This is inside of original book of A Vindication of Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft which was exhibited at Hackney Museum with my new book with Anna Birch, Wollstonecraft Live. We designed a book to be a company with this book to sit next to each other. But we needed to keep A Vindication of Rights of Women in the glass cube for the safety and our book was chained through the wall (also for the safety), which were an irony physical representation as both book wanted to unfold the story of ‘chained’ and ‘encapsulated’ reality from its own period.

Nevertheless, I found the letters in this old book fascinating. This book was published at 1792. In late 18 century, letter ‘s’ used more often as the form of current ‘s’ alphabet. Until then, ‘s’ was used as ‘ſ’ instead. (like in this picture) S (capital) is used in the front of the letter, and gradually small ‘s’ used for the end of the word. But it did not used for the beginning of the word or the middle of the word. However it read as [ess] like today’s [ess]. So in that period, sinfulness was written as ‘ſinfulneſs’.

I could not trace why this was happened, but I think this is the voiceless letter becomes voice-ful with a presentation of the alphabet, which is decoding of the text itself.