When is a book a rook? And when are pages knights? When you are Arián Dylan, the book-carving artist whose chess set you see here. Dylan’s piece, titled El orden y el caos (Order and Chaos), is one of my favorites from The Art of the Book, a recent exhibition at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, Calif. The show includes altered books by several artists. Here are a handful of pieces that made me smile and made me think – about thinking and reading, and, inevitably, about paper. It’s a medium, a message, a many-splendored thing.