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I have a favorite feature of this book — Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Mémoires from 1959 — and it is that Jorn asked the book binders for a dust cover made from some unconventional material, something that would leave a mark on the hands of whoever was reading the book, and the solution they landed on was sandpaper. A sandpaper dust cover would roughen up the skin on your hands if you held the book. And  if you were to put the book in your bookshelf, it would scuff up the books next to it when you took it out or put it back into the shelf. Lay it it down on top of your coffee table, and you would scratch the surface of the table. It was a book designed to leave a mark on its surroundings.

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More pages from Mémoires. If you’re looking at this through a small screen, you are probably seeing a cropped version of the image above. You’ll find an uncropped version here. Scan from Archive.org
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‘Je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siècle’ (‘I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century’) Scan from Archive.org

Asger Jorn was also involved in the creation of Helhesten — an avant-garde art magazine published in Denmark between 1941 and 1944. I’ve gathered some material about Helhesten here.

Bibliography