ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with various ways of literary, artistic destruction: acts of mutilation targeted either to material writing, typography, or the book object. The phenomenon has roots in art and literary history, but, as the chapter suggests, contemporary Finnish examples seem to part from the avant-gardistic negative, or nihilistic, destruction, and turn to more advanced and refined take on demediation. The cases examined seem to be about artistic inquiry on literary media, its material means of meaning-production. The examples are from Finnish contemporary literature and book art. First, the chapter focuses on mutilation of writing: removing, scraping, covering, overwriting text, or other ways of preventing it from being read. The second half of the chapter focuses on one conceptual book art project, where poet Tuomas Timonen destroyed individually the unsold 483 copies of his poetry book. The reading focuses on the methods and ways of mutilation, and the affectual meanings inherent in ravaging books.
