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I guess from a general interest in the relation between writing and typography. I started collecting books with letters for titles years ago, simply out of curiosity, and more or less haphazardly. Later, I realized that this collection could form the basis for an essay about typography and literature. I found that limiting myself to these thirty-odd books (I don’t write about all of them) was a constraint that allowed me to explore the topic freely. Some of the books are well-known – Andy Warhol’s a: A Novel, Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood, Thomas Pynchon’s V. – but others are pretty obscure, and these were fun to track down and challenging to write about. Also, searching for titles from A to Z became a structural device.

I’m not really interested in concrete poetry, and I purposely avoided some of the more tired tropes when it comes to language and the visual arts – synesthesia, for instance, or seeing writing and letters as landscapes. It’s worth pointing out that I write mostly about novels, and a few essays and long poems. At the beginning of the book I reference an essay by Guy Davenport in which he mentions what he calls the “Kells effect.” I was really intrigued by this term. Davenport uses it in relation to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Basically, he argues that prominent letterforms can serve a larger thematic and structural purpose in a work. The term itself refers to the Book of Kells, the Irish illuminated manuscript from the ninth century that’s decorated with ornate lettering – lettering that often adds a layer of significance to, if not commentary on, the main text, the Gospels. So I was intrigued by Davenport’s suggestion that a similar logic might underpin works of contemporary literature, even if they are mass-produced novels that contain few or no such decorative elements or illustrations. You could say that my book is a survey of the Kells effect at the end of the Gutenberg era.

I wanted not only to explicate a selection of writings, but to engage with them on a conceptual and material level. It started as an essay, but the narrator gradually became more prominent, and I started to incorporate elements of fiction: the narrator – that is, the figure of the reader – became a character.

Ultimately I guess I consider it all writing. My books combine reading and writing, text and image, quotation and appropriation. Seeing as A Die with Twenty-Six Faces is a book about typography, I felt it was important to incorporate images of words in various media: printed words, handwritten words, digitized words, engraved words, filmed words.

It just so happens that L is the only letter missing from my collection. So I called the main character L.: the figure of the reader completes the book, as it were. But although ‘L.’ is on the cover, the title is A Die with Twenty-Six Faces. The cover gestures towards a completion that – farcically – falls just short. L. is obviously an exaggerated version of me – there’s something foolish about the book’s premise, and somehow this foolishness made it possible for me to write.

Of course, the book is a metafictional work in the sense that it’s a book about books, but yes, I’m less interested in an ontology of writing than in how texts are produced, disseminated, and archived. Incorporating elements of fiction allows me to situate these processes in a lived experience – at least I hope the book conveys a sense of lived experience. It also opens up a space for gaps, exceptions, doubts – things that aren’t normally allowed in an archive (or in literary analysis, for that matter). To give an obvious example, the collection is rearranged in multiple ways. Now that I think about it, the book’s hybrid form is also a vital contrast to the encyclopedic or totalizing impulse behind collections, which can be oppressive.

Craig Dworkin calls this the “phantom shelf”: there’s always another book or author or category that could be added, or a book or author or category that’s been excluded. Of course, this is the unresolvable tension between accumulation and classification. And it’s a truism that the most interesting books and authors resist classification, or even upend our systems of classification.

L.’s collection of alphabet books is not grouped together on one shelf but scattered throughout his library. It’s hidden within a larger collection: a dispersed thing, not a monolithic thing. A Die with Twenty-Six Faces is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier book of mine, On the Self-Reflexive Page, which presents a typology of pages from novels that make use of non-verbal devices. Collecting pages from books is a paradoxical idea: how can you collect individual pages? (For one thing, you can’t separate a recto from the verso.) You can only collect reproductions of pages in a new book. A Die with Twenty-Six Faces is about a collection of books, not pages, but I’m very selective of what I take from these books: a quotation here, an image of a page or cover there. In the end, this collage of quotations and images is held together by the main character, L.

Exactly, and hopefully this creates a sense of inexhaustible dialogue. It’s also why many of the illustrations are reproductions of covers, title pages, and flap texts – examples of what Gerard Génette calls the paratext: the material that surrounds the text and frames it in a certain way. In my book, this material becomes part of the text.

I’m happy you made that connection and I agree. A Die with Twenty-Six Faces takes up many of the themes in “Infant A,” the short piece of fiction I wrote for The Social Life of the Book. In “Infant A,” the narrator goes for an imaginary walk with Ulises Carrión, the Mexican bookmaker who in the 1970s ran Other Books and So, an artist’s bookshop in Amsterdam. And, to go full circle, their conversation revolves around Zukofsky’s “A” and Warhol’s a: A Novel. Like Carrión, I want not only to write texts, but to make books.