“Dividers Mark Pawson | Daisies Asleep, Daisies Awake John Bevis | Stonehenge Anon. | The Sea and The Trees Gavin Morrison | Bleaching Fields Centre spread | A Handmade Web J. R. Carpenter | Wartesaal Reinhard Mucha | Label Ian Hamilton Finlay | Descriptions of Literature Gertrude Stein | Monotone Press Eric Watier
Mark Pawson’s amiable description of domestic order that begins this issue might, in a way, suggest a prevailing interest in classification and placing. In 1981, John Bevis, whose essay about the Kearton daisy photographs is included here, made a small boxed work, in an edition of fifty copies: a rolled length of dymo-tape, pressed with a text seemingly concerned with the dilemma of labelling, commandeered from Arthur W. Clayden in his 1905 book Cloud Studies. It states: ‘There is always a danger that the use of any system of names based on types shall lead to the neglect of everything not typical’.
After four issues, the purpose of this magazine might seem to be to publish what is typical, that the gathering of articles is a matter of seeking similarities and commonality, whereas, it is also to do with looking out for what might be exceptions, the barely visible, and the improvised.
But not as much is hidden away nowadays, the online archiving of marginal and significant works and ephemera is vast and ever-expanding. Backwaters of pre-internet culture are documented in close detail, the obscure edges of one subject exposing others there beyond the periphery.
The sort of job that a printed quarterly might do in these times—to offer up thirty-odd pages of commentary and images every few months—is as unpredictable a prospect as ever. And the archetype for any publication focussed on sampling and variety is the Reader’s Digest, middlebrow and conservative, read and re-read in waiting rooms and lounges worldwide.”
Issue 5 of this publisher’s magazine, stapled, 21,5 x 15 cm, 32 pages, Axminster 2016
ISSN 2056-6301
