Friday 7 June 2024, 3.30pm
(Fair runs from 6–9 June, full dates and times below)
Cromwell Place, London, SW7 2JE

Book Works will have a table and present a panel event at Inventory, a new art book fair at Cromwell Place that surveys this current moment in the expanded publishing landscape, running 7-9 June 2024.

The posters from the What Did You Do fundraising project will be on display through the weekend. On the Friday at 3.30pm, Book Works will host a panel discussion to discuss arts, activism, institutional silence and cultural opposition to genocide, with Saeed Taji Farouky (Cultural Alliance for Palestine), Zarina Muhammad (The White Pube), Rachael Jarvis (Director, The Mosaic Rooms) and Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA).

Constituting a book market, reading room and programme of events, Inventory will foreground interdisciplinary, collaborative and non-profit forms of publishing and instigate research into the agency of the artists publication and the capacities of the artist-led press.

Looking to the pasts, presents and futures of the printed form as part of an extended dialogue of artist and activist practice, this inaugural weekend programme welcomes established presses, occasional publishers, zinesters and those making their first experiments with print.

All events are free and open to all, but capacity is limited. The full opening times for the fair are below. For more info visit the Cromwell Place site.

Fair opening times:
Friday, 7th June: 12-6pm
Saturday, 8th June: 11am-6pm
Sunday, 9th June: 11am-4pm

30 June 2024, 2pm
Cafe Oto
Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL
Free but RSVP

Sadly The Wastes launch at Cafe Oto last Sunday had to be postponed due to transport woes, but it has now been rescheduled for Come and celebrate with Roy Claire Potter and friends on 2 June at Cafe Oto for the London launch of their debut novel, The Wastes.

The launch event will begin with a new reading performance by Roy Claire Potter and Kieron Piercy, whose previous collaborative releases and broadcasts include Conversations with the Anthony Burgess Archive on Sub Rosa, and Three Sweep Between for Glasgow’s art radio station Radiophrenia. This will be followed by a conversation about the themes and production of the novel in the context of artists who write with Daniella Valz Gen, who is the 2024 Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery.

The Wastes is published by Book Works as part of the Arrhythmia series, edited by Katrina Palmer.

Roy Claire Potter has released duo and solo audio works with labels like Cafe OTO’s Otoroku and Takuroku, Sub Rosa, Chocolate Monk, and Fort Evil Fruit, and has worked with a broad range of musicians and sound artists including Park Jiha, Ziúr, Kieron Piercy and Bridget Hayden. With a visual art background in experimental art writing and drawing, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings, often focusing on group dynamics or the aftermath of violent events with a dark, sometimes wilful humour. They publish writing and make exhibitions internationally, and recent collaborations for stage and broadcast have been made possible by BEK, Counterflows, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, and Wysing Art Centre’s Polyphonic music festival with Somerset House.

Based in Leeds, Kieron Piercy produces amateur acousmatics for computer and electronics with releases on Harbinger Sound, Porta, and Chocolate Monk.

Daniella Valz Gen is an artist and writer born in Lima and based in London, who works across installation, text, and live performance. Their work investigates different forms of embodying liminality, and reflects on the negotiation of territories, modes of address, and value systems. They are the 2024 Whitechapel Gallery Writer in Residence and their first collection of poetry Subversive Economies is published by PSS.

Sales Assistant, Book Works (1 day per week)
Salary: £30,000 (pro-rata £6,000 per annum)
Permanent contract (probation period 8 weeks)
Location: Book Works, 19 Holywell Row, London, EC2A 4JB (please note this is not a remote role).

Book Works seeks a Sales Assistant to work with the Publishing Manager on all aspects of sales and distribution.

Book Works is a non-profit organisation, a registered charity, and receives NPO funding from Arts Council England. We publish approximately 8-10 titles a year, and also have an extensive backlist of titles, in addition to special editions and prints that are published from time to time. Visit our new website to see the full range of titles: www.bookworks.org.uk.

Book Works is committed to making a positive impact to address inequality and discrimination. Through our work, employment and audience engagement, we pursue a programme that foregrounds social justice in the arts. Our programme reflects our desire to work with artists and writers from the global majority who are often unrecognised by mainstream institutions, and those from liberation or historically marginalised groups. You will be part of a team with a public face and play a role in ensuring that principles of equality, diversity and inclusion are foregrounded in our work. You will also be part of a team that is exploring new ways of improving our commitment to climate justice.

To apply please submit your CV, a covering letter and completed equalities monitoring form to paul@bookworks.org.uk, with Sales Assistant in the subject, by midnight on 11 June 2024. If you have any questions about this process, or access needs that you would like to discuss please get in touch.

For a full job description, and equalities monitoring form please follow this link.

Our book of the month is Maija Timonen’s The Measure of Reality. Get it with 30% off for the rest of June.

Fantasies and dreams are a way of accessing hidden dimensions of everyday experience, but what happens when you can’t fantasise? In this work of analytic fiction, creative and heterosexual crises unfold, shaped by the anxieties of our time. Social and economic pressures are almost crippling, yet meticulously understood – obsessively decrypted and re-encrypted by Timonen’s unnamed female protagonist who subjects everyday occurrences and encounters to absurd levels of scrutiny and interpretation, often with recourse to theory. Short story chapters, captioned in a manner reminiscent of episodes of Seinfeld, are interspersed with a letter, a list of forgotten browser tabs, a treatment for an unmade film and a variety of dating scenarios.

In one of these, speed daters smell T-shirts as the narrator desperately tries to account for an alarming absence of desire. The specificities of love and sex are shown simultaneously in Timonen’s project to be something genuinely ‘ours’ yet alienating. They act as both tools for the negotiation of the complexities of subject/object relations in contemporary capitalism and constitute a kind of precarious – even false – refuge from the trauma of living in it.

Maija Timonen is an artist based in London, Berlin and Helsinki.

Published by Book Works as part of G.S.O.H. The Rest is Dark, The Rest is Dark guest edited by Clunie Reid. Designed by Erik Hartin.