Scanners is a month-long used bookstore project that highlights the book as a physical object in an increasingly dematerialized world.
Our work with used books originated—and continues—in the salvage culture of the flea market, where we have supplied readers and artists with literature, non-fiction, and visual source material for over a decade. Scanners grows from this experience and takes the transient nature of the flea market site indoors for a short-term experiment in duration. With idiosyncratic materials and categories, and an emphasis on face out display, Scanners is also a proposal: one possibility for what a future bookstore might be.
Scanners will focus in part on visual culture, including art, architecture, and craft, as well as print-based media for use as source material. Other sections—on theory, counterculture, and technologies of the word, among others—will sit alongside vintage punk rock fanzines, VHS tapes and obscure ephemera.
Events at the store will examine topics in contemporary print culture, including: the printed image as source and inspiration; the changing nature of the reading experience; the future of the archive; the role of the internet in the search for knowledge and as an arbiter of value; and, despite the rise of the digital, the continued explosion of printed matter.
Developed and operated by Matt Borruso and Nick Hoff, Scanners will be open for the month of October, 2011, in San Francisco.
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