2008 KAC Winner Gean Moreno just sent the first volume of his [NAME] project to the printers. Today he ruminates on books, his relationships with them and the seeds of the [NAME] project…

“It’s not books, it’s graphic anomalies and unexpected forms that are interesting. I have a healthy relationship with plain books. I buy them, read them (sometimes), shelve them, lend them out, and loose them (often). What I guard much more jealously are teratological specimens–books that were born deformed, that don’t fit any type, that are the obvious result of tweaked visions or a lack of funds and up-to-date technologies. It’s not artists’ books, either, in the traditional sense. The feel of mass production plays a part. I’d take Xerox copies over handmade papers any day. I have an issue of The Breeder that’s just a bunch of loose sheets and brochures in a flat box with a pig-faced model shot by Bruce LeBruce on it. It’s interesting as a thing. As I wrote that I realized that I couldn’t even really tell you what it is–and that’s why it hasn’t faded into that zone of de-differentiation I call the bookshelf.

It’s in the interest in strange book forms where the seeds of [NAME] probably germinated. It’s the odd and unpredictable book that I hope comes out from our little press–again and again. Of course, I don’t want to make such a book–that would drain the magic from it. I just want to facilitate its production, coax it from other artists who can modulate it through the filter of their own idiosyncratic ways of looking at things, and set it adrift in the world. We’ll know soon enough if things are on track as [NAME]’s first volume, Daniel Newman’s WWW–his tiny compendium of all the knowledge available–is currently at the printers and due to arrive in mid-September.” 

– Gean Moreno, founder [NAME] project