What is a book?

Stephen Livingstone makes artist books. Well, that is a bit of an understatement, he works with a variety of materials from natural and found substances – pulverize rock, sludge, and dust to traditional inks.
A major part of his work involves remaking books to infuse them with a new meaning.
 
And I met him this afternoon at the Artist Bookmarket in the Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh.
 
Here he is holding up a book on mountaineering which he has cut up and reassembled  as a scroll. “I am reinterpreting the Chinese scroll with a Western aesthetic.”
 
See extra photo for another Sir Walter Scott quotation.
 

My afternoon of culture ended ignominiously when I boarded a crowded train back to Stirling to find it stuffed with football fans highly inebriated whose every other word was an “f…” one.