Jessica Field

Book of Knowledge, 2016

This is a book that I found in a thrift store. It was meant to be a book to continue my robot diary chronicles, but when the children’s encyclopedia was gutted and the pages replaced with blank ones and 4 pages were pulled from the book to act as the sheets to bind the blank pages to the hardcover. The significance and irony of those sheets and the book being empty showed it to be a complete and finished work.

These practical sheets from the original book show an alphabet where each letter is defined by a fantasy word, like F is for Fairies. None are practical, which is peculiar in itself. The back page shows the world in terms of time zones and the paths of eclipses of the sun traced on a world map. The inner pages connecting the cover to the blank pages are little encyclopedia explanations answering the questions: 1) Where does thought come from? And 2) Can the brain ever get filled up.

The book stays empty to act as a promise unfulfilled that the practical sheets holding the cover to the pages attempt to explain but the book being so void of anything but potential focus the mind on the thought space of the two simple questions above with an answer designed for a child to comprehend. This very question shows a different time as no parent would buy a book such as this for their child as today’s educational expectations differ to what this book is attempting to achieve. It is not only about learning, it is about creating doctrine, it has a bit of Darwin evolutionary language that has been used so often to marginalize minorities, it has a strange tone of preaching morality, yet also tries to promote a child sense of wonder and imagination.

It is old so the information is not quite true to today’s standards. So then to book becomes pregnant with the flaws of knowledge and how it is used on people to influence them in both insidious and in positive ways, but is always biased to the time and voice in which wrote the book so the black pages become filled with meaning on how these sources of information should be reinterpreted and it down plays knowledge in the sense of receiving it to the bigger question of how it is interpreted by an individual.