Photographs and text by David Maisel
Essays by David Maisel, Geoff Manaugh, Michael Roth, and Terry Toedtemeier
108 pp.; 71 color reproductions; 17×14 inches, casebound
Book design by Bob Aufuldish, Aufuldish & Warinner
Edited by Alan Rapp
Published by Chronicle Books
Publication Date: October 2008
ISBN 978-08118-6333-9
Library of Dust, from the photographer David Maisel, may well be this year’s most haunting book of images. It is a collection of photographs of copper canisters, each containing the unclaimed remains of a patient from a psychiatric hospital in Oregon (the same one used for filming “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). Rivulets of chemical corrosion, almost oceanic in their intense coloring, run down the sides. Mr. Maisel’s book is a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.
—from The New York Times, November 28, 2008
Library of Dust is currently out of print. A few copies are available for purchase through David Maisel Studio. Please inquire here.