In a conversation with Bob Nickas for Hauser & Wirth, Mario Diacono recounts his fascination with magical thinking and how he started collecting esoteric books:

“It was for me a form of ‘possessing the past’. I consider alchemy – the alchemy practiced in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the late 18th century, the humanistic Europe – a post-Christian mystery religion that disappeared at the birth of the modern world, which we can date to the 1789 French Revolution. The transmutation of lead into gold was not that dissimilar, as a process of secrecy and meaning, from the rebirth of the acorn in the Eleusinian mysteries. We can never be totally sure if it happened or not. This mysteric element is fascinating. A process aiming at a ‘perfectioning’ of matter, at a transmutation of one matter into another, implied a coupling of magical thinking with technical thinking, a vision of the world alien to any scientific explanation.” (Hauser & Wirth, March 2020)

At first glance, Book of Eros seems to be one of the esoteric titles drawn from his Bibliotheca Hermetica, or one of the twenty-four magical books Prospero takes into exile in Peter Greenaway’s film adaptation of The Tempest (Prospero’s Books, 1991). Yet, once opened, the book unfolds in minimal terms. An exercise in concrete poetry, Book of Eros consists of eight pages: four white and four black. On the first pages, the phrases "VÀGINA BIANCA" (‘white vagina’) and "VÀGINA SCRITTA" (‘written vagina’) create a sensual visual pun between the Italian words "pagina" and "vagina", with the latter written here with the accent on the first syllable rather than the second, thus echoing the pronunciation of pàgina. This transmutation of one word into another is not only erotic but also alchemical, evoking Diacono’s fetishism for books and magical thinking. As in many of his works on paper, language itself becomes a material to be transformed.

Since the late 1950s, Diacono has worked extensively with concrete and non-verbal poetry, contributing to the development of the new artistic avant-gardes in both Italy and the United States. Book of Eros is the third artist’s book published in the JCT serial edition, following A metrica n’aboolira and A Visual Pollution, both of which are held in the Metabooks collection.