Drag-nets is an adjusted re-print of a little known dustjacket for a fictional book by a fictional author. The original was produced by a bookseller in Chicago, Hamill & Barker, so that friends in Europe could wrap copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses and send them to the US before the censorship ban on the novel was lifted in 1933.
The work is displayed as two stacks. One features free-to-take copies of the re-printed dustjacket, which are digitally printed in an unlimited edition and stacked on top of the delivery boxes sent by the paper merchant who sourced and cut the brown wrapping sheets. So that these covers might be useful to new book smugglers – but this time as a veil for any volume – I collaborated with the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow to publish a modified scan of Ulysses under the title Drag-nets. As per the original dustjacket, this truncated copy of Ulysses appears to be authored by Arthur West and published for the Satyr Press in Boston. The book edition was printed in the minimum quantity necessary to register the book’s ISBN under the UK law of Legal Deposit, plus one handling copy. Those six books destined for Legal Deposit form the second display stack, on top of which the handling copy can be freely browsed. Like the stack of free dustjackets, the books are also on the gallery floor atop an upturned delivery box used by their supplier – the trans-national print-on-demand company, Lulu.com.
