Martin Howse: Diff in June (2013)

Diff in June tells a day in the life of a personal computer, written by itself in its own language, as a sort of private log or intimate diary focused on every single change to the data on its hard disk. Using a small custom script, for the entire month of June 2011 Martin Howse registered each chunk of data which had changed within the file system from the previous day’s image. Excluding binary data, one day’s sedimentation has been published in this book, a novel of data archaeology in progress tracking the overt and the covert, merging the legal and illegal, personal and administrative, source code and frozen systematics.

The book, consisting of almost 24 million chars, is now made available in 3 different formats, determined by the production and distribution constraints of the platforms adopted: a full, freely downloadable PDF; a 500 pages PDF available on Issuu.com; and a 740 pages print-on-demand paperback available on Lulu.com.

Publisher Link Editions, Brescia, August 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781291503593

Publisher

PDF, PDF (1673 pp)
Issuu (500 pp)
Lulu (740 pp)

Johanna Drucker: History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990)

A striking alternative to the familiar telling of historical events, Drucker’s account of mythic and major events in the course of western civilization marches roughshod over received traditions. The combination of typographic innovation, visual puns and linguistic play are unique elements of her style. A richly suggestive work interweaving official history and individual memory.

“Several themes interweave in this book: a feminist rewriting of the history of the world, an opposition between official history and personal memory, a critique of feminist theoretical attitudes towards language as patriarchal, and all sorts of graphical and textual puns and play. The book is a tribute to my mother, and the drum majorette who opens the book is a figure that corresponds to her early years, youth, and activities as a baton twirling teen in Downer’s Grove, Illinois. I had learned language, and literature, through an intense and intimate relation with her. The feminist dogma of language as patriarchal didn’t fit the erotic and personal experience of my relation to the literary through the relation to her, even male identified as she was. She may have been the law, and the symbolic, but she was fiercely feminine and feminist as well. So the red text erupts through the black, making memory a strain of presence within the history retold.” (author)

The work first appeared in the letterpress edition in 1990. Five years later it was published in two-color offset by Granary Books.

Publisher Druckwerk, Cambridge, MA, 1990
40 pages
via Danny Snelson

Interview with the author (Tate Shaw, The Journal of Artists’ Books, 2007)

Publisher (1995 Edition, Old site)
Publisher (1995 Edition, New site)

PDF (updated on 2018-12-31)
JPGs (added on 2018-12-31)

Sergey Merkurov: Soviet Erotic Alphabet (1931)

The so-called Sovetskaya eroticheskaya azbuka [Soviet Erotic Alphabet] by the monumentalist sculptor Sergei Dmitrievich Merkurov (1881-1952), the author of numerous monuments to Stalin (including the three largest in the USSR) and Lenin.

Так называемая «Советская эротическая азбука» скульптора-монументалиста Сергея Дмитриевича Меркурова (1881—1952) — автора многочисленных монументов И. В. Сталину (в том числе трех самых крупных на территории СССР) и В. И. Ленину. Знаменитая и крылатая фраза: “В СССР секса нет” имела скорее всего политическую подоплёку. Если самого Лаврентия Берию можно назвать продолжателем дела “секс-машины” Григория Распутина, то, напротив, добропорядочного советского гражданина Сергея Дмитриевича Меркурова, лауреата нескольких сталинских премий, – «строго засекреченным русским Байросом». Данную папку он подписал на обложке: акварельные рисунки И.И. Иванова (1886-1924) и даже указал годы его жизни. Как будто, это имело какое-то значение для работников “карающего меча революции”. Чувствуется сильное влияние французской и южно-немецкой школ живописи.

Commentary: Ross Wolfe (2013)
Erotic Alphabets: A Bibliography (Josh Honn)

Published in 1931
36 pages
via raruss.ru

PDF