One of the most ubiquitous English ghost stories, The Screaming Skull of Burton Agnes Hall, is a fine example of the persistence and reiteration of a popular narrative over many years.Drawing from decades of research, artist Robert Williams re-presents references to the story from more than 100 popular sources that extend across more than 150 years.The project, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Hilmar Sch�fer, echoes the transmission of the story as quoted text, oral tradition and downright plagiarism, as it draws together many references across time to a story that tells us as much about cultural and historical representations, as it does a lurid tale of murder, grave-opening, and screaming skulls.Contributors to the project include artist James Brook, artist and writer Dr.Kate Briggs, and cultural sociologist Dr. Hilmar Sch�fer. Robert Williams is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cumbria Institute of the Arts.

'Remember the lessons of literary history. Don't wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.'Mixing anecdote and advocacy, the first section of this two-part polemical essay offers an introduction to the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing – as undertaken by some of the most revered writers in the modern Western literary canon, from Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) to Irma Rombauer (1882–1941) via Virginia Woolf (1871–1922) and Derek Walcott (1930–).Having looked back at some of the monuments of literary history, the second section takes its charge from the epigraph, 'Institutions cannot prevent what they cannot imagine', and looks forward to the political praxis of the twenty-first century's digital future.The essay was first commissioned by the Foreword for the London Art Book Fair 2011 catalogue. Translations will soon be available in Spanish and Italian.Accompanying an eponymous solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, April-May 2012; and the Laurence Sterne Museum, Coxwold, August 2012.Limited edition. Do or DIY is created by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston.

Craig Dworkin presents his entire corpus of 13 FACT poems (2005-16) for the very first time in his latest book, Twelve Erroneous Displacements and a Fact (2016).Dworkin's FACT series is an exact list of the ingredients that make up the constituent components of the materials used to inscribe the text of the poem and the object on which its is published, hence the blunt title of the work. It's a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language.Each time Dworkin displays the poem he researches the medium on which it's being viewed and changes the contents accordingly. It's a flexible work-in-progress, which has listed the make-up of everything from a xeroxed sheet of paper to compact disc to smartphone touchscreen to dyed wool Himalayan rug. The idea is written on and through the material form.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Reading as Art at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre (27 August - 19 November 2016)

The Perverse Library includes Professor Craig Dworkin's bibliography (2,427 titles), a supplementary bibliography of absent and imagined books, and an accompanying essay arguing libraries are in fact defined not by what they contain, but by what books they exclude or fail to include. The essay also investigates the histories of libraries, makes a theoretical argument about the relation of canons to architectural space, and explores the psychology of collecting – including the pathology of bibliomania: 'He had but one idea, one love, one passion: books. And this love, this passion burned within him, consuming his days, devouring his existence.' Although they present themselves as figures of rational organization, library catalogues and classification systems can only hope to distract from the aberrant chaos they cannot exorcise. Published to accompany the exhibition The Perverse Library at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, 4 September – 31 October 2010, curated by Simon Morris.

Poetry. READING THE REMOVE OF LITERATURE is a reading of Maurice Blanchot's seminal book The Space of Literature, performed on the page as an annotative writing that encircles the should-be space of print. Through the progressive appropriation and then erasure of Blanchot's text, and through a processual transposition of hand-writing into formal typography, Thurston addresses the very question of the possibility of literature that obsessed Blanchot. The meaning of the candid reflections and meditations which form the incisive marginalia is founded in a tension with the suggestions of the absent text. Floating alone these annotations may have little worth or make little sense, but between these covers they do not deny the history of their derivation: They are constantly anchored by that which is missing, in a creative erring, in a process of over-coming, which in this book asserts an equality of presence between the read and the written; the reading and the writing.

This index sets fragments collected from websites in the month following the publication in the journal 'Nature of - the Sequence and Analysis of Duplication-Rich Human Chromosome 16' against the background of the earlier draft sequence originally published by Project Gutenberg.

Photographs made Sunday, June 1, 2003 of cut-out words from Sigmund Freud's book "The Interpretation of Dreams" thrown from the window of a car speeding down a road in Dorset.

Pigeon Reader is inspired by Georges Perec's thoughts on reading, which he likened to 'a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs'.Morris' intervention oscillates between the obvious and the indecipherable, the trivial or the commonplace and the strange and the unexpected; between sense and non-sense, logic and absurdity, simplicity and abstruseness; between what the artwork shows and what it says. Pigeon Reader is an intervention in a precise facsimile edition of Perec's book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin books, 1997).In remaking the full book, Morris' conviction has gone beyond the recent tradition of the artists' insert. Within the paratext he has corrupted the corporate branding, with penguins morphing into pigeons and advertisements re-imagined.One could be forgiven for asking why someone would remake an entire book just to make a conceptual play in a single chapter. Morris would likely respond with Perec's closing words from the very chapter re-played: 'These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them.'