Mr. Collier's letter racks

Three hundred years ago, an unprecedented explosion in inexpensive, disposable print--newspapers, pamphlets, informational publications, artistic prints--ushered in a media revolution that forever changed our relationship to information. One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/British still life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality. Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original way with a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this new information age.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.