Sunday Reads
Softcover print is risky terrain where, they don’t wear very well. On the other hand, it’s cheap to print, which means it’s a space to experiment. The softcover is not trying to look precious. These books and magazines are built for circulation, spill marks, being lent, marked, dog-eared, rubbed with lipstick. Below: some softies and reasons it deserves shelf space at Voo.
The starting point of the (Pilcrow) series, #0 Apophenia is an exercise in noticing patterns where none exist, treating the world’s largest collaborative archive as both material and mirror. Compiled entirely from text and images found on Wikipedia, the book collects fragments from the world’s largest encyclopedia and turns them into an amazing collage of text and image. This issue is put together by Jan-Pieter ’t Hart, the Amsterdam based artist who runs the publishing platform called OUTLINE.
Part of the (Pilcrow) series, #2 Bundle Theory takes collecting, or hoarding, as a patient, slightly obsessive aesthetic. This too is a Wiki assembly. Romy Day Winkel edits this mass of information into a meditation on accumulation: what happens when magical and mundane objects, facts and fictions, are bundled together without hierarchy? And I love Wikipedia.
BUTT and its pink toned pages was founded by Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom (Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman) in 2001, and had always the antidote to glossy gay media. The queer magazine with minimal filters, and relaunched in 2022 with renewed energy yet still thrives on conversation, revelation, and bodies – and it’s one of our costumer favourites. Issue 37 spans 120 pages and features pieces by or about Nan Goldin, Coco Capitán, Omar Apollo, Brazilian congresswoman Erika Hilton, and more.
This is a 192-page softcover manifesto of Japan’s underground rave visual culture. Edited by Gabber Eleganza and published by Never Sleep (Archivio #3, 2025), Manga Corps assembles flyers, handbills, zines, mascots, illustrations, and graphic detritus from Japan’s hardcore, gabber, and J-core scenes of the 1990s and early 2000s. It traces how Osaka and Tokyo became nodes of a distinct hardcore sound, one that never wanted to be legible outside its subcultural circuit. In Manga Corps, you’ll see chaotic typography, glitchy mascots, layered collage, and DIY folds. The softcover format, with its fragility and portability, matches the fugitive nature of its subject: scenes that often happened off-grid, away from capital, away from documentation.
Real Review is a London-based magazine in softcover form, measuring 26 × 11.5 cm. Its long, narrow format, 26 by 11.5 centimetres mimics the proportions of a smartphone, translating digital reading habits into print. Issue 16 spans a range of writers and artists interrogating “transformation.” It’s: an interview with Jonathan White on the future as a political idea; a flyer project by Dozie Kanu; an “Opioid Crisis Lookbook” speculating on semiotics; essays on mood, voice notes, moral killing, Star Trek, law-enforcement hardware, non-commercial imagery.
Borrowing its title from John Carpenter’s 1988 cult film, They Live is Hiroki Tsukuda’s visual counterpart to that same dystopian paranoia. Tsukuda is born in Kagawa in 1978 and based in Tokyo. A child of late-’80s cyberpunk and early internet aesthetics, he translates his obsessions – dark thrillers, apocalyptic fiction, manga – into (sexy) collages. The publication, They Live is a collection of images from the exhibition with the same name, shown at Petzel Gallery in 2020.
