“Impossible, you say?” one of the early pages asks rhetorically in Art of McSweeney’s, a study of the art of the quirky periodical McSweeney’s Quarterly. “Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus.” With David Eggers as the chief ringmaster, McSweeney’s Quarterly gathers together all creative creatures under the big top of his publishing venture in an attempt to do nothing less than save the printed book itself. To lovers of the online reading experience, Eggers et al. seem like hopeless Luddites—dinosaurs in a golden age of pixels. To lovers of the book as a work of art, the McSweeney’s cast attempts the impossible and succeeds, at least for now.

“[T]here are business people who spend their days crowing about a future where physical books are no more,” Eggers laments. “McSweeney’s is a small company dedicated to these physical books that purportedly have no future.” In a picture showing issues 1 through 29 of McSweeney’s Quarterly, you can see the exquisite corpus of twenty years of creativity. The variety not only in exteriors format but also in interiors, including modern contrivances such as CDs and DVDs, resurrects the idea of the book as something important rather than something dispensable. “This book is dedicated to readers who love physical books as objects,” Eggers enthuses, “and also to showing young publishers-to-be how much fun can be had while making books, and how available the means of production is to them.” Art of McSweeney’s proves it’s OK to make a fetish object of books while simultaneously demonstrating that creating such gems is possible given the proper passion and creativity.

Art of McSweeney’s moves chronologically through issues 1 through 31 of the quarterly, with brief interludes to discuss other publishing ventures such as William T. Vollmann’s 4,000-page leviathan on the history of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, and former Talking Heads front man David Byrne’s writings. Eggers and collaborators such as Sarah Vowell, Rick Moody, Neal Pollack, Michael Chabon, and Glen David Gold anecdotally lead you through the buildup, construction, and reception of each issue. Even mistakes such as a weighty metallic binding to hold magnetically bound mini-books that led to postage fee issues seem more fun than folly when done in the name of trying something cool.

If McSweeney’s Quarterly can be said to have a father figure, I’d nominate Marcel Duchamp. Using Duchampian “found materials” found on the side of the road of publishing history, McSweeney’s Quarterly makes everything old new again. For example, a long-forgotten “Gaelic Self-Taught” book finds new life as a short story “designed in the style of comic book without pictures.” The classic McSweeney’s look comes from old school ideas digested by post-modern sensibilities.