A man's library is a sort of harem.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life (1860)

The truth is, I can't help but begin by mentioning the toilet paper. All wrinkled and white (none of the fancy double-ply lavender-coloured variety), and rarely torn neatly across the perforated lines, toilet paper kept the mark of pages in (dare I say?) many of Martha Rosler's books. These books - nearly eight thousand of them - were temporarily removed from the artist's home and shelved in impressive row after row in a cramped storefront space in New York's Lower East Side run by e-flux.¹² In an act of incredible generosity, one of America's most important living artists temporality dispossessed herself of the vast majority of her personal library so that it could be made available for consultation. No borrowing was possible, but the eclectic ensemble of books on economics, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, mystery novels, children's books, dictionaries, maps and travel books, as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings could be studied at will. Smart, decidedly political in orientation, often funny, and all over the place (in that way a perfect mirror of its owner), the library is packed with essential reading and titles that even your better bookstores would love to get their hands on. As the product of decades of avid reading, the contents of the library are both the source of Rosler's work and an installation/artwork that continues many of the concerns - with public space, access to information and engaged citizenship - that traverse her entire oeuvre. The project started,