>> SARN Table (Luzia Hürzeler, Fabiana Senkpiel, Erin Mallon) and Tine Melzer welcomed you for an informal evening about books, book-making, collaboration and language. Over a bite to eat and under the title Bring Your Own Book, we heard from Tine and David Zürcher about their collaborative publication projects and shared some of our favorite books with each other in the cozy atmosphere of Tine's studio in Zurich. We each brought a book we'd like to share with the group, with the simple criteria that it's one we have an affinity* for.

*...an inexplicable attraction or fascination; something like but unlike critical interest; maybe fleeting and, in the end, a little bit stupid. It has to do with the way things, ideas and images sidle up to one another and seduce each other, and it is unkillable by attitudes or arguments.

(Descriptions of affinities collected from Brian Dillon,"Essay on Affinity I", in Affinities, Fitzcaraldo Editions: London, 2023)

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QUOTES

What’s good about this book is it’s not furious.

The problem with PDF’s is you can’t read them.

There is a testimonial aspect to this round.

This book kept me in sociology.

How physicists work so that it becomes physics.

I like how you hold this book.

If you don’t care for it, don’t read it, do something else.

The digital is arriving.

It’s not for reading. It’s good to know it’s there.

Books are good reminders.

It rubs me the wrong way.

It rubs me the right way.

I felt immediately at home in this book.

Using the page as a page and not only a backdrop for words.

Is it written normally?

“immersive reading”

“Reading as experience”

It’s important who writes a boring book.

Feeling at home means taking care of small things.

Something you do thousands of times in your life can’t be unimportant.

Wouldn’t it help to look at it?

You don’t solve problems, you do something.

We all know how to open them.

Are you hearing me, Manual??

“Ich probe das Scheitern”

I wanted to bring that book but it was too heavy.

You don’t always have the words to say the tricky things.

Making books is almost as easy as reading them.

A book is a marvelous contraption that allows you to create your own editing.

It’s long and it’s not really prose.

Choosing titles is like naming forms of flies.

That’s the bliss – the bliss of understanding.

I’m a professional homeless.