The Book

The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was modernism''s great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: probably his most famous pronouncement is ''everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.'' The Book was Mallarme''s total artwork, a book to encompass all books. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal ''all existing relations between everything.''