incastellated aesthetics

Total fucking necro, the faxed artwork of TRANSILVANIAN HUNGER, cold meat industry sigil bs, the BEGOTTENing of 90s dtv horror trash stills, everything on all the filters redlined, 90s websites like Dans Gallery of the Grotesque and blackmetal.com, Hellhammer, all come to mind for an underlying incastellated spirit, but we've made a conscious effort for our aesthetics to be distinct from our products, as elegant as something like Fitzcarraldo eds is it tips its hand about a perception of literature that is about acquisition and status, it is the suggestion (at first blush quite admirable) that all that matters is the text, sounds like something we'd love, but the more you think about it the less it is invested in the potential of the book as a thing and by extention the potential inhabitability of the text, it's suggestion is that the text could have been in any typeface, could have any cover, be any aspect ratio and only happens to have that particular blue cover, aspect ratio and set in Fitzcarraldo because they are the pub who acquired it, i guess you could say that all of our books look the way we do because we published them, however they never know what they will look like until we do, can you imagine BELFIE HELL with a tasteful blue cover, PERIPATET, HUNCHBACK 88? But one can easily imagine NOCILLA LAB with 1000 other covers, it is not the point though i don't think as to why all of our books avoid our "brand", is more that brand isn't or shouldn't be paratext, there are so many aspects of a book that can thicken its existence, i feel like there is probably a conception that with great literature you could read it off a phone and it would still be great, that you could listen to it on a podcast and it would still be great, but truly, if you're taking advantage of language (what other priority shutoff literature have) I don't think that is possible, Strickland (still not gonna spell his name) tweeted that he was listening to a FINNEGANS WAKE audio book while going to sleep, I think that's rad, but an audio book of the most linguistically complex prose ever written is missing the visual component of its punmanship, only seeing the text (and if you know like 50 languages) and its intentional misspellings etc is giving the full breadth of its possibility, it is a text meant to be read, why would all texts not aspire to be read, otherwise just record a podcast, so take FINNEGANS WAKE as the extreme of linguistic expectation for this, then there are other aspects of print to be explored and exploited, typesetting, i think of THE F TEXT for instance where each letter in the whole book was individually set to address Douglas's process of photoshop layer archeology, or PERIPATET where for whatever reason each page had a different font size so that despite different lengths of text components they still filled an entire spread, typeface, i think of NYMPHOLEPSY where we selected a font with as many ligatures as possible to express the interconnected nature of a highly sexual text written by two people, or BOUND, where we created a typeface based on Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum's logo to "write" a map of Dantes inferno, or aspect ratio where SEA-WITCH was already designed as a square, or the forthcoming AUTOBIOLOGY which uses a wider aspect ratio and a very narrow text block to accentuate the sense of scrolling through a long uninterrupted text... none of this is to even touch on cover art (we have multiple books that don't even have the title on the cover), title sequence (some books don't "start" for dozens of pages), etc, these things require the utmost freedom to truly bring a books potential to life as a book and not just something that has been written, and thus, as much as we strive to indulge in "our" aesthetic, our books will forever each have their very own, from scratch, bespoke, total fucking whatever identity.