I first read Primo Levi's "Psychophant" in The New Yorker in 1990. The psychophant in his short story is a device that produces uncanny portrait-objects. Ten years later, I made my own uncanny object, a shelf-sculpture that, like his psychophant, invites interaction. I called mine a restless shelf.
This book documents the Restless Shelves as solitary works in my studio and then in situ in my collaborators' domains. Included is Levi's "Psychophant". The book's form, tète-bêche (French for head-to-tail), is a manner of bookbinding in which two books share a spine but face opposite directions. With delight in this synchronicity, I join my work to Levi's.