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This lecture focuses on the painted books of Aztec Mexico. These sixteenth-century documents are considered works of Art by some, and Writing by others. The Aztecs and their neighbors conceptualized writing and image-making as a single cultural category, one that involved a nonverbal system of graphic communication in which images carry meaning directly without a detour through speech. Exploring the place where our Western conceptions of Art and Writing come closest together, this talk reviews some of the graphic vocabulary of Mexican pictography. Dr. Boone will focus on the arrangements of the images and analyze the underlying spatial grammars of different literary genres.