The Best American Book of the 20th Century*

As ‘The Best American Book of the 20th Century’ travels through the textual materiality of an entire century of mass-produced literature, it suggests intertextual relationships between the narratives of American fiction. Since a multitude of changes in time and culture converse in the book, the project transverses the usual, formal standards of language, questioning power dynamics between reader and writer. Are Pearl S. Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell, Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, Daphne du Maurier, J. D. Salinger, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison basically telling a similar story?

Do they, through this project, become the collective authors of one, all-encompassing- book?

Is the project an opportunity to re-assess and reflect upon modernity’s spell on our collective imagination? And, ultimately, how does its composed text resonate in our present times?

Pockets brought literature to the masses by turning books into best sellers. Contrary to high-end prints the design of these pockets, cheap and mass-produced, was fit to serve the distribution system. Often effectively well–boxed, they were proportioned to maximize the box’s content and carrying-ability and were taggedto increase recognizability for the man handling the boxes rather than to make them look good. The accompanying exhibition is conceived as a stock-sale of the book, in which the mass-produced and standardized presentation materials resonate with familiar formats of 20th century modes of book distribution and display. The standard cardboard boxes utilized as distribution and display devices represent functional carriers of the circulation of mass fiction throughout the previous century, and, for a significant part, up to this day. This project is brought to exhibition as a “stockroom-booksale”, resonating the symptoms of mass-distribution as visualized both on a sculptural and a graphic, formalized level. It presents a unique opportunity to display the boxes both as singular units on bookshop counters and as miniature sculptures in exhibition contexts, hinting at the standardized logistical and economic infrastructures behind each book purchase and art display.

Design agency Project Projects translated these ambitions in the publication’s graphics, in close collaboration with the editorial team. Curator Niels van Tomme served as scenographic advisor, Onomatopee director Freek lomme facilitated final editing and production: exhibition space and publisher Onomatopee provides an institutional framework for the presentation and distribution of this project, making ‘The Best American Book of the 20th Century’ its 100th project issue (OMP100).