Nancy Holt created Moon Book in 1972—shortly after the first Moon landing in 1969 and the additional five lunar landings between through the end of 1972—a period when the Moon loomed large in the collective imagination. Throughout her life Holt was fascinated with the way that language and imagery affect our perception of the world around us, including our relationship to celestial phenomena. Growing out of the exploration of language in her concrete poetry in the 1960s, Moon Book collages reference to the moon from newspaper clippings, scientific writings, diagrams, advertisements, and images from pop culture and science magazines. The collaged fourteen page book, which Holt dedicates to Carl Andre "on the occasion of the only total eclipse of the moon this year," brings together disparate relationships and perceptions of the Moon over a large span of time: Galileo's drawings of the moon, an advertisement for Frank Hebert's 1965 Dune, images from the Apollo Moon landings, and time tables for the total eclipse of the Moon from The New York Times Almanac. 

In Moon Book Holt trains her eyes on representations of the cosmos in both the profound and the mundane parts of written and visual culture. We can also see this interest in the link between found language and the cosmos in her photographic series from the same year, California Sun Signs.