ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents This book is a work of fiction in which all the texts and illustrations are clipped from women's magazines from the 1960's. It resembles the cut-up stories made by William Burroughs except that the flow is deliberate rather than random. Graham Rawle describes the making of the book in an afterward. "I started writing this book in the usual way. When I had completed a rough draft, I then searched through hundreds of women's magazines, cutting out anything that seemed relevant to the scenes I'd written - sentences and phrases that, when joined together, could be rearranged to approximate what I wanted to say. These cuttings were then filed and from them I began to reassemble my story. Little by little, my original words were discarded and replaced by those I'd bound. Once the transition was complete, I could start pasting up the pages as artwork. The method was primitive: scissors and glue. Apart from a little tweaking here and there to enlarge very small type to a readable size,...