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By: Mel Campbell
Date: 20th May 08
Product: Accessories
Theft: Theft is inevitable: Buy two
What:
Novel Badges
Where:
Here
When:
As fast as you can click a mouse
How much:
$3 + postage, bargain!
Keeping up with a dirty hipster's required reading can be dispiriting. You've gotta know your Lethem from your Eggers, classic novels from graphic novels. And while everyone's raving about the hilariously ironic promotional campaign for Chuck Palahniuk's latest effort, the last book you read was Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell. (And you liked it.)
Luckily, Natalija Brunovs and Patrick Pittman from Perth arts collective The Concrete Organisation have made literary appreciation delightfully absurd. The ‘first edition' in their Novel Badges project lovingly reproduces the cover typography from famous literary works - with the word 'badge' somewhere in the title. Whether you fancy 20,000 Badges Under the Sea, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Badge or To Kill A Mocking-Badge, you can fend off those gnawing pangs of uncoolsieness for the price of a coffee. Meanwhile, advanced students of existential badge-losophy can plump for No Badge. Whoa! You're blowing my badge.
Better yet, invent your own (A Confederacy Of Badges, anyone?) and email it to Natalija and Patrick, and if they put it in their next collection, they'll flick a couple of freebies your way. Nice... I mean, badge.