Between 1961 and 1970 Roth created about fifty “literature sausages.” To make each sausage Roth followed a traditional recipe, but with one crucial twist: where the recipe called for ground pork, veal, or beef, he substituted a ground-up book or magazine. Roth mixed the ground-up texts with fat, gelatin, water, and spices before stuffing them into sausage casings. The source materials included work by authors and periodicals that the artist either envied or despised; they run the gamut from lowbrow illustrated tabloids to well-regarded contemporary German novels to the works of Karl Marx and the influential philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

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