The texts in this book were written in the early 1980s, in Oakland, California, during the years when I was first in graduate school at Berkeley. Their publication in this form was entirely due to the encouragement and generosity of Peter Ganick, who invited me to submit a manuscript to him for consideration in 1993. I offered him this selection, or, alternatively, the texts I had written in Paris in 1984-85. He chose these and brought them into print in 1994. The fictions are abstract, figurative, dense, complex, and reflect the best of my efforts in this mode at the time.
typographic: Very straightforward, a small Garamond, I believe.
graphical: Headers, page numbers, text blocks, all quite conventional as presentation.
The texts are most interesting, and the presentation only serves to put them cleanly forth. The works are creative fiction, somewaht surreal, somewhat magical, somewhat contemporary and news-event observational, highly subjective, interior in their site of conception and production.
Johanna Drucker
type: initiating
role:
author
designer
Potes and Poets Press
type: initiating
role:
publisher
printer
location: Elwood, Connecticut
publisher: Potes and Poets Press
dates:
publication: 1994-00-00
publication history: A single edition of this work was produced, this one.
subject:
artists' books (LCSH)
themes: Human folly, frailty, and figurative forms of composition.
content form:
experimental text (local)
publication tradition:
artists' book (local)
inspiration: The lived and the real.
related works: Against Fiction (1984), Just As (1982), The Yellow Dog (1985-6),and even Bookscape (1987) share some of the linguistic character of these texts.
community: other
manuscript type: texts
location: artist's archive
note: All in existence, including the original layout for Mark and the Medium, the only one of these stories to have been formatted and typeset in an earlier form.
edition type: editioned
publisher: Potes and Poets Press
place: Elmwood, Connecticut, though my work on the project took place in New York city.
dates:
publication: 1994-00-00
edition size: 30 signed and numbered for distribution, 12 signed and numbered in a special edition for sale.
note: I appreciated Peter Ganick's support enormously.
horizontal: 7" inches closed
vertical: 8.5" inches closed
depth: .25" inches closed
production means:
offset (local)
binding: other
substrate:
bookBlock: paper
endsheets: paper
media:
ink (local)
format: pamphlet (AAT)
cover:
color: yes
pagination: unpaginated
numbered?: numbered
signed?: signed
These stories were written in 1980, 1981, and 1982 in Oakland, California when I was living in the warehouse with Tamia, Julie, Diane, Nick, and Andrew. Thanks to Peter Ganick for encouraging me to get them out of my files in the Winter of 1993 and publishing them in Spring 1994. / 30 copies published by Poets [sic] and Poets Press for distribution to friends of the author and the publisher. 12 copies for sale as a limited edition, numbered and signed by the author.