- A lecture in German language -

A book is more than a container for transporting texts and images; it is a commodity, stage, infrastructure, time machine and a non-human counterpart that often accompanies us for decades. In his lecture, Jan Wenzel presents five ways of describing the medium book and talks about his experience with books as a publisher, author and passionate reader.

Jan Wenzel lives and works as an author and publisher in Leipzig. Together with Anne König and Markus Dreßen, he founded the publishing house Spector Books in 2001, which has since published more than 500 titles. In 2018 Spector Books received the Saxon Publishing Prize, in 2019 the German Publishing Prize. Together with Anne König, Jan Wenzel curated the festival for photography f/stop in Leipzig in 2016 and 2018. From 2011 to 2017 he had his own column in the magazine Camera Austria, The Revolving Bookshelf, in which he regularly wrote about books and bookmaking. In 2020 he was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his book Das Jahr 1990 freilegen.

The lecture took place in the framework of the Schloss Wiepersdorf Virtual Residency Program 2020 on 15 July 2020 through Zoom.