Scanners is a month-long used bookstore project that highlights the book as a physical object in an increasingly dematerialized world.

Our work with used books originated—and continues—in the salvage culture of the flea market, where we have supplied readers and artists with literature, non-fiction, and visual source material for over a decade. Scanners grows from this experience and takes the transient nature of the flea market site indoors for a short-term experiment in duration. With idiosyncratic materials and categories, and an emphasis on face out display, Scanners is also a proposal: one possibility for what a future bookstore might be.

Scanners will focus in part on visual culture, including art, architecture, and craft, as well as print-based media for use as source material. Other sections—on theory, counterculture, and technologies of the word, among others—will sit alongside vintage punk rock fanzines, VHS tapes and obscure ephemera.

Events at the store will examine topics in contemporary print culture, including: the printed image as source and inspiration; the changing nature of the reading experience; the future of the archive; the role of the internet in the search for knowledge and as an arbiter of value; and, despite the rise of the digital, the continued explosion of printed matter.

Developed and operated by Matt Borruso and Nick Hoff, Scanners will be open for the month of October, 2011, in San Francisco.


NICK HOFF is a writer, translator, and bookseller. His work has appeared in various journals, including Telos, Fifth Wednesday, and Left Curve, and his translations of scholarly works have been published in The Journal of Modern History and in several books. Odes and Elegies, his book of translations of Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2008. Hoff lives and works in San Francisco.

Scanners is supported in part by the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grants Program through an Individual Artist Commissions grant. We would also like to thank Mina Dresden Gallery.



MATT BORRUSO is a visual artist, bibliophile, and San Francisco native. His recent solo shows include The Hermit's Revenge Fantasy at Steven Wolf Fine Arts and Return to Holy Mountain at 2nd Floor Projects in San Francisco. His work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and the Headlands Center for the Arts in the Bay Area, Anna Kustera, Derek Eller and the Manhattan Cultural Council in New York, and more recently Exile Projects in Berlin among others. Borruso currently lives and works in San Francisco.



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