Paper Bonds
Bookmaking for Kin, Friends and Self in Contemporary Europe and the Middle East
A project developed within AV ČR-CNRS Tandem Program supported by the Czech Academy of Sciences, CNRS and CEFRES
Project principal investigators:
Hélène Martinelli (ENS Lyon / CEFRES): helene.martinelli@ens-lyon.fr
Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė (Orientální ústav Akademie věd České republiky): saba@orient.cas.cz
ANNOTATION
The project explores self-made books and private bookmaking practices in contemporary Europe and the Middle East, focusing on their material, symbolic and social dimensions. Adopting a genealogical perspective, it examines how non-commercial publishing and book production shape relationships, express identity and responds to political and technological change. Drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, book history and sociology of literature, the project aims to reappraise the social significance of the print book in the era of digital publishing.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Despite the rise of digital media over the past decades, print books have not only persisted but thrived. In countries as diverse as France, the Czech Republic, and Egypt, numbers of titles published annually continue to grow. Instead of replacing print, as many have predicted, digital publishing has contributed to its resurgence. By allowing access to authorship to a larger number of authors – particularly those from marginalised communities who have been excluded by traditional gatekeepers – digital publishing has enabled them to build their readership. Yet, despite their success achieved online, many still choose to print their books afterwards as a sign of authority, permanence, or symbolic gratification (Parmentier 2022; Larson 2024). The enduring presence of the book indicates that its significance lies not only in the transmission of content – which digital media can now accomplish – but also in its material and symbolic aspects, such as its capacity to signify a social status, to materialise social bonds, and to offer means for the expression of the self.
Such an observation encourages us to reassess the significance of the print book as a cultural object, embedded in its materiality and symbolic value (Chartier 1996; Melot 2005). This project aims to document grassroots practices of publishing, bookmaking and distribution that operate outside commercial circuits and are rooted in communities of family, friendships and the expression of the self. It adopts a genealogical perspective focusing on the post-World War II Europe and the Middle East to identify key moments of transformation in these practices – such as political upheavals like revolutions (Carle 2019; Pepe 2019) and wars (Martinelli 2025), shifts in technology (Ryzová 2014), the emergence of new forms of self-expression (Garvey 2012) and of sociability that inspire new material practices (Williams 2017; Šabasevičiūtė 2025). The project encompasses scrapbooks, art brut books, handmade books created for friends and families, and self-published books.
The project aims to remedy an important gap in the academic literature on print books. Seminal works on bibliography, book history or anthropology have established that a text is not reducible to its content, but also encompasses its material characteristics (McKenzie 1999; Barber 2007). However, the interest in material aspects of books in shaping sociality has largely been confined to particular historical periods – such as the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era – when books were rare objects and their materiality was appreciated as part of various religious ceremonies and household rituals (Chartier 1996; Williams 2017). When the material and symbolic aspects of print books are recognised as worthy of scholarly attention, the study of bookmaking has often been associated to specific geographical regions, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks: artist books have been studied as art objects, primarily within 20th-century European and American contexts (Chapon 1987; Moeglin-Delcroix 1997); fanzines as products of artistic subcultures in the Anglophone world during the late 20th century (Duncombe 2008); and samizdats as a product of repressive Central and Eastern European regimes (Labov & Kind-Kovacs 2013; Camarade, Galmiche & Jurgenson 2023). However, there are virtually no studies that explore these practices collectively. Yet, these practices converge in their shared role in shaping social bonds and communities. A more comprehensive approach to self-made books would also allow to consider practices that fall in between these trends, such as the hand-to-hand distribution of self-published books in Egypt’s literary clubs, illustrated samizdats from the pre-Soviet era, or the crafting and exchange of personal cookbooks, among many others. While recent scholarship increasingly challenges the dominant approaches to private bookmaking – through the exploration of “unbound literatures” (“littératures sauvages”, Saint-Amand 2016), material form of samizdats (Komaromi 2022), including illustrated ones (Typlt 2023), art brut unique copy books (Berst 2022), and artistic fanzine subculture in Central Europe (Šima 2021), a more comprehensive approach to these practices is still needed.
To avoid the limitations due to linking certain bookmaking practices to specific geographical zones, historical periods, and theoretical frameworks, this project adopts a triangular approach, focusing on France, Czech Republic (and Central Europe more broadly), and Middle East. This particular geographical focus reflects the current areas of expertise of the two applicant researchers. However, such a focus decentres a purely Western European focus on the bookmaking and. By including regions situated in the imperial peripheries, it traces the historical effects of colonial and centre-periphery dynamics on print cultures (Orsini, Srivastava & Zecchini 2022; Newell 2023). This approach allows for the exploration of variations in infrastructural conditions (access to print and the economies of DIY) as well as the shifting symbolic value of books across different societies, where books are markers of social status, traces of social bonds, or simply decorative objects. During this project, we aim to expand the geographical focus to include Anglophone cultures and other peripheral regions.
The project is grounded in the disciplines of anthropology, the sociology of literature, literary studies, and the history of the book. It builds on approaches that highlights materiality, the interplay of visuality and text, infrastructures, sociality, and affects. What new forms of conceptualisation of the self do bookmaking practices engage with, respond to, or express? What kinds of new social relationships do these practices create and reflect? What are the material afterlives of the books – how do they become “objects of affection” (Dassié 2010) in the domestic sphere? How do central or peripheral positions shape these practices?
This research project is relevant in today’s context, where the digital disruption of the publishing industry has generated new research agendas. These include the exploration of “literatures outside the book” (Ruffel & Rosenthal 2018) and the rise of self-publishing in the digital space (Larson 2024). While these areas have produced innovative insights, the exclusive research focus on the digital sphere tends to overshadow the enduring significance of material books. Yet, private bookmaking practices, a steady and continuing tradition over the decades, might be poised for a resurgence. As political instability, censorship, the disillusionment with digital and technological utopias, and the increasing desire to move away from the commodification of commercial publishing grow, many countries are returning to “kitchen politics” – a term describing informal, familial, and domestic modes of action. In this context, practices of bookmaking and book-gifting might provide a crucial material support for building trust-based communities, offering tangible anchors of identity, belonging, and social connection in an increasingly uncertain world.