LaPoD XEROX Bootleg READER 2018 is made with a photocopy machine and contains a collection of scanned excerpts from books on the book. Created during an “improvised office copier performance” (blurb on Lulu) in Danny Snelson’s 2018 course “Print on Demand Art and Poetry (LaPoD)” at University of California, Los Angeles, the publication is both a collection of relevant theory on the subject as well as a reflection on the practice of creating seminar readers in copyshops and their distinct materiality. By publishing the photocopied and digitized—i.e., scanned—pages as a print-on-demand book, LaPoD XEROX Bootleg READER demonstrates the aesthetic qualities of this mode of text reproduction and distribution that is about to become obsolete. The reproductions include typical modes of visual degeneration such as poor positioning of the books or visible hands holding pages. The reproduction of the scanner’s hand forming the last page of the book shows that this is a deliberately chosen aesthetic strategy.

The reader includes excerpts from:

• Eva Weinmayr, “Library Underground—A Reading List for A Coming Community.” In Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. by Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 250–282;
• Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read (New York: Vintage Books, 2014);
• Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-Book. On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016);
• Kate Eichborn, Adjusted Margin. Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016);
• Timothy Laquintano, Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016);
• Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980 (New York: New York Public Library, 1998);
• Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim. A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007);
• Annette Gilbert, “Book Pirates. On a New Art of Making Books.” In Reprint. Appropriation (&) Literature, ed. by Annette Gilbert (Wiesbaden: Luxbooks, 2016), 49–77;
• Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr, “The Piracy Project.” In Code—X. Paper, Ink, Pixel and Screen, ed. by Danny Aldred and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé (Farnham: BookRoom Press, 2016), 01:07–01:18.