In my work in public libraries as a library worker and artist, I have seen that library books ‘die’ – are taken off shelves – to make space for new books, so that the shelves can ‘breathe’. There are many criteria used to determine this. For example, they could be duplicates; in bad condition; outdated in terms of their content according to different parameters. In this project, I am most interested in this last reason for taking a book off the shelf – that a book’s content is outdated – even though library workers are very cautious about removing books in this way from what I’ve seen. And these books anyway will likely be sold on by the library and exist in many other libraries still, definitely in the British Library if published in the UK and Ireland. But this does mark a moment of transition that feels important: from within the circulation of that particular library – with the status and belonging of being part of that library’s collection, a shared resource that we agree is valuable for a public to read for free – to being released from that library.

So, if we see these books as symbols/metaphors of systems/knowledges/ways of being that we no longer need, how can we mark this transition for these books? What sorts of events or rituals or moments could give these books a good death – composting their knowledges/practices/ways of being and putting them to rest, so they don’t reemerge? And what else might come from this space? How can we expand/stretch/play with the potential of words, the meanings that we can receive from these books? How can words disintegrate and come together again in an embodied way as something different? The last words (2025 onwards) is a series of collective performances/grief rituals/joy rituals/spoken word works/breath exercises/something else each time, working through these questions.

https://libraryblog.wordpress.hull.ac.uk/2025/12/19/last-words-2/ Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, January 2026