Boy Vereecken Livres

An investigation of the Crime Dossiers, a form of literature as mystery game— an entirely new manifestation of gamified literature—developed in the interwar period. “An intricate web of envy, desire and aspiration,” Herewith the Clues is a jaunt through the history of the Crime Dossiers, a form of literature as mystery game—developed in the interwar period—where players solved puzzles much in the way that a detective in the 1920s might have solved a crime using forensics. These mass-produced games came in the form of binders, books, suitcases, or boxes containing crime-scene evidence (and literary red herrings), each piece of evidence itself a kind of riddle. One could see these as not only an entirely new manifestation of gamified literature, but game playing itself evolving: storytelling as a riddle-solving game acted in the flesh, rather than existing solely in the minds of author and reader.

Signature Strengths was inspired by the direct approach to marketing of the No-Frills grocery store novels in the early 1980s, which employed the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples for the mass-marketing of genre fiction novels. Four complete books from the generic pulp fiction series titled Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance are reproduced in total in this artist book. The repackaging of these unique American pocket-book novels into a non-structured book is conceived and edited by designer, researcher and member of the Slavs and Tartars art collective Boy Vereecken. The only additional writing featured is a critical evaluation by Toronto-based writer Mark Mann on the fascinating experimental endeavor in genre writing and mass-market publishing.