First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014. Guide Book catalogs all thirty-eight books that were written and designed by Tom Comitta between 2011 and 2014 but were stored on their hard drive instead of seeing the light of day. With the help of Gauss PDF, the author published the entire collection at once as number GPDFE014—a project that would have been unthinkable without print-on-demand, as the author explains on their website. All books were published both as PDF and print-on-demand, and are available individually or as zip folders, sorted by year.

In the Guide Book, each book is described in detail and at times accompanied by further material. Making explicit the conceptual idea and reasoning behind their works, this publication arguably becomes the best entry point to Comitta’s artistic writing practices. The experimental approaches to writing range from appropriation and collage to conceptual writing, visual poetry, and the transcription of sound works, and focus on the book as artwork, even though the works are mostly text-based.