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Don’t miss this opportunity to get (or give!) this exciting (or is it merely interesting…or challenging…or warming?) testament to slow social media in action. Auction ends New Year’s Eve.

OFFICIAL PROSPECTUS
Slowbook is a testament to slow social media in the twenty-teens, consisting of 64 A4 pages (8.5 x 11.5), hand bound in hard covers by Irene Lazzarin of Slowbook (Italy), with adhesive-backed, digitally printed content scrapbooked on every page. Slowbook is published as a limited edition of 21 copies; one for each of the contributors (including Irene, makes 14) one for me (15), and the remaining six for sale to standing order subscribers to The Heavy Duty Press (of which there are three), other libraries’ special collections, and private collectors. Of the three available, one has been sold to some generous patron in St. Louis, Missouri, leaving only two copies for sale, of which this is one.

Contributors include Irene Lazzarin (Italy, bookbinder), Deborah Mitchell (all the writing about motorcycle travel), Musta Fior (France, frontispiece/collage), Emily Sytsma (handwritten letter w/collage), Brandon S. Graham (4 poems about his history with guns), Juliet McAra (New Zealand, 5 collages), Lisa Chun (2 collages), William Cody (4 poems), Jeanne Mettner (short essay and poem), Lori Chilefone (postcard), Jennifer Mikulay (handwritten letter + article on Earth Day from The New Yorker), Eric Widi (doodle drawing w/photograph of sandwich), and Tim Vermeulen (ransom note). 


YOU DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS

I used to have a Facebook account. I enjoyed it for many years. I met a lot of new people, became aware of a lot of new issues, and saw a lot of funny things. But eventually it got the best of me. I hated myself for the amount of time I spent in front of the screen, for waking up and going directly to my computer to check my Facebook feed, and for publicly carrying on in pointless ephemeral threads. I was a Facebook addict and I felt I needed to go cold turkey.To document a conscious shift away from online social media at the close of 2012, and to compare the value of time spent surfing social media to time spent engaged in the physical world around me and old school creative production, I put out a call for postal "status updates," in the form of text, photograph, artwork, or link to an article published online, before closing my account. I promised to create a limited edition book, comprised of reproductions of the contributions, and send one copy to each contributor upon completion, if I received at least ten submissions by the end of 2013.

My original limit for submissions was set at 420 characters, because I once received an error message on Facebook telling me their character limit was 420. The first submission I received was plenty over 420 characters and four pages long, so I dropped any restrictions on contributions, and accepted everything that came to me.

As it turned out, a flood of four submissions in October and November brought the total number of contributors to thirteen. Lucky me.

Some of the contributions came in the form of artwork, some in handwriting, photographs, or inkjet printed, Word-formatted text. Word-formatted contributions were scribed by hand, in the style of The Sphere, the grocery zine that established this press in 1993 at Koppa's Farwell Foods (no longer in the family).

Everything was scanned, digitized, printed, trimmed, and adhered, scrapbook-style, into books handmade in Italy, by Irene Lazzarin (whom I met when I googled "slowbook" and found her Etsy store, aptly named Slowbook, in February 2013).

And here we are, three years later.

View a full pdf of the book for free at heavydutypress.com.

DO NOT BE MISLED

This is a contemporary conceptual art object more than it is a fine craft book. Yes, it is a handmade book from Italy, and yes, it was assembled/created by The Heavy Duty Press, but it is not fine printing, and it is not an overly creative or finely crafted binding. Your purchase is an investment. You will receive 1 of 21 (copy no. 6) carefully and thoughtfully created books, inspired by a negative reaction to online social media overload. This book is not anti-Facebook, anti-Twitter, or anti-online social media. Rather, it is a surprise of unrelated thoughts, poems, pictures, and letters, more subtly poignant than you can imagine. Thank you for your support of The Heavy Duty Press.