Above: Dieter Roth, Daily Mirror, 1961

Below: Dieter Roth, Daily Mirror, 1970

The Daily Mirror also represents a process in two respects: first by enlarging the page to unreadable levels and also having it represented in minuscule form in the bottom corner, and the second respect is that this book had three incarnations. In 1961 he first created it as a two centimeter square book made by cutting squares out of piles of The Daily Mirror newspaper and gluing them at the spine, second, in 1965, he created a loose collection of these pages, blown up to twenty five centimeters and printed on newsprint, and third in 1970 he produced the Collected Works edition in standard octavo size (6 x 9.5"), each page showing the source image, roughly 2 x 3 centimeters in the bottom corner of the full-page blow-up of this same image.⁴⁶
         The interpretation of this book offered in The Cutting Edge of Reading, is that "the artist implies that he has magnified what the Daily Mirrorhad already grossly exaggerated. ... He compounds our frustration as readers in increasing our awareness of the problems of communication ... one would expect that magnifying small densely printed news would make it more legible, but to the contrary the smooth surfaces metamorphose into endless rows of dots.⁴⁷
         An important aspect of Roth's work is that he took the conventions of format and structure as the subject matter of his books. "There is no way to translate a Dieter Roth book in to another medium - the idea of the work is inseparable from [its] form as a book and they realize themselves as works through their exploration of the conceptual and structural features of a book."⁴⁸ It is also important that he created editions of his books as this helps the format fit into one of the conventions of book publishing, therefore helping to root artists books in the book medium.
         Creating in editions were also of primary importance to Ed Ruscha with ideas from one edition leading to the next. Multiplicity was one of the important features of his art as he championed the idea of the democratic multiple, meaning that his books were easily available, cheap and portable. With his work the customary aura of artwork was dispelled, his books were for use, intended to be handled and enjoyed.⁴⁹

 

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