When artists and designers approach the book as a medium, they redefine the boundaries of its complex materialities— those inherent in any text and those beyond it. Books provide implicit and explicit embodied and performative experiences, where the smell, print, and differences in paper's fibres bristle against the ridges of one's own fingerprints further developing an intimacy with a reader that creatives utilise to situate and contextualise idea, image and text.

Hosted by the Royal College of Art, this one-day symposium; Materiality of the Book unites the interests and concerns of the Artists Publishing Research group (APR) and the Material Engagements Research Cluster (MERC) in a dialogue on the materiality of the book.

Accessible to internal and external audiences, the event features keynote speakers whose presentations will provide context for a series of peer-reviewed papers presented by group members and PGR students. The sub-themes will steer discussions on the book as method and object, landscape and the book, and the materiality of language.