World Book Night - The Secret History Dinner

The annual collaboration with Sarah Bodman and Co. at CFPR Book Arts to produce an artist’s book in tribute to a particular novel is now complete. The book, print and video will launch on 23rd April, World Book Night.

To date we have made books for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley and Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief. This year we featured Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History. The dinner took place over Easter weekend, in an aptly situated venue in Oxford. Collaborators brought their typewriters and cameras, and food and drinks from the book were served throughout the night, including dangerous-looking mushrooms, an elaborate lentil dish, roast meats, frozen cheesecake, and even food inspired by Bunny’s tasteless wake at the Corcoran’s house.


The typed version of the group’s collaborative essay: The Secrets of Metahemeralism, cobbled together and triple-spaced in the style of Bunny Corcoran provides the core of a photocopied, editioned artist’s book, in tribute to the narrator Richard’s extra paid duties at college. The book will also include postcards, notes, scraps of paper, photos, etc. 


Contributors to the book were: Helen Allsebrook, Helen Barr, Sarah Bodman, Angie Butler, Simon Butler, Arthur Buxton, Nancy Campbell, Jenny Gal-Or, Hazel Grainger, Charlotte Hall, Anna Lucas, Kirsten Norrie, Simon Smith and EF Stevens. 

Angie Butler’s Letterpress Etiquette Network has printed a letterpress broadside edition of lines of text selected from the compositions (below).