American artist Jared Bark began putting up stacks of books in the fields and woods on his farm in 2012. All he had was an image in his mind’s eye of a column of books standing at the edge of a field surrounded by trees.

After working on the outdoor stacks, Jared Bark brought the project indoors to his studio, making all sorts of different stacks: colourful ones, burned ones, effaced one… More recently, Bark has been constructing vertical stacks of books that are then run through a sawmill to become a cant, a term for a log that has been milled on all four sides.

The slender verticality of the sculptures reference both the trees from which paper is made and the ancient freestanding columns Bark experienced in Pompeii. Book of Stacks, Stacks of Books gathers for the first time in a book a comprehensive selection of the stacks Bark has been making over the past decade.