In the Guardian, Rick Gekoskiannounced that he is abandoning his attempt to write a history (or biography) of the book.
I spent the last two years toiling away, increasingly aware that, to subvert a subject, to rewrite and to redefine it, you have to know a lot about it. And there’s too much to know. Try as I did, and read as I did, little caught my attention sufficiently to spark my imagination. I felt as marooned and thirsty as an art lover forced to read nothing but books about paint, and canvas, and the nature of perspective. But of course – and here the analogy between the fields breaks down – you cannot talk about the history of art without reference to works of art, and you can talk about the history of the book without reading many books.
He is writing a novel instead.
