Words, Books, and the Spaces They Inhabit is the first of Mari Shaw’s series The Noble Art of Collecting. With examples of unexpected collectors and serendipitous outcomes, Shaw investigates the obscure desires that shape art collecting and the public goodwill that results from it. What was lost when the scrolls in the ancient library of Alexandria were destroyed? How did Catherine the Great’s collecting change the way we think? How do Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com expand our appreciation of books as objects? Though the ways we communicate live and vary, history has been created, recorded, and preserved in writing. Words and the spaces that contain them are crucial to an empathetic understanding of our world.

Mari Shaw is an intellectual property lawyer, storyteller, and author of Painter and Pataphysician Thomas Chimes (2015). She has organized projects with artists such as Candida Höfer and Anri Sala; has taught a seminar on originality, art, law, and technology at the University of Pennsylvania; and lectures at a number of universities and art schools. Shaw has served on boards and advisory committees for documenta 12, The Galleries of the Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin Law School, and the Wilma Theater. She and her husband, Peter, live in Philadelphia and Berlin and have been collecting art for thirty-five years.