Mutilaties by Irma Boom

This book is one of my favorite works by Irma Boom.

Created to mark the twentieth anniversary of Metamorfoze, the Dutch national program for the preservation of paper heritage, it is an homage to the cultural legacy of paper. Designed by Irma Boom, it was published in 2017.

The book draws attention to both the beauty of historical paper materials and the traces of their deterioration. To make this visible, she introduced semicircular cuts into every single page. As the reader turns the pages, the paper crackles as small circular windows gradually open, one half at a time. The intervention is applied without exception—to image pages and text pages alike. In addition, the book alternates between monochrome and color pages, bringing into focus the contrasts between analogue and digital, past and present.

As in many countries, the preservation of paper archives in the Netherlands relies heavily on digitization. For decades, Metamorfoze has played a central role in advancing this effort as a national initiative. Against this backdrop, Irma Boom radically explores the possibilities of the physical book—something that can never be replicated through digitization. This book simply cannot be turned into a PDF. Its reading experience can only be understood by holding it in one's hands and witnessing how the book itself changes through the act of turning its pages.

The Dutch title Mutilaties translates into English as Mutilations, meaning ‘damage,’ ‘mutilation,’ or ‘destruction.’ The title refers both to the mechanical incisions—the wounds—cut into the pages of the book and to the title of the essay included within, written by Tijs Goldschmidt. A writer and evolutionary biologist, Goldschmidt reflects on the similarities and differences between cultural evolution and biological evolution, while describing the unique sensation of encountering original paper documents firsthand.

The essay concludes with the following observation:

“Life on Earth has spent three and a half billion years perfecting the mechanisms of replication. The human practices of writing, printing, and digitizing, by contrast, have only just begun—and there is something comforting in that thought.”