R.B. Kitaj suffered from a self-diagnosed case of ‘bibliomania’. His thirst for reading and acquiring books was unquenchable. In 1965, an interviewer asked if he considered reading time a necessary part of his working method—he agreed that it was. Much of his time was spent in book shops where he made friends with book dealers and poets, who were perennially the subject of his paintings. 

In his series of screen prints, In Our Time: Covers for a Small Library After the Life for the Most Part, Kitaj adopted as a subject some books he was interested by. Plotted onto an expanse of neutral white paper, these books were manipulated into a display of material qualities: tattered dust jackets are unfolded; frontispieces are revealed behind open boards; typography and engraving have weight and depth; creased corners and irregular silhouettes are retained as marks of personality and use. 

Kitaj’s choice of books was eclectic. Most choices reflect his sustained interest in specific authors or themes, including classical modernism (Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller), racism and antisemitism (The Jewish Question), the Spanish Civil War and anarchism (The Defence of Terrorism by Trotsky) and nostalgia for the United States (Edward Hopper, The Bronxville Portfolio). As Kitaj’s subtitle for the series makes clear (‘After the Life’), the books depicted in these screen prints were taken from his own collection. Taken together, the prints of In Our Time represent an intellectual project to create a ‘library’; it is unsurprising that the result is an index of Kitaj’s abiding thematic concerns.