"French writer Anatole France was asked by someone admiring his library if he had read all the books in his collection. France responded by saying, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?" Literary critic Walter Benjamin subsequently used the quote in "Unpacking My Library," an essay in which he tries to explain the perplexing qualities of collecting things. In this case, the "things" happen to be books."

"Doug Manchee's work currently on display in the cloistered glass cases of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Rochester also is about collections of things --- in particular, images of the pages of books. But what is perhaps new about this collection is that Manchee uses digital technology in the production of multiple scanned images that are layered one upon the other until all the information becomes a composite, or a "concretion" on a single page. All the text is there for us to see but not to read: in the process of stacking or collaging together a book's pages, all the lines of text come together as dense, black bands that efface all that was written. Nothing remains decipherable."

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