While viewers typically encounter artworks in their entirety from a “safe” distance (as determined by museum or gallery convention), the book format allows for an immediate engagement, and invites the reader to contemplate individual threads of paper, to trace incidental signs and symbols, to decipher remnants of type, or to consider the compositional quality of parts independently of the whole. The public turns from spectator to intimate reader.
– Reto Geiser in Reading Revolutionaries
The Latin-speaking provinces of Roman North Africa ran from Tripolitania in the … usually of mosaics (or parts of mosaics) divorced entirely from their setting; and … several projects have aimed at collecting all the mosaics from whole cities, …
– result from a GoogleBooks search for “Roman” “Africa” “Mosaics” “Parts” “Whole”)
(my thanks to Bill Horrigan for the gift of Reading Revolutionaries. For more about this book, go here.)