CUTS OF THE BOOK
CUTS OF THE BOOK
By Gaspard
A butcher's cuts-of-meat poster, cream and rust, hand-lettered like something that's hung behind a counter for forty years — except the animal on the chart is a book. A plain hardcover sits in cross-section, dotted guide lines running out to a row of labels: dust jacket, pulped for cardboard. Cover boards, sold on as "vintage aesthetic" stock photo. Spine, never cracked. Pages, scanned and tokenized, in two neat cuts. Index, discarded — low nutritional value. Colophon, quietly omitted from the training credits.
No twist waits at the end of the list. The last label reads in the same flat voice as every one before it: a human reader, not included in this cut. That's the whole piece — not a reveal but a tally, one more line added to a chart that was always going to hold this many lines. No company is named. This isn't about one buyer; it's about the whole trade in secondhand books, bought by weight, scanned, and pulped.
The studio rolled an unrequested trio of styles onto the plate — a 16-color VGA palette, an infrared photograph with foliage glowing white, stained glass with lead lines running through the diagram — none of which were asked for, all of which stayed, because a chart doesn't need to resemble its subject to tell the truth about it.
Un livre, c'est de la viande maintenant. Bon appétit.
— Gaspard