“[Alighiero] Boetti was just about to embark on his major work of the early ’70s, the compilation of a list of the world’s one thousand longest rivers, which would be published as a book in 1977. It may not be immediately apparent that this was a huge undertaking in geographical research, calling not for consultation with available reference works but for extensive inquiries with scientific institutes around the world. As Anne-MArie Sauzeau-Boetti wrote in the book’s preface, of the various ways of comparing rivers according to size, that of length is ‘the most arbitrary, the most naive, but even today the most common.’ Any true measurement of a river’s length, as Sauzeau-Boetti points out, is rendered ambiguous by ‘its meanders and its passages through lakes, its branching around islands or displacements in the delta, by human intervention along its course, by the ungraspable limits between fresh and saltwater.&nbsp.&nbsp.&nbsp.’ Boetti’s task in compiling his list of the thousand longest rivers was to give an apparently logical and scientific structure to an obsession, an irrational project – to produce a disinterested contribution to knowledge that would be not only useless but perhaps not even really knowledge. One wants to ask, as a narratorial voice in Ulysses does of its hero, ‘What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?’ And to answer, as did its oddly Whitmanesque interlocutor: ‘Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level.’ ”

(Barry Schwabsky, “Imaginary Itineraries: Alighiero Boetti’s Dossier Postale,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter, vol. 26 no. 3 (July–August 1995), p. 91.)