Or as Bud Parr has said, read now (or never).
The publishers of this anthology of Latin American writing wanted to draw attention to the very short life of new writing in our times. Using vanishing ink seemed like a fine way to do it.
The buyers of the first print run were clearly in agreement, but one wonders, what were they buying? A novelty, a talking point - or a journal? would they leave it closed on the bookshelf for fear of losing the book?
The editors remark that most first books vanish anyway. They are currently investigating further publications in the same format:
'we think that this is a magical and poetic way of confronting a real problem,' explains javier campopiano, regional general creative director of draftFCB.
'we wanted to make a book that was a message in itself, that encourages us to read those authors, before their stories disappear for real, right before our eyes.'
while potential purchasers are likely to object to the impermanence of the object-- which defies being returned to months or years later for a second reading--
the project highlights both the difficulties that face emerging contemporary authors, as well as our often-neglected enjoyment of text, and the perhaps overly
confident opinions we hold about the permanence of written material. as the video documentation of the project suggests:
'books are very patient objects. we buy them, and then they wait for us to read them. days, months, even years. that’s OK for books, but not for new authors.
if people don’t read their first books, they’ll never make it to a second.'Read more at Design Boom. (Noted also at Wired, Gizmodo, the Independent and the Boston Globe, among others.)
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