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Tragic Book Number Nine
Contributors: C.K.Wilde, Kurt Allerslev Reynertson, Kent Winkler, S.L. Hoche, Scott Teplin, Dylan Graham, Jonathan Lill, Patrick Joseph Blough Flynn, Samantha Hunt, Caren Heft, Mark Wagner, Jeffrey Morin, Marshall Weber, Stan Shellabarger, Adrienne Herman, Karen Switzer, The Reverend Bronwyn Pandemonium, Jan Rolletchek, Kevin Pyle, Adam Januz, David McClimans, Kathyrn Gritt, Pumpkin Boy/ Kurbis Junge, Steve Timm, Peter Spagnuolo, Fiona Smyth, S.S.Schooler, Sara Parkel, Ianthe Jackson, David Heagle Last, Henrik Drescher, Ottfried Zielke, Carey Kalimba Acenzo, Alison Brashaw, Robert The, Keith Sirchio, Gerhild Ebel, Gary Panter, Amy Mees, Kidd of Speed, April Manning, Leif Parsons, Elena Wen, Michael Duffy, Laure Parsons, Joe Stauber, Katherine Streeter, Chrysse Everheart, Takashi Suiken, Eliana Perez, M.T. Karthik, Alain Pilon, Shelly Jackson, SFC Red Thomas, Robroy Chalmers, Sean Star Wars, Sara Cook, Robert Munn
Year: 2005
Edition: 55
Pages: 180
Size: 11" X 11" X 15"
TB #9 is the culmination of the procedures and experiments that began in 1993. The Internet revolution that was starting as the series took form was a full-blown reality by the time TB #9 was finished. Electronic communication in some ways supplanted the necessity for such a book. The goal of "having the most talented people you knew all in one room" is now basically fulfilled in a virtual space. The website as an information kiosk is now an everyday reality for most computer owners; as is the ability to interlink these bodies of information allowing for endless footnote/endnote daisy chained hyperlinks. A website about Chernobyl is redesigned and reproduced in TB #9, as if to perversely underline the outmoded nature of the book while celebrating it. An actual object is only necessary if the material presentation is integral to the ideas therein. So it is with the ideas in this most complicated of communal books, TB #9. Carey Acenzo's thousands of little copper wire balls were placed in every copy of the books; when the participant first got their book, and opened to that signature the balls fell out of the book, leaving only the impression of their presence in the soft paper. How tragic is that? A book that falls apart as you read it, leaving evidence of its' own slow destruction? The production of this book was the largest the publisher had ever undertaken at the time and required lots of help. Caitlin "Cat" Glennon, Eliana Perez, and Sara Parkel worked on all aspects of the editioning- from cutting and covering the boards, folding signatures, to executing the saddle stapled spine binding devised by Mark Wagner for the edition. Patrick Joseph Blough Flynn of The Flynnstitute did all the illustration and typographic design for the contributors in this edition. April Manning printed all the electrostatic transfer pages for the books at Hyperion Design. Despite the strange format, many contributors prepared their own signatures- fantastic silk-screens, sad pop-ups; sewn up dreams, and funky frottaged signatures all on different paper stocks hunker together in this book. Keith Sirchio's clever folding of his Cuban photograph leads the reader to the slow revelation of preparations for a pig roast. Samantha Hunt and Peter Spagnuolo's writing in this issue is the best the press has published. Robert The cut a book called "Tragic Ground" into the shape of a gun and then took the book apart, sealing a few pages into 55 laminate pouches which were then sewn into the books. The melding the techniques and technologies of 'Zines and Artists books was realized in the Tragic Book series, and its' culmination, Tragic Book #9.
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