Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. (For more about iconic books, see the links to the Iconic Books Project at left.)

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Gigantic Books

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The worth of iconic texts gets marked by, among other things, the construction of monuments that take the shape of the books themselves. Monuments of the Qur'an appear in the palace square of Sharjah in the UAE (above) and on roadsides in Bahrain, while the tablets of the Ten Commandments fill an entire hillside in Murphy, North Carolina.

Gigantic monuments to secular texts apparently have more difficulty in getting funded, if the aborted plan to construct a 50-foot tall replica of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is any indication.
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