The Last Books is a publishing house founded by Phil Baber and Snejanka Mihaylova in 2012.
 
The Yellow Papers is a pamphlet series for experimental poetry and poetics.

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Contact: mail[at]thelastbooks.org
Barentszstraat 291-B, 1013 NN Amsterdam, NL
or, Tsar Ivan Asen II, 26, 1224 Sofia, BG
 
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Phil Baber is a writer, editor, and graphic designer. In 2012 he was awarded the Walter Tiemann Prize for book design, and between 2013 and 2015 he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. In 2017 he was writer in residence at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen. He has given lectures and readings at venues including the Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin; the Austrian Ministry of Culture, London; Raum, Bologna; the Teylers Museum, Haarlem; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Bulthaup Gallery, Saint Petersburg. His most recent work, four studies of a late fragment by Friedrich Hölderlin, will be published in Bricks from the Kiln 4 (autumn 2020). He teaches writing at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.
 
Snejanka Mihaylova is a writer and artist working between philosophy, theatre, and performance. She holds a degree in philosophy of language and hermeneutics from the University of Florence, Italy, and a master’s degree in theatre studies from DasArts, Amsterdam. In 2012, she was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Her work Theatre of Thought, for which she published an eponymous book, has been performed in several locations in Europe, including De Hallen in Haarlem (2011). In 2012 she published Practical Training in Thinking and led a seminar in dialogue with Mladen Dolar at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She has received commissions from If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution and Redcat Gallery, Los Angeles. Her most recent performance work was presented at Art in General, New York, and Swimming Pool, Sofia. She has taught at the University of Lausanne, the Dutch Art Institute, Documenta 14, and the Sandberg Institute. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sofia, where she teaches philosophy.
 

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1. The last books, being spineless, insert themselves between the pages of the next-to-last books – a way of getting about in the world – so that when the pages are shaken, the last books fall out, like infants, speechless almost.

 

2. Not unlike previous books, the last books include fragments of songs, collections of facsimiles, hieroglyphs and stelae transcribed and annotated; and like those previous books, the last books aspire to the consistent and complete, although like all books they fail, having about them something unassured, something dispersed, elusive, unfathomable, although they are among the last ones to fail in this way.

 

3. Each of the last books will remember at least one book that went before it, books that are not among the last books, obviously, if they are remembered, unless, unlike the last books, they last long enough to be forgotten.

 

4. As with the first book, the one cut into stone under ancient skies, the last book is not something more, something added to other things; it is not even something less. Then what is it? A gap in the universe: nothing that is visible, nothing invisible.*

 

5. There are books abandoned by their readers and there are books that attempt to abandon their readers and dissolve their authorship. To set their readers free, as the saying might have it – for all the little their authors ever know about this, bound as they are to being read (to being readable), to being loved (to being loveable), incapable of love’s singular repetition. But these will not be the authors of the last books.

 

6. If the last books are not the books memorised and recited by people who consider themselves the guardians if not the survivors of the books (the books it is hoped will survive their survivors, just as they survive their own destruction), this is because there are other books that tell the story of those times, and these aren’t the last books either.

 

7. Nor is the last book the infinite book, I mean the one that depends, if it’s ever to be completed, on the infinite patience of the reader, because that book has already been written and is still being read, and even as the last books are beginning to circulate, will still be being read, its finitude still being chased down through each of its pages, even as the last books are starting to fall apart.

 

8. The last books will be written by ourselves and by our friends and for this reason they will be beautiful, and when we are gone and when our friends are gone there will be no more of them, they will have been the last ones.

 

9. It is a mistake to suppose that the last books will be monumental – although the last monuments may well be made of books.

 

10. And, lastly, the last books will be made by people without too much concern as to whether such things can be made to last.

 

*Cf. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” The Infinite Conversation, pp. 422–23 (trans. Susan Hanson)
 

—Joe Kelleher (2012)

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Website designed by Phil Baber and Elisabeth Rafstedt; programmed by Arthur Haegeman.
 
The construction of this website was supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst.
 

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Our Dutch chamber of commerce number is 34382527. Terms and conditions can viewed here.