Ways of Reading: On the Road with Tim Youd's 100 Novels Project

One day back in 2012, Youd was sitting in his studio when he came up with the idea of retyping novels as an art project. He had just closed the book he was reading and started squeezing and pushing on it--he wanted to crush the book so he could "get all the words onto one page," he tells me, pressing his hands together. The book became an object with a formal quality. There's "a black rectangle inside of a white rectangle," Youd says, referring to the text within the encompassing margin being the white rectangle. "I wanted the texture of the words, the weight of the words." It had to be a typewriter because the book is typeset, he reasons. "It's a font, and I wnat to echo that."