Bookwork - A Guidebook of Supposed Lies

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies | 2004 | Found book with additions

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies is part of an ongoing investigation into marginalia and readers’ interventions in library books (from coffee stains to scholarly arguments). A found copy of Francis Chichester's Gipsy Moth Circles the World was given a new dust jacket, library date stamp sticker, catalogue number, bar code and other additions. In an attempt at collaborative authorship, it was then liberated into the Plymouth University Library with the instruction that  “This book is to be improved on or before the date stamped below…”

The book's new title is drawn from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and the dust jacket contains a quote from the same book: “When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts and faded unknown animals alongside them.”