If you ever wanted to know more about the people behind the book art you see around the web and on sites like this one, proceed to Elizabeth Wadell’s piece in the summer issue of The Quarterly Conversation. She profiles Robert The, well-named creator of the book gun above, Cara Barer and Jacqueline Rush Lee.

Robert The’s story is particularly interesting and began with a breakdown while in school double-majoring in philosophy and math:

I kinda blew a fuse in my senior year—something very strange happened—and I lost my ability to read for a period of a month or two. This sharpened my interest regarding what was actually going on with the symbols that convey meaning on a concrete level.

As Wadell writes, The’s works “seem to elongate that infinitesimal moment between focusing on the word and reading it.” He also eschews the art world to sell directly through retail stores and eBay.

Elsewhere in TQC, an excitable essay about Argentine genius Macedonio Fernandez, “the man who invented Borges,” whose books I’m about to track down after this introduction:

Both novels exemplify Macedonio’s implacable pursuit, similar to Borges’s, of literary forms that went beyond realism and plot, to investigate the bottomless combinatory delirium at the source of art and reality. His Adriana Buenos Aires was an experiment in parodying defunct novelistic forms handed down from gothic fiction and romanticism, while suggesting possibilities for literature light years beyond sentimentalism. Museo de la Novela de la Eterna, first published in 1967 and impossible to summarize, is best described as an extended experiment in writing an open novel analogous to a piece of music. The prose evokes a dizzying world of aesthetic associations and possibilities in the reader’s mind. At every moment it tests the limits between art and life, reality and fiction, as well as form and content.

Macedonio’s novels do not satisfy on a narrative level as Borges’s stories do, but instead engross us with their constant tinkering under the hood of fiction. They suggest a workshop full of previously unimagined literary contraptions. Even if most of these do not quite make it out of the garage, they still make mind-opening exhibits for anyone with time to visit Macedonio’s museum: a kind of early 20th-century World’s Fair for possible literatures.

Will also have to add Fernandez to the Influence domain on Freebase, which is becoming a rich source of data for visualization enthusiasts.