PCL LinkDump: Audio / Visual findings on a more or less regular basis.
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Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Cut up prose from pulp paperback covers

"... For ten years or more I collected sleaze/trash/pulp paperbacks published in the 1950s to '70s, mainly for the lurid cover art and cover blurbs. I ended up with almost a thousand, a few of the covers can be seen on flickr . The bulk of the collection went when I moved on to the boat, but one day late last century I had the idea to work the cover blurbs into some form of text piece. "Bonnie", my second attempt, came from the covers of various publishers' books, and I juggled them around until I was happy, keeping the individual quotes intact.

Thirty Books - Except Their Secrets... This was the first attempt at building prose/poetry from trashy paperback cover blurb. These all came from the same publisher, Softcover Library. The distinguishing traits of their books seemed to be a colour photo of a topless woman on the front cover but no sexual content in the actual text. I sat at the pc with all my Softcover Library copies in a box, pulling them out one by one and keying in the cover text, with the intention of shaping them into something later. There was no need. "Thirty Books" is the text in exactly the order the books came out of the box. I saw it made poetic sense with no intervention from me. It was thrilling. ..."

Scorzonera / Words

Note: I am forwarding this message from Scorzonera to this site's visitors:
"It would be fun if someone with the skills and material could knock up a Flash movie marrying the text with images of book covers, don't you think?"

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