This brut book, this brut book idea, is modified for me (albeit unwillingly) by the several unforgettable moments in the 1934 Howard Hawks film, Twentieth Century (John Barrymore, Carole Lombard, with a script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur), in which Barrymore, as the tyrannical theatre producer Oscar Jaffe, threatens to ostracize his associates, perceived by him to be disloyal, by “closing the iron door on them.” Iron book, iron door, the finality of, the unforgiving, the once-closed-never-again-open-able.
The other iron books that come more seriously to mind are Anselm Kiefer’s iron/steel books—like his huge, terrible, vertically positioned Constellation Book from 1974, which is all pages-as-doors. I once stood next to a Kiefer iron book at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, and it was like looking down into an endless pit, dug in the ground.
