For ABC Days, Artists’ Books Cooperative member Wil van Iersel invited twenty-eight artists to produce a book in a given format of 48 to 64 pages to be published as a consecutive series each day between June 11 and July 9, 2020. Some of the participating artists are members of ABC and others responded to an invitation, parts of which are reproduced in Jan van der Til’s publication July 06 2020 (which is at the same time Book XXXVIII: Please tell me why in his large project Rhizomebook). As one learns there, this is the first time ABC asked non-members to collaborate on a community project, and thanks to sponsorship by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts this participation could be remunerated with a €200 honorarium and four copies of the participant’s own book in the series.

Each publication references the date it was published with most of the content directly reflecting on the news of that day or period. In this way, the series documents the zeitgeist of a memorable period marked by the lockdown enforced in many countries following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests against racism, police brutality, and white privilege.

The date, which forms the title of each book and is the only paratextual information on the front cover, is reminiscent of On Karawa’s Date Paintings except for the fact that ABC Days presents itself as a collective timed practice, as can also be seen on the back cover, which bears the title of the series next to the artist’s name. The color of the cover is determined in each case by the color of an illustration in the respective book.

The artistic practices and techniques used in the books vary from post-photography and found images to commentary and conceptual approaches to collage, photography, and drawing.

Each book was published as a browsable but not downloadable PDF on the day it references. As a printed copy, it could only be acquired in one of the twenty-nine box editions of the set, published after the series’ completion. In the absence of real-life book fairs where ABC would present this project to visitors, a presentation video was made in which a computer voice narrates the background of the series instead of a “real” ABC member.

Contributing artists: Alaa Mansour (LB), Bruno Zhu (PT), Corinne Vionnet (CH), David Horvitz (US), David Schulz (US), Dawn Kim (US), Duncan Wooldridge (UK), EJ Major (UK), Hermann Zschiegner (US), Jack Halten Fahnestock (US), Jan van der Til (NL), John Maclean (UK), Jonathan Bragdon (US), Jonathan Lewis (UK), Jonathan Schmidt- Ott (DE), Kurt Caviezel (CH), Lotte Schröder (NL), Louis Porter (UK), Micheál O’Connell (Mocksim) (IE), Mishka Henner (UK/FR), Mohini Chandra (UK), Monika Orpik (PL), Ofer Wolberger (US), Penelope Umbrico (US), Rahel Zoller (DE/UK), Studio The Future (NL), Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson (NO/IS), Travis Shaffer (US), and Wil van Iersel (NL).