Beginning in the early 1980s, Graham took found texts as the basis for his bookworks—at once conceptual and material—inserting bookmarks with additional pages, inserting textual loops or incorporating books into optical devices in works such as "Dr. No*" (1991), "Lenz" (1983) and "Reading Machine for Lenz" (1993) respectively. Many of these were carried out with esteemed Belgian publisher Yves Gevaert and/or the gallerist Christine Burgin. His extensive body of work related to Sigmund Freud (beginning in 1983) has developed out of this text-based practice, though, later, found object books would be integrated unmodified into Donald Judd-like sculptures, for example "The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud" (1987).