Thank you for dialing up Tilt on personal computer system. Tilt is baby soft. We hope Tilt you like. It smell like perfume? Tell us, and we sweeten the love. Objectionable content of your dream.

[editor's note: the information below refers to last year's altered book exhibit. The Lit Fest will host another one in 2007.]

The artfully altered books of Speaking Volumes: Acts of Defacement demonstrate moments of political statement and personal reflection, compulsiveness and comedy, mystery and eroticism, violence and eccentricity. While some artists approached each page as a new canvas for original illustration and collage, others manipulated the discarded library books into sculpture, the paper and cloth serving as raw material for shadowboxes, stages, targets, or statements on the very nature of text and literature.

Below is a peek at the exhibit (in a series of slapdash digital pictures), to be held Friday, Sept. 15. (Click on "Invite" above for details about reservations.)

1. Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven rendered in fabric, feathers, and black rickrack, as a piece of ornate gothic comedy, by Harriet Otis;

2. Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, the text partially obscured to create a new narrative, by Amy Nelson and Larry Kukuk;

3. The Prisoner of Love by literary miscreant and philosopher Jean Genet, reconceived as a journal of photography and text, by Tim Siragusa;

4. An examination of the phenomenon of banned books, by Carol Toftness;

5. The history of the renovation of an historic
Omaha house, by Eddith Buis;

6. A TV toy theater made from a biography of Lucille Ball
and Desi Arnaz, by Stacey Aldrich;

7. The Haiti-inspired adaptation of Graham Greene's
The Comedians, by Orenda Fink;

8. The locked and chained "The Book of Forgotten Human
Knowledge," by Bart Vargas;