This exhibition revisits a pocketbook essay and art installation originally made in 2012 for the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Both elements mixed anecdote and advocacy to introduce the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing as undertaken by some of the most revered writers in the Western literary canon, from Laurence Sterne to Irma Rombauer via Virginia Woolf and Derek Walcott.
Since 2012, translations of the essay have been prepared in Spanish, German, French and Italian by researchers in Santiago, Berlin, Paris and Montevideo. In turn, each translator has both translated the existing content and added further such examples from the literary history of their native country. As such, each translated edition expands the manuscript, like a snowball, developing a micro-political network of localised knowledge and small-press publishers.
That snowball keeps rolling (latterly in to Portguese and Brazil) but this commissioned, low-fi installation documents the project to-date. It presents a sample of the anecdotes added since 2012 on bi-lingual posters, and reflects on the place of self-published literature in the economy of the modern book trade by putting copies of all the referenced texts held in the Birkback College library on a library trolley-cum-printing stamp. It also serves as a publishing stage, offering free-to-take Xerox copies of the expanded manuscript in English for the first time.
Download the print-at-home version below.
