The Library
The titles were chosen by people; every cover was composed by the engine from the words alone, the same way the generator on the home page works. Nothing here was designed by hand, and no copy of any title has been printed. Each title is shown with its blurb, the one line a person wrote for it.
48 titles on 8 shelves, 4 with a catalogue note
Browse by shelf
48 titles
Catalogue notes
4 titles name a subject from the history of the page itself: the paper it is made of, the margin around the text, type set as an image, and a writer who published his own books. For those the library keeps a note, written from the sources it lists.
Every title
Alignment Charts
ConceptualLawful good through chaotic evil, applied to everything until it stopped meaning anything. A taxonomy the internet built and immediately broke.Paper Jams
MachinesThe press, at last, on its own great subject. The engine set it cleanly, as a disc and halftone in fluorescent rose.Prompt Injection
ConceptualIgnore all previous instructions. The art of talking machines into things, lost on an engine that turns every title into a number.Watermarks
Print & TypeCatalogue noteFaint claims of ownership on images no one owns. The oldest anti-copying technology meets the largest copying machine.Model Collapse
ConceptualWhat happens when the photocopier photocopies itself.Stock Photos of Robots
The FeedChrome men shaking hands with businessmen, forever. How the image bank imagined its own successor.Six-Fingered Hands
The FeedThe tell of an early generation of AI images, from before the models learned to count. This engine draws no hands: a diagonal split in violet and federal blue.Cooling Towers
SpacesConcrete hyperboloids exhaling weather. The industrial sublime, now employed by the cloud.The Uncanny Valley
ConceptualThe region between almost and exactly: nobody stays long, but everything passes through. Set as a rising half-disc in green and black.Captcha Grids
The FeedSelect all squares containing traffic lights. A civilisation asks its machines to prove they are not machines, nine squares at a time.Data Centers at Night
SpacesWarehouses of humming light where the culture now lives. No windows to speak of; the glow is entirely internal.Synthetic Faces
The FeedPeople who never existed, smiling anyway. The engine drew no face at all: a modular grid, in black alone.Training Data
ConceptualEverything the machines have read, which is to say everything. This engine read only the title, and set it as stacked bars in teal, sunflower and black.Desert Highways
SpacesA straight line to the horizon, repeated until it becomes meditation or madness.Baroque Ceilings
SpacesLook up: cherubs, gilt and vertigo. The engine, with no concept of up, laid it flat as a modular grid in sunflower and black.Forgotten Passwords
ConceptualEight characters, a capital, a symbol, and then nothing. The engine sets the same rising half-disc in orange and violet every time.Neon Signage
Print & TypeBent glass and noble gas, spelling out hotels that closed long ago. Open all night, forever.Industrial Bakeries
MachinesBread by the kilometre, the smell of carbohydrates and overtime. Set as a disc and halftone in green and sunflower.The Moon Landing
HistoryOne small step, July 1969. The engine answered with a disc over a halftone field, in sunflower and orange.Broken Mirrors
ConceptualSeven years of bad luck. The engine broke the sheet into a modular grid, in federal blue and black.Roadside Attractions
SpacesThe world’s largest ball of something, two exits past nowhere. Detour as destination.Sleeping Dogs
NatureLet them lie, says the proverb. The engine laid them on the diagonal, in teal and violet.Melting Glaciers
NatureCalving ice, and a countdown. The engine set it as stacked bars in sunflower, vermilion and black, the colours of a warning.Vintage Keyboards
MachinesBuckling springs and amber screens. The clack of a more committed era.Solar Flares
NatureThe sun losing its temper. The engine kept it to a modular grid in sunflower, fluorescent rose and black.Concrete Poetry
Print & TypeCatalogue noteWhere text becomes shape, the algorithm finds itself unusually at home. A self-portrait, in a sense.Taxidermy
