The publication is the first book to present a selection of Gregory Battcock’s prefaces and essays (from Minimalism, Idea Art, Why Art?, and other books), as well as columns published in underground newspapers in the 1970s.
An artistic response to systems of classification, from alphabetization to Diderot's Encyclopedia Tehran-born artist Fari Shams' (born 1976) European Civilization, Peter the Great, and the Order of Thingsis a multipart project on classification systems, comprised of an installation, a data calculator and this publication.