'Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring': Aug 8

Commentary by Joseph Hernandez: In an increasingly digital world, it is easy to get lost in the morass of typography, graphics and words bleeding through every web page, site and magazine. Innovation, then, becomes a struggle to master expression over multiple media. Zach Plague, graphic designer and author, has proven this skill at shaping any media with his debut novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, printed by featherproof books in Chicago. In the novel, Plague melds both design and authorship to create a multidimensional work that crosses over from art to literature and vice versa. boring boring satirizes the boring lives of 19 year old art students, but the work itself is far from boring. Written over the course of five years, Plague decided to take the art school narrative a level further by toying with a traditionally staid art form: book printing. At the earliest level of book production, the text is printed on signatures, the mapped out, poster-sized version of the book before it is bound into its final form. Plague took plot elements from boring boring and at the signature level, played with typography and illustration, designing 9 not-boring works of art.

MORE INFO:
www.zachplague.com

The author/designer's debut novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring (On sale date: August 1, 2008, $14.95, black and white illustrations, isbn 978-0-9771992-5-9, Distributed to the trade by: Publishers  Group West), has taken the designed book to the edge. We're calling it a hybrid typo/graphic novel, that uses innovative typography and design to create a more expressive, vocal read. When the mysterious gray book that drives Ollister and Adelaide's relationship goes missing, the two ex-lovers lose their way. He plots revenge against art patriarch The Platypus, while she obsesses over their anti-love affair. Meanwhile, the other art school scenesters experiment with bad drugs, bad sex, and bad ideas. When a punk named Punk shows up with a potent sex drug, the whole crowd gets caught up in the gravitational pull of The Platypus' sinister White Ball, where a confused art terrorism cell threatens a ludicrous and hilarious implosion. With an unerring, unflinching eye for satire,  Zach Plague's brilliant hybrid of image and text skewers the art world and those boring enough to fall into its traps.
 
Plague gave each character a typeface of his or her own, and more than 100 fonts are used throughout the book, including many handwritten elements. And it doesn't end on the final page. Taking true advantage of the new plugged-in world, the book's content has been expanded into every media imaginable. Let's go down the list:
 
• A poster series, which includes the full text of the book, that can be hung on a wall, plastered on street corners, or
folded down and read, just like the featherproof mini-books. On display at Country Club Chicago.
• A dynamic, fully readable online version at zachplague.com.
• Free downloadable eBooks, mini-books, and audio excerpts.
• A music/spoken word audio mash-up, read by a cast of characters, out soon on Flameshovel records.
• Not to mention the perfect-bound version, a work of art in its own right.
 
We couldn't be more excited to announce that galleys are yours for the taking. Review copies of the CD and the poster series are also available upon request, and Zach Plague is available for interviews. We hope you'll consider this debut from one of the strangest, most inventive minds in Chicago.

To post a comment, you must register and login.