, Johannes Oestringer)
Book: Gutenberg Beuys Feindruckerei GmbH, Langenhagen (DE), Offset Black printed on Munken Print White 18, 80 g/m²
Dust jacket: Graphic workshops of the HGB Leipzig, Offset 3 colours + laser print black printed on Profibulk 13, 115 g/m²
Typeface: Century Expanded Std & Century Schoolbook Mono (Bitstream), UN-11 (Source Type)