In a career spanning fifty-five years -- as poet, printer, typographer, and theorist -- Alan Loney has consistently sought to conceptualize and articulate his often polemic ideas about The Book and its place in the world. Collected here for the first time, The Book Unhinged presents a broad selection of nearly forty pieces, some previously unpublished, which gather the fruits of that labor: essays, letters, interviews, editorials, articles, and criticism. Alan is never frightened of provoking his critics, but he is always open to the work of others, and generous in his approach to them.
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From hand-setting type -- that exquisitely slow and careful process of space-finding, composition, and word arranging -- to the riches of language, Loney meditates on the respect due to each & every slippery nuance of signification that a text demands. This trove of reflections, poetic fragmants and conversations carefully interrogates the poem, and the book as image and object, revealing a life of publishing, poetry, and poiesis.
- Marian Crawford, Monash University

Alan Loney always and never does things by the book. The Book Unhinged is an 'apparently random' miscellany of genres characterized by arcane inquiry and leaping allusiveness -- broad strokes and close calls. Even titles explode like tiny imagist poems: 'The book: material instrument'. In the guiding spirit of his 'first real teacher, George South', Loney approaches the task of writing 'with care, with attentiveness, with patience, coupled with a carefulness in the language we use to talk about what we see, what we hear, and what we experience'. The book is both time-bound and timeless, and worth purchasing for the interview with Kyle Schlesinger on the relationship between typography and poetry alone.
-Terry Locke - Poet & Educationalist

A pleasing eccentricity, an off-centeredness, in Alan Loney's print-philosophical excursions catch him engagingly mid-thought, unravelling his thinking, which is never quite complete or completable, as he dissects, prods or praises the aura of the book in its many modes. Loney excels as a close reader of the typographic settings of words; he makes the normally invisible visible. The meanings of words slip and slide or stay suspended, in pleasing parenthesis under his gaze. He honours the text's burden and the role of the reader. The essays and interviews are fragments; together they offer a whimsical and restless poetics of the fine-printed book.
- Paul Eggert, Loyola University Chicago & University of NSW
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For more on the publisher, visit https://www.opifex.com.au.

Available in New Zealand and Australia from Opifex.