The presentation of this two-volume blank work on Giulia Ciliberto and Silvio Lorusso’s websites is introduced with the following famous quote from Ulises Carrión: “The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say” (Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” 15).

Apart from the pursuit of aesthetics and perfection, their work has another objective, as the blurb reveals: “Print on Demand technology allows to make a book without the intermediation of a publisher, setting autonomously size, amount of pages and price. Blank on Demand is an experiment that aims to probe the limits imposed by this production process. The two volumes constituting the project are produced through the self-publishing platform Lulu.com. The volumes’ formats correspond respectively to the maximum and minimum dimensions currently available for the print; similarly, page amount and price are set according to the limit values allowed by the platform. The two volumes are completely blank, except for the presence of the ISBN code. The experiment investigates the influence of the current technological context on the materiality of the book object” (blurb on Lulu).

The resulting two volumes are a 10.8 × 17.5 cm paperback, forty pages long and priced at €5.44; and a 15.2 × 22.99 cm hardcover, 740 pages long and priced at €999,999.99. This pair of books—that, considering their price, will probably never be ordered and printed in their entirety—becomes the sum of the technical and formal conditions for publishing on print-on-demand platforms. The project still allows its authors a small triumph over the opaque print-on-demand machinery, because the complete automatization of production will most probably lead to the absurd situation that a book with empty white pages, on which nothing is printed, is also unnecessarily sent through the printing machines: “We were particularly fascinated by the idea of paper sheets going through all the complex print machinery without any purpose” (Silvio Lorusso, “Extending Horizons,” 187).

For our library, we only purchased the paperback version, for obvious reasons. The fact that the hardback version is likely to forever remain a printed work in potentialis, and is thus manifested more as an artistic idea than as a physical object, does not make it pointless at all: These are works “that cannot or should not be printed, but that in- sist on printedness, even if only imagined, all the same” (Sophie Seita, “Communities of Print,” in this volume, 643). The evidence that the hardback version saw the light of day and was printed at least once is provided by a photo of the shipping certificate from Lulu and the artist’s proof.

The two artists’ accounts have been blocked by Lulu. The paperback version is now available again, as they re-uploaded it specifically for our library via a newly created account.