Art Book-Objects: Muted Volumes Project
A body of book-objects, artist books, designed from the experience of weaving through the stacks of Buhr.
Muted Volumes is a series of “art book-objects” currently in progress being handcrafted and designed to appear as intricate unique boxed books in every way other than their accessibility to the contents. The book-objects will be eye-catching and decorative yet unopenable and unreadable. These “books” (if they can’t open, can I call them books?) are a series of art pieces that represent my fixation with the Buhr book stacks and its closed-to-the-public reality. The project will culminate in an exhibition at the Clark Library rotunda exhibition space at Hatcher Library in the winter of 2025.
This project is graciously funded by the Research and Creative Projects Committee of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor Library.
Background and some context.
The Buhr building is where I currently work full time and it is the main structure for offsite shelving of the library system of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. A large part of my day to day job is going into the stacks with various tasks to find, retrieve, and verify the information on some of the roughly 4 million items spread across multiple rooms and multiple floors.
As this is part of the offsite shelving, this collection of books is not open to the public for browsing. It is also not designed for browsing, it is not in call number order, there is no furniture, there is no decor, it is all storage. We, the Buhr stacks staff, are some of the only people who routinely peruse and chance encounter Buhr books as we pull patron requests and service areas of need. Some of these books have never been loaned, some are niche topics that you’d never expect whole books to be on, and some have beautiful designs that you could never know to look for except spotting it unexpectedly.
Working at Buhr has provided me with the opportunity to borrow and skim through some of the most interesting objects I would have never thought to search for. Buhr books, often easily identified by the little white sticker with an inventory number on it preceded by a single letter, go out to the local community and the interlibrary loan program all the time. The catch is, someone has to know exactly what they want, and it has to happen to be here, and we will send it along. We, however, get to see what books sit next to the book someone requested, as well as the whole aisle while intentionally, or unintentionally, catching glimpses of a cacophony of titles that make up about two fifths of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor’s collection.
And Buhr itself, as a brutalist retrofit structure, has an undeniable industrial charm when you pair the experience of retrieving a real physical book in a room full of the same. The no-windows and temperature control in most of the stacks help preserve the collection. However, the motion-activated lighting and the sparse windows of intruding sunlight in some areas dot and dash the surreal feel of walking throughout the structure and stacks of Buhr.
Click below or hover over the “Muted Volume Projects” at the top of the page to navigate to pages:
Art Book-Objects: Muted Volumes is a project funded by a grant from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor Library Research and Creative Projects Committee for the FY of 2024-2025. The contents and photos of this website, unless otherwise noted, is created and managed by solely me, Stephanie, as a way to document and share the experience through an online format.