WriteOffs, as the tagline suggests, is intended to be an unnecessary archive of unnecessary books. A space for unnecessary texts and books that are considered obsolete, trashy, base and/or just silly. Books that are not really written about (they are, rather, written off see what I did there?). It is high time this arbitrary snobbish attitude was abandoned.
A book is not only printed text (in the grand scheme of things one argues of course that the text is really what matters and that through the text we achieve the transference of knowledge, which is actually the most important thing); it is also a cultural historical and an artistic object. From the binding, the covers (design, font hardcover or paperback etc.) to illustrations, and contextual facts (for example the history of a particular publishing house), a book is an object which represents a moment in time in a culture. It is semantically restrained by its subject matter and by its text but it is also (or it could be), as an object, open for reinterpretation. It can be political even when the subject matter seems apolitical.
The Spanish writer Arturo Perez Reverte in his novel Club Dumas (a book about books – very meta! but that is how we like it) at one point compares the books of “old”, books made to last (printed on thick quality paper, bound in leather covers and/or illustrated by hand with durable paint) to books of “modernity” (paperbacks of all kinds of genres printed in haste) and reflects how today we publish “libros de mierda para una cultura de mierda” – shitty/superficial books for a shitty/superficial culture. With these manuscripts and the printed editions made to last the book-as-cultural object concept is obvious, intentional and recognizable. Here however I will try to present how the “libros de mierda” are books that also deserve attention, and how the ones that have been “written off” as simple, kitchy or ridiculous are also very worthy of our care and our thoughts.
The method is simple – to write about the writeoffs. Some of the books here were given to me as a present, some of them I found on the street, at the flea-market and some I stole from libraries, youth clubs or other people. I shall name no names.
I will try to investigate and find a backstory for every book presented here – a kind of culture-is-context approach if it must be defined specifically. The languages that the books are written in are either Croatian, English, Spanish or German. If an interesting title comes along and the language is unknown to me I might wrestle with it in the name of science and Internet popularity (everything for Internet popularity!). That is all mí gente – Enjoy!
WriteOffs 