I've gotten a bit behind here.

I'm working way too much at present, and my art and this club are being neglected. I'll catch up as soon as I am able.



WHAT IS THE LOST BOOK CLUB AND MUSEUM?

It is a gallery of fragments, both text and image artifacts, connected by a common theme: The Deconstruction and Reimagining of Books and Book Culture in our Post-Literate Age.

EXAMPLES: Fragments of ancient texts in forgotten languages, scientific & technical illustrations from unknown sciences and technologies, false starts of books, covers or title pages for non-existent books, impossible bindings, enigmatic fragments of torn burned or rotted pages from mysterious religious works, histories, cosmologies, fragments of art, diaries, found poetry, interesting scraps of paper found in the street, books made of unexpected materials or hollowed out to contain unexpected objects, banned, burned, forbidden, unfinished, unwritten books, unidentified alphabets, hieroglyphs, ideograms, iconography, books from prehistory, books from the future, books from parallel universes, books with built-in lenses and peep-holes, pop-up books with animated scenes, magical books, books of pressed flowers, pressed bugs, pressed dreams and nightmares, catalogs of stains and odors, unnatural histories, abnormal philosophies, Readers' Digress condensed and compacted books, Books of tree rings and geological strata, books of Tibetan sand paintings that spill into the gutters as you turn the pages, broken books exposing their inner workings, or with their guts spilling out, neodada collage, putting bits of image and text together haphazardly like the early attempts to reassemble dinosaur bones, books made of folded-spindled-mutilated IBM punch-cards, books written in UPC code, suggestive receipts and office memos, shopping lists and telephone doodles, fragments of catalogs of fragments of catalogs of fragments, et cetera, et cetera...

(The above list of examples is, itself, a good example of an acceptable text submission)

SUBMISSIONS: Entries may take the form of images of these artifacts, text descriptions of physical artifacts, text excerpts from lost books, and/or image and/or text explorations of things related to the main themes of this club. As with other clubs, you submit via note with a link to the image or text already placed in your personal gallery.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I, James Koehnline shall be, for the foreseeable future, the sole curator, librarian, gatekeeper and judge, making all decisions regarding what gets into the club gallery.

If the quality is high and the quantity sufficient I may have discussions with the contributors of the best submissions regarding the possibility of publishing a real book in the form of a catalog of our imaginary museum.

I am looking forward to hearing from you who find this an interesting experiment.

MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES

To be a member you must add the club to your Friends List, and choose your membership category. There are to be two categories, and you are welcome to sign up for both, if you like.

1. DONORS: This is for those of you who intend to submit works from your own galleries to The Lost Book Club and Museum. Submitting as a Donor does not guarantee posting, but it does guarantee careful consideration of the suitability of all pieces submitted, and you get your avatar on the front page and will be invited to participate in contests and such.

2. SCOUTS: This is for those of you who will be on the look-out for exhibits for our museum, whether by simply being attentive to the work of friends and the work you happen to see around dA, or by actively scouring the dA universe for artifacts for our museum. You may then act as go-between or simply note me about prospects and I will check them out. Scouts are also encouraged to help me build a LINKS page, for appropriate materials outside of dA. As a Lost Book Scout your avatar will appear in a separate roster on the front page.

If interested, note me.

OUR MEMBER ROSTERS

DONORS:











SCOUTS:








SCOUTS HONOR ROLL
Our Scouts Honor Roll starts off with two of you: , who helped to spread the word of this club, pointed out some great work and brought in several enthusiastic members,
and , who has brought to my attention many treasures here at dA, as well as great resources from beyond for our Links Page [link] Thanks to you, and to all who are helping this club grow and evolve.

A FEW INSPIRATIONS:
The fiction of Jorge Luis Borges [link]
Peter Greenaway's film "Prospero's Books" [link]
Writings and Projects of Hakim Bey [link]
Recent Exhibition at the Seattle Asian Art Museum: "Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art" [link]
Ernie Kovacs' "Eugene" TV special (especially the library scene, of course) [link]


LINKS PAGE: [link]



Thanks to for our deviantID, below: