In It’s In the Book, Tripp swings between sweeping and trenchant social commentary and intimate personal confession, also alternating between deceptively simple poetry in English to Tripp’s version of the iconic symbol language of the Karuk culture.

The book was started in the 1980s (Tripp does not date his art and eschews colonial linear concepts of chronology) and evidences Tripp’s lifelong use of layered compositions on transparent papers to construct a four-dimensional painting where the readers’ paging of the book within space-time determines the composition of both the images and the text. The title of the book highlights the practical self-referentiality of Tripp’s aesthetic, both a statement of cultural totality and a sly critique of the same. As with most of Tripp’s artworks (and especially his titles), there is a humorous element in invoking numerous clever and sardonic linguistic associations.