Notes from the Booth
The night projectionist at a failing picture house typed a sheet for every midnight show. Six survive: on house rules, the machine, the regulars, and the last night.
Confessions of a Cabinet Medium
A professional medium of the 1880s gives up the trade and explains how the seance was staged, who it was staged for, and the one evening she could not explain.
The Bonfire Accounts
Two artists won a civic prize and burned the money in a boiler house. A year later they published the accounts, line by line.
Music on Bones
A memoir of cutting forbidden records onto hospital X-rays, written by one of the cutters thirty years later. Translated into English for the first time.
Nine Letters from the Salt Works
A schoolteacher in a company town wrote nine letters to her sister about the year after the works stopped. Translated into English for the first time.
Signal to Noise: A Primer on Tape Culture
A 1988 essay on the cassette underground: home duplication, trade by post, and a music made from the sounds of machinery.
The Furnace Hymnal
Three issues of a zine typed, copied and left in the canteen by the night shift of a steel plant in its final years.
Hermes at the Photocopier
A 1992 zine arguing that the office photocopier is the great magical instrument of the age.
The Inverted Catechism
A privately printed pamphlet of 1902 that asks the questions of a child's religious primer and returns the answers of a rebel.
Notes Toward a Theory of the Abandoned Mall
Fourteen numbered notes on the dead shopping center, written in 2003 and circulated as a stapled offprint.
Against the Bright Future
Twelve theses on optimism, issued as a sixteen-page pamphlet in 1978 and out of print within the year. Compact, furious and frequently funny.
The Smokestack Gnostic
A chapbook sermon of 1994 that retells the Gnostic creation myth as the history of a factory town.
A Bestiary of Small Cults
Twenty years of visits to religious movements too small to alarm anyone, written up with the patience of a naturalist.
Dead Letter Office: Mail Art from Nowhere
The catalog of a 1986 exhibition that showed only undeliverable post: mail art addressed to places that do not exist.
The Tin Sun Almanac
A mock almanac issued on the eve of the millennium, with weather, feast days and household advice for a year that, by its own cover, would not arrive.
Manual for the Unconvinced
A handbook written by six people who had each left a demanding religious group, for anyone inside one who has begun, privately, to wonder.
Nothing of that kind is shelved in this room yet.