This book is already eight years old now but it remains one of my favorites. I remember I bought it at the MOMA bookstore right after graduating school. I thought it was the coolest book ever. And it still seems to fit in with the style that’s popular today. The book is put together by a Swiss artist collective called Silex. Many of the pages are exercises the artists worked on together. For example, one of them gives you two separate simple drawings and someone had to draw all the steps from the first drawing to morph into the second drawing. Another exercise has the artists recreating photographs or paintings in their own style. All lined up next to each other, you can see how different artists interpret things so uniquely. (I have some Andrew Jeffery Wright zines that do this similar exercise.) The book is full of naive drawings printed on all different kinds of paper. One of the funniest parts of the book are the secret pages. There are a couple of pages that are folded in and sewn back into the binding so you can’t see what’s inside them unless you bend them down and peek in. Those pages have drawings of dildos hidden inside. You can get a copy of this book here.

© Julia Rothman 2007