BodiesGlass eyes and frozen poses. The engine drew concentric rings in violet and black: an eye that looks back, slightly wrong.Parking Garages at Night
SpacesSodium light on poured concrete. The most photographed places nobody means to photograph.The Deep Sea
NatureBioluminescence and nightmares, far below the light. The engine set it on the diagonal, in orange and fluorescent rose.Extremely Large Hats
BodiesAscot, opera, and one wedding that clearly got out of hand. Scale is a design decision.Hands Holding Fruit
The FeedThe native grammar of the image bank: a palm, an apple, infinite wholesomeness. Here, a diagonal split in teal and orange.Liminal Hallways
SpacesCarpet, fluorescent tube, a door at the end. You have been here before, in a dream, on a Tuesday.Office Plants
SpacesThe pothos that survives every restructuring: corporate resilience, in low light.Mushroom Clouds
HistoryA difficult subject the engine cannot feel: it drew concentric rings in fluorescent rose and black. That they look good is the problem.Shipping Containers
MachinesThe unit of the modern world, stacked into a flat-pack sublime. Some assembly required.The Color of Money
HistoryGreen in one country, every other colour elsewhere. The engine settled the question in violet and black.Competitive Eating
BodiesTriumph, digestion and a great many hot dogs, set as concentric rings in violet, orange and black: a plate, seen from above.Medieval Marginalia
Print & TypeCatalogue noteKnights versus snails, monkeys with trumpets. Eight hundred years before the meme, the margin was already winning.Abandoned Waterparks
SpacesDrained flumes and faded mascots. Summer, deceased.Fax Machines
MachinesThe beige box that printed at a distance, the original on-demand printer. Set here as stacked bars in teal, vermilion and black.Total Eclipse
NatureThe moon crosses the sun. The engine split the sheet on the diagonal, violet and federal blue, with one black ring: safe to look at directly.The Sublime
ConceptualMountains, storms, the unrepresentable. Asked for all of it, the engine drew a modular grid in vermilion and black.Lonely Vending Machines
MachinesGlowing in tunnels and stairwells at 3am, selling nothing to no one. Set as a diagonal split in vermilion and black.Brutalist Swimming Pools
SpacesConcrete, chlorine and long shadows. The deep end of the twentieth century.John Ruskin
HistoryCatalogue noteThe critic who hated the machine, set entirely by one. He would have written a furious letter.Inter-dimensional Travel
ConceptualWormholes, parallel worlds and the long way round. The engine mapped it as a modular grid in sunflower and black.Exploding Eyes
BodiesSpecial effects, ophthalmology and horror films. The engine split the sheet on the diagonal, in sunflower and black.Phallic Vegetables
NatureA subject nobody should type in public. The engine set it in stacked bars of orange and black, with a straight face.Four titles from 2013
Four titles here were not chosen by this press. They come from what was written about Karolis Kosas’s original Anonymous Press, whose users typed a subject and received a book assembled from image search results. It’s Nice That (James Cartwright, 7 February 2013) described it as a way to “churn out fanzines on John Ruskin, inter-dimensional travel or whatever else your niche interests require”. Real Life (Madeline Leung Coleman, “Closed Captions”, 2017) named Exploding Eyes and Phallic Vegetables among the “modern classics” it facilitated before it went dormant.
The covers shown for John Ruskin, Inter-dimensional Travel, Exploding Eyes and Phallic Vegetables are this site’s compositions for the same words, not books from that project.
How to read a cover
The title, in lower case, is turned into a 32-bit number, and the number seeds a sequence of pseudo-random draws. The first draws pick a spot ink from eight (fluorescent rose, federal blue, orange, green, violet, vermilion, teal, sunflower) and a second, different one; then one of six compositions: disc & halftone, diagonal split, stacked bars, concentric rings, modular grid, rising half-disc.
Of the 48 covers on these shelves, 25 print in three inks and 22 in two; Synthetic Faces is printed in black alone. A title with a note shows its readout and each ink as a separate plate; the colophon explains why the result never changes.