User:Simon/The Electronic Revolution

bootleg book: The Electronic Revolution

Printed: 30.09.19
Dimensions: 200x280mm
Cover stock: Ursus (silver) 200gsm
Text stock: Ursus (silver) 120gsm
Binding: Staple bound
Pages: 32pp

The Electronic Revolution is an essay by William S. Burroughs, in which he outlines his radical concepts of the cut-up, and the written word as a virus that makes the spoken word possible. The text was introduced to me by Florian Cramer in a seminar on media activism, networks, and mail art that he delivered last year as part of Special Issue 9: The Network We (de)Served. Both of these ideas can be applied to what I'm doing with this bootleg library - reformatting and annotating texts as a way to create conversations around them. I found a pdf of the text on ubuweb, where it was published under their ubuclassics imprint. This was devoid of any other publication details that usually accompany "official" publications, such as date of publication, identifier etc. The text was also riddled with punctuation and spelling errors, which I decided to keep in the bootlegged print publication. There were no italics so I used a font I had ripped from a Canadian calendar featuring Eskimo drawings and Inuit script - the font looked like a grotesque (Helvetica?) and had a low contrast, and was only available in regular (no italics) so it was usable for this design. I set the text in a symmetrical layout with large margins at either side, and decided on a suitable large scale format for more relaxed reading.

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  Front cover

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  Spread: Ample margins for annotation

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  "Language is a virus"

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  Bootleg acknowledgment