I’ve been meaning to write about Zach Plague‘s Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring Boring ever since Featherproof Books, Plague’s indie press best known for its downloadable mini-books, sent me a copy a few weeks back, because I loved the basic design concept: Each of the trade paperback’s signatures—the large sheets of paper which are trimmed and folded to produce 32 book pages—was printed as a giant double-sided poster, so each page in the book has little bits of artwork poking out at weird angles… and that’s in addition to the 100-plus different typefaces Plague uses over the course of the narrative. Unfortunately, I never quite got around to sitting down with the book (and a single detached signature that came with it) for a reading sustained enough for me to come up with something intelligent to say about it—and, in the end, Steve Delahoyde, of UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, beat me to the punch with photos from Plague’s gallery opening in Chicago last week.
Delahoyde was greatly impressed by the “busy, captivating artwork that clearly must have cost them Featherproof about $80 per book purely in black ink,” and he found a lot to like in the story, too. Over at the Austin American-Statesman, though, Roberto Ontiveros claims Boring is “the most negative book I have ever read,” although he admits there are funny bits. You can judge for yourself: Plague has put an electronic version of the book on his homepage, along with a downloadable PDF. Oh, and the signatures are available as a collection of posters, too.