This monograph examines the Royal Book Lodge (RBL), an international network that emerged in the late 1980s across several European cities.

Conceived as a fluid and collaborative structure rather than a fixed institution, the Lodge developed as a platform for artists’ books and research-based publishing, operating between exhibition practice, fiction and political commentary.

Central to the project is the construction of biography as narrative strategy. Personal histories are not presented as stable documents but as mutable, often fictionalised frameworks through which identity, authorship and collective memory are negotiated. The Lodge repeatedly blurs the boundaries between fact and invention, using the book as a site where documentation and fabrication intersect.

Themes of migration and displacement run throughout the project, reflecting broader European cultural and political transformations. Political violence, ideological legacy and the afterlife of avant-garde movements form an additional layer of inquiry. In particular, the publication situates the Lodge within a lineage that includes Situationist thought, especially in its attention to détournement, myth-making and the critique of institutional structures.

Rather than functioning as a conventional art collective, the Royal Book Lodge operates as a narrative system: a shifting constellation of contributors, texts and visual strategies that examine how history, fiction and political imagination are produced and circulated through publishing.