A book is more than a text set in type. Its format, binding, paper and layout all take part in how it is read. The four books presented here explore different ways of bringing these elements together. Each begins with a particular text or subject and develops a form of its own, through typography, materials and the craft of bookmaking.

In June 2014 the collective Institute of Jamais Vu moved its gallery to blip blip blip in Leeds. There the group rebuilt its twenty exhibitions, made of fibreboard, all at once, to form a single hall: Thunderdome. The works were laid over one another, each keeping the position it had held in the gallery. In the book I repeat this layering. A shape of the exhibition space is glued to the cover. The same plan is printed on the flap, and the list of all the exhibitions is placed inside it, so that the reader begins with a map. Inside lies a panorama of the show. Headings and subheadings serve as a timeline, with the exhibitions in chronological order.

In L’Alouette Anouilh turns to historical material, though the time of action in his plays is often blurred. How can a book hold this ambiguity? The running head remains unchanged from the first page to the last. Around it, the illustrations move freely, combining historical references with postmodern wit. The central image is the lark, hanging motionless in the sunlight while an archer takes aim. For one of the characters, it stands for France itself.

The starting point is speculative realism and its critique of correlationism: the view that we can know only the relation between thought and world, never either term alone. The argument extends this principle to all relations, placing the human among many others. Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude provides the textual basis. The photographs follow from this premise. What does an image show when the human is only one relation among many?