Book With No Back Cover

Book With No Back Cover has two front covers, both identical. But you can't call  it a book with an identical cover 'at each end', because it doesn't have an end.

The mirroring quality of Book With no Back Cover isn't a trick. Recursive patterning flows, wave on wave, spiral on spiral, through concept, content, structure, form and design: at and across all layers and levels of conception. The simplicity and purity of Will Shaman's design fully capture Richard Burns's twin central themes: first, that no book has an end; and, second, that all books are part of the one Book Without End.

In this respect, Richard Burns moves along similar lines to Osip Mandelstam, T. S. Eliot, Borges, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès and Nasos Vayenas. Furthermore, Book With No Back Cover challenges notions of linear, 'progressive', 'developmental' time, as well as  Aristotle's prescription in The Poetics about the need for "a beginning, a middle and an end"...

At its precise centre, a reflexive and self-reflecting mirror explores the dimensions of a legal text in boustrophodon, itself an implicit commentary on the Codex of Gortyn...

  This voice, no longer mine, is yours now. Take it.
       Use it. Give it your own far finer sound.

   In hearing these words, rewite yourself. Having
       no back cover, the book is yours to complete.

 ... all of which suggests: this book is patterned on Yi Jing (I Ching) and Kabbalah.