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Finally, the catalog published by Spector Books will be here soon! 

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froncer-les-sourcils_olivier-bertrand_2017.pdf

Publisher website Surfaces Utiles

Magazine website La Perruque

Bertrand

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Using the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and Urs Lehni’s Rollo Press, Olivier Bertrand’s thesis *Froncer les sourcils* (Frowning Eyebrows) traces two publishing experiments that reinvented the publishing craft in their respective eras by seeing it as a creative play on its technical and financial constraints: “It is a question of responding positively to the constraints of the machine and the lack of means by taking advantage of difficulties and by showing inventiveness and cunning” (Olivier Bertrand, *Froncer les sourcils*, 58). They did not necessarily reinvent the wheel. Rather, as Bertrand points out, their achievement was to bring together craftsmanship and industrial production, horticulture and entrepreneurship, capitalism and socialism. 

In this way, both publishers are shining examples for Bertrand’s own publishing practice, which he develops from the following consideration: “It is not necessary to recreate new structures each time, but it is quite possible to rely on those that already exist, even if it means hijacking them. Rather than denying them, we can imagine, for example, taking advantage of the strength of the institutional or industrial structures already in place to transform them according to our needs (and not those of the market). In terms of resources, it is a question of working as much as possible with the materials that are already around us […]” (Bertrand, *Froncer les sourcils*, 100). 

Accordingly, Bertrand develops strategies of hacking and reusing leftovers from industrial production to make the books of his publishing house Surfaces Utiles and his magazine *La Perruque* (since 2015). The latter, for example, is a strip of paper, 90 cm long and 1 cm wide, obtained from the unprinted margins of printed matter. While the name of his publishing house alludes to the use of these unprinted surfaces, the name of his magazine takes Michel de Certeau’s term “faire la perruque,” describing the use of working time and working means, resources, or tools of a company to one’s own advantage (see Michel de Certeau, *The Practice of Everyday Life*, 26f.).

isbn

open edition

cc by-sa

12.6 x 20.3 cm

nonfiction

education / classroom

color

perfect bound

paperback

study / analysis

composition (writing  / drawing / photography)

Blurb

ecology / sustainability

print technology

politics / activism

economy / labor

book / book design

materiality

publishing / distribution

Froncer les sourcils

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*Heroic Real Estate Otter of the 21st Century* is an experimental collaborative novel written by seven authors during a seven-hour book sprint on November 2, 2012 at the Inspace gallery in Edinburgh during the conference *[Remediating the Social](https://elmcip.net/conference)*. The writing performance was organized and mediated by an automated editing software run on a networked Linux PC called *The Maggot*, conceived and coded by exquisite_code (Brendan Howell and Sabrina Small). 

The foreword explains: “The process of writing proceeded in rounds, with all participants sitting at a table working simultaneously for periods of 10 minutes. The writing interface was presented in the form of a simple browser-based text editor, with basic typographic options (bold, italic, lists) and standard editing functions (cut, copy, paste). At the end of each timed round, the editor [i.e. *The Maggot*] automatically submitted the texts, regardless of their level of completion and the desires of the authors, and closed each of the edit windows. The machine, sometimes known as the *bastard editor*, then proceeded to insert the chunks into the corpus. This round of texts was automatically printed out on an old line printer, leaving an endless paper record piling up on the table. Next, *The Maggot* chewed into the corpus, making holes between existing chunks or picking out existing texts in need of further editing. These inserted empty passages or redacted texts were then sent out arbitrarily to the writers for another 10 minute round” (“Editorial Mechanics,” p. v).

*Heroic Real Estate Otter of the 21st Century*, published by exquisite_code, contains the outcome of this performance. The actual authors writing via this networked editing system were Brendan Howell, Helen Varley Jamieson, Cristiano Montanari, Elisabeth Nesheim, Brittani Sonnenberg, Franziska Wegener, and J.D.A. Winslow. Sigla in the margins of the pages indicate who last edited the respective text passage. What is not documented, however, is which other author(s) contributed to the passage and how much their texts were interfered with in one of the later rounds of editing. 

On Lulu and Amazon, *The Maggot* is listed as author; in the preface, *The Maggot* is listed as editor. The book is accompanied by a list of contributors; a list of free and open source software used in the production of this work, from programming to photoediting to typesetting and cover layout; and a drawing by Franziska Wegener explaining the different stages of the writing process and listing the possible forms that this collectively written novel could now take after it has been written, from “Life-Novel” (via print-on-demand) to “Text Dump” (via “Print Live”) and “Display.” Indeed, on the various occasions where this editing software has been used, different publications have been produced, ranging from blog posts and line printed zines to print-on-demand books distributed via [Mute Books](https://www.metamute.org/) to the book at hand published via Lulu. The source code for *The Maggot* is available online.





Heroic Real Estate Otter of the 21st Century

Heroic Real Estate Otter of the 21<sup>st</sup> Century