This is an artist book called Elements of Geometry.
And it's after the very famous treatise – mathematical treaties – by Euclid,
which was written in 300 BC.
Now there have been very many printed editions of that text – still considered a fundamental
text in mathematics and geometry – the first printed edition was published in Venice in
1482, and this artist book is a response to that first printed version.
As you can see, the artist has in this instance, for this artist book,
he has pixelated the text – so that's a deliberate decision that he's made.
The printed version had diagrams to accompany the text, to help explain the theories,
and some of the later printed versions had fold-out diagrams – so little paper pieces that
were kind of stuck in on the pages, that you could fold out in order to understand the text better.
But this artist book takes that a step further because it has pop-up diagrams inside of it.
And right at the very end of the book, here we have a miniature version of the actual
book that we're looking at, which I think is a really nice ending that the artist has included.
Across from that pop-up, you can see the colophon page of the book,
which gives us all the information about the publication and it includes the edition number.
This is a very small edition – there are only 10 copies
of this book that have been made, and the National Art Library's copy is number four.