Book Art by Dorina Miller Parmenter © 1996

@ Syracuse University

No comprehensive survey of iconic books and texts has traced their development and influence from ancient to modern times and compared their roles in multiple cultures and religious traditions. The aim of the Iconic Books Project at Syracuse University is to inaugurate such an investigation. Since 2001, James Watts and Dorina Miller Parmenter have conducted basic research to catalog, analyze and describe the symbolic or “iconic” uses of books and other texts.
About Iconic Books
About the Iconic Books Database
Symposium 2010
Symposium 2007
Bibliography
on Iconic Books

Iconic Books Blog

The goals of the Iconic Books Project are to:

  1. Assemble a database of images and textual descriptions of iconic books and their uses;
  2. Analyze this database for cultural and historical patterns of usage and development;
  3. Publish the broad array of categorized data in accessible form;
  4. Catalyze in-depth study of iconic books in their particular cultural and historical aspects.
The project's collecting and cataloguing activities aim to do basic research, but its study of iconic books has implications for understanding phenomena as diverse as the marketing of e-books, political ceremonies, legal conflicts over religion, artistic and media depictions of books, the reproduction of scriptures, the architecture of libraries and museums, radical religious uses of media images, the relationship between image and text, the role of religion in law, and the historical influence of “book religions.”