Veronika Spierenburg’s In Order of Pages presents a compendium of the artist’s many hours of research and reading at the Sitterwerk art library. The Sitterwerk, located in a valley outside the city of St. Gallen, is part of a group of art and craft resources including a foundry, a materials archive, and a photography studio and lab.

The library originated through a bequest by Daniel Rohner, a passionate collector of books, and has since grown. Today the collection operates on an advanced cataloguing system: each book is fitted with a radio frequency identification (RIFD) tag and is digitally tracked; as a result none of the books requires a fixed shelf location, but can always be found regardless of its circulation history.

This system was created in light of Rohner’s interest in the associative connections generated by chance and the random adjacency of books in a well-used library. The RFID system enables spontaneous creativity in the use, the finding, and the sharing of volumes and information, as readers generate specific collections of books based on divergent interests.

Since 2010 Spierenburg has created her own inventory of this library, scanning more than 3,000 pages that reflect her particular interests. This publication reproduces about 450 of her selections, organized by Spierenburg in collaboration with graphic designer Simone Koller.

Each page retains the pagination from its original source and presents a random selection of the subjects covered in the library’s holdings, including art history, exhibition documentation, art and craft materials and fabrication techniques. Diagrams meet diagrammatic artworks and vernacular forms meet avant-garde artists. There are images of nature, of artists’ ephemera and of architectural and furniture design. There is visual coherence across diverse subjects, such as when striped parquet designs from 1950s Germany meet a layered felt sculpture by Robert Morris from the late 1960s (above); elsewhere a curved theatre interior echoes the curve of a bell jar in a work by James Lee Byars.

One copy of this book arrived in New York yesterday; if you recognize the distinctive table in these photos, you will know where to find it. And it’s also likely to turn up at Dashwood Books.

Veronika Spierenburg (b. 1981) has a BA in Photography from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and a MFA from Central Saint Martins College, London. She has had solo exhibitions in Zurich, London, Helsinki and New York, has been awarded artist’s prizes several times by the Canton of Aargau and she is the winner of the Manor Kunstpreis 2014. Since 2012 she has been a member of the City of Zurich’s Art Commission.