Ala Ebtekar’s Thirty-Six Views of the Moon begins with an eleventh-century quatrain by Omar Khayyam: drink wine, look at the moon, and think of the civilizations it has seen pass by. The book takes that instruction literally. Ebtekar collected pages from volumes spanning a thousand years—poetry, science fiction, religious texts, philosophy—each page touching on the moon or the night sky. He treated the paper with potassium ferricyanide and ammonium ferric citrate to make it light-sensitive, laid a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California over the sheet, and left it outdoors from dusk until dawn. The exposures were made by moonlight alone.

The resulting cyanotype contact prints belong to a nineteenth-century process, but the pages beneath them belong to the history of reading. Astronomy and devotion, observation and elegy, occupy the same surface. What Ebtekar proposes is a reversal: instead of pointing a camera at the sky, he lets the moon mark the page, and asks us to imagine ourselves as objects of a gaze that has been arriving for a billion years.

Radius Books issues the project as a hardcover volume with essays by Kim Beil, Alexander Nemerov, and Ladan Akbarnia, an annotated index of the selected images, and a bibliography of sources Ebtekar has drawn on across the project’s various iterations. The project has taken the form of four unique editions, each produced under the moonlight of a single season and each with its own bibliography.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in how process, text, and sequence hold together as one object. The cyanotypes are images of a kind of exposure that cannot be repeated at will, since the light source is not controlled; the found pages carry their own histories of use; and the essays and index give the reader a way to consider the work as an ongoing inquiry rather than a fixed portfolio.