Angela Genusa’s Spam Bibliography presents all emails received in her spam folder between September 2012 and March 2013, formatted as a bibliography and sorted alphabetically: senders become authors, the subject line becomes the title, and the date received becomes the publication date. Accordingly, the blurb on Lulu—following the ironic “How to ...” pattern typical for Troll Thread—reads: “HOW TO ORGANIZE EMAILS.” This unique representation makes spam messages appear as objects worth documenting and investigating.

In accordance with academic standards, the text is quoted verbatim, including linguistic absurdities, random overuse of capitalization, and all those confusing punctuation marks and symbols like arrows, crosses, asterisks, and emoji. One doesn’t always know whether they mean anything, whether they are just mojibake or whether they are meant to trick email providers’ anti-spam algorithms. Their “alphabetical” order, opaque at first glance—e.g., the heart comes after the asterisk—probably results from the Unicode values of the characters.

With a strong documentary gesture, the collection draws a panorama of human desires, weaknesses, fears, hardships, and their proposed solutions driven by capitalist logic, and gives a glimpse at an often automatically deleted genre of waste text and its rhetorical potential. At the same time, it exposes this generic, automated, marketing speak in the digital age as a kind of transhuman writing that is usually not only written by machines, but also increasingly aimed at non-human readers—namely spam filters—before reaching its real target: humans with all their weaknesses.