This is post is written by Julie Park, an Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow in the Special Collections Center.

Hot foil stamped in blue are the words “20 Slices” on the cover of an orange clothbound book. Square shaped, the book is the same size as a package of Kraft singles. There is a reason why: within the book cover are in fact twenty plastic covered slices of orange cheese manufactured by Kraft Foods. This discovery begs the questions: is the item a book or a pack of cheese slices altered to resemble a book? If one calls it a book, then with what definition of book is one working? These questions typify any engagement with the book genre that 20 Slices of American Cheese represents: as an artist’s book it straddles the categories of book and art object. 

Entitled 20 Slices of American Cheese, the book was created by book artist and designer Ben Denzer and was published by his small editions press, Catalog Press. It was recently acquired by NYU Special Collections and is featured along with another item by Denzer, Ninety One at Sixty Ninth, in the current exhibition The Interactive Book. The book derived from Denzer’s quest to “prod what a book could be,” including one of its core elements, the page. As one might expect from a book whose main material is a product of day to day life and an ingredient in humble dishes, the idea came to Denzer while he was in the most prosaic of settings, the grocery store.

He recounts: “in the grocery store I picked up a package of Kraft American Singles (I’m a big fan of breakfast sandwiches) and holding the pack, I thought that it was basically already a book (already a collection of pages). All I had to do to emphasise that fact was to bind it together, make a cover and a title.” 20 Slices is consistent with other items on the Catalog Press list, which follow Denzer’s definition of a book as “a collection of things bound together.” They include: 

5 Ketchups, a set of ketchup packs bound in red cloth covered boards

30 Napkins, a set of cocktail napkins from the Plaza Hotel bound in light grey cloth

200 Fortunes, a set of fortune cookie fortune strips bound in blue cloth

20 Slices of Meat, a set of mortadella slices bound together in its own material, with its fat used for the inlaid lettering of its title.

Like 20 Slices of Meat, 20 Slices of American Cheese has met with the surprise and wonder of many, and is the most talked about–or the most interacted with through conversation–item in the NYU exhibition in which it appears. Not just a conceptual experiment, and quite fitting for an item that appears in an exhibition on books as interactive objects, 20 Slices “also came from a desire to make a book that someone could eat (a book that could be interacted with gastronomically; consumed in all the meanings of that word).” Herein lies the challenge of 20 Slices of Meat and 20 Slices of American Cheese; while their edibility makes it possible to interact with them in a particularly corporeal and visceral way, that is, through consuming them through the digestive tract and not just the mind, it also make the books perishable and a challenge to preserve. Indeed, more often than not, the question most asked about 20 Slices of American Cheese is not “is it a book or an art object,” but rather something far more practical: “does the book need to be refrigerated”?

Despite the obvious challenges surrounding its preservation, giving 20 Slices of American Cheese a home in NYU Special Collections was an easy decision. While Denzer’s book sits well alongside the other artist’s books already in the collection (and are staple holdings in many other special collections), it makes an especially relevant supplement to one of NYU Special Collections’s crown jewels, the Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection. Comprising an exceptional range of several sub-collections, it includes the Cecily Brownstone Collection of American Cookery, the James Beard Papers and Collection, the Gourmet Collection, the Andrew F. Smith Collection, and many others. Certainly Denzer himself is aware of tapping into food studies when explaining that in creating 20 Slices of American Cheese he found a conduit for exploring his interest in American cheese as a “specific bit of American culture.” And as mentioned earlier, he also found a means for expressing his love of a particularly American dish, the breakfast sandwich.

Yet when people from all backgrounds ask the same question about the book when encountering it–does it need to be refrigerated?–they highlight its status as food, and as such, an item that can not evade decay, as well as a book, an item meant for others to engage with for an indefinite length of time. Nowhere does this become a more pressing issue than when considering its future as an item held by a cultural heritage repository. Like the works of Dieter Roth, whose artist’s books such as Poeterei: Doppelnummer der Halfjahresschrift für Poesie und Poetrie (Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1967-1968), contain pages stained by meat, Denzer’s food books reflect a preoccupation not just with interacting with books by consuming and incorporating them into one’s body, but also with ephemerality.

The book’s impermanence derives from a feature that makes it highly interactive, yet not in an altogether wholesome way: its responsiveness to oxygen in its environment, which is in turn registered in the biological growth that emerges on the cheese slices after being exposed to it. Furthermore, once control over the mold growth is lost, the book in turn will contaminate other objects adjacent to it. The cheese and plastic wrapper covering it will break down and non-cheese parts of the book, such as the spine and cover will become damaged. A conservation report written by Jessica Pace, Preventive Conservator in the NYU Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department, details the different possible outcomes in keeping 20 Slices of American Cheese over time as a collection item. Perhaps the safest and most proactive approach is also the most interactive one, which is to store the book in a low humidity and possibly anoxic environment while replacing molding cheese slices with fresh ones as needed. In handling the item in this way, the problem of its ephemerality finds a solution that is in part dependent on American food tastes, which are also prone to transience. As long as the desire for bright orange process cheese keeps Kraft Food and other manufactures in business, 20 Slices of American Cheese can renew its “pages” and thus extend its life without harming the objects or environment around it. 

Despite its conceptual novelty as an artist’s book, 20 Slices of American Cheese underscores what have always been factors in acquiring rare book and archival materials: each item enters an ecology of care that involves several parties, from curators and catalogers to conservators and users, and consideration needs to be given to how it will bear the passage of time as well as environmental particularities. The very intensity with which  these issues have been raised, owing to its perishable qualities, render 20 Slices of American Cheese an especially vivid case study for demonstrating the highly interactive nature of all books as material and cultural objects.

Julie Park has recently organized the virtual exhibition The Interactive Book for NYU Libraries, where she is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow in the Special Collections Center. An interdisciplinary scholar, she has published widely on the history of the self as it arises in literature, material and visual culture, and book history.