Room & Book at The Poor House Reading Rooms, Dorset.
3–31 August 2022

Scroll down to view the exhibition or click here to request the e-catalogue

Room & Book is delighted to present our first Summer Reading List and online selling exhibition in partnership with The Poor House Reading Rooms, Dorset. Loosely responding to Paul Nash’s 1936 Dorset: Shell Guide, which articulates a sense of the landscape as a geological and surrealist object, the list includes books, exhibition catalogues and zines, mostly relating to British modernism and surrealism, organised around the themes of science, mysticism and geology.  All material will be available for sale at roomandbook.co.uk from 3 August. Click the link above to request a price list in advance.

The Poor House Reading Rooms is a living house, as well as an archive of modern and contemporary artists books and affordable editions housed in a former church poor house in a rural setting near the Jurassic coast in Dorset. It hosts residencies, research visits and publishing projects. The Summer Reading List closely relates to the recent publication, Wild Stone (2022), a Poor House Reading Rooms education project produced in collaboration with MA Sculpture at the RCA, Van Gogh House, and Tate Archive. Wild Stone responds to the format and imagery of Nash’s book “as a provocation and motif to make a new work exploring the cityscape and rural landscape as a surrealist object – of wild stone – replete with the forces of physics, geology, and deep time…”

Image: Paul Nash, Dorset: Shell Guide, 1936