Coarse

Playlet script, spraypaint on sandpaper, 18pp, one-off, 2021

Description

Coarse is a three-scene 'reverse Pygmalion' - a playlet about turning a nice person into a filthy animal. The pages are made of sandpaper and the text is printed via spraypaint and stencils. As the characters descend into squalour, the pages become coarser and the words are more difficult to read.

Background

This book owes a debt to 'Mémoires' by Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, which has a sandpaper cover. I sort of flipped it around, as I wanted the interior to be abrasive and harsh, but for the outside to be sort-of normal.

Part of making experimental books is playing around with form and content. I didn't really have any great desire to explore George Bernard Shaw's social experiment (or the musical version with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn, for that matter), but when the idea of increasingly rough pages came to mind, it seemed to fit well enough. By necessity, a lot of the text is exceedingly vulgar and I was fine with it being rendered illegible.

The text is set in Blackout, an open source font from the League of Moveable Type. I created stencils on the Cameo cutter for each two page spread and used black spray paint to render the text on the page. Honestly, this process was a little slapdash (the flat stank of aerosols for a couple of days) but, as previously mentioned, I wasn't too concerned about the typography being sharp.

Using a modification of a Japanese stab-bind technique, the book is bound using three 25mm stainless steel bolts. Having decided to use sandpaper, I wanted to use only items I could buy from a DIY store. The cover is a section of the dust sheet I used to protect my floor as I sprayed the pages. Honestly, it may be a little too slack to effectively protect the pages and the bolts are perhaps a little too long for the book to sit comfortable on a shelf alongside other volumes. This makes it closer to Mémoires than I consciously intended.