READING MAKES ME HORNY

Orbiting around the saddest house in the history of Grand Designs, Sam Moore’s Chesil Cliff House and other failures takes us to North Devon where, standing at the cliff’s edge, we meet Edward Short: a man with a Fred Perry shirt and a dream. Amongst a chorus of characters including Kevin Mcloud as Father Time, Moore by means of Short leads us into a study of creative failure, gender, and, ultimately, the desire to keep writing.

"I struggle to see anyone living here. It feels like a distorted wonder of the world, a cautionary tale. Something that could never have been lived in, but that had to be made."

About the author:
Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and Search history (Queer Street Press). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

About A Series of Attempts:
This new series published by Sticky Fingers Publishing explores the essay form through the etymological root of essay: to try, trial or attempt. In 1508, French theorist Michel de Montaigne published a collection of 107 texts called Essais, described by his contemporaries as ‘self-indulgent and embarrassingly confessional.’ It is through these roots we find the attitude and intentions at the heart of this series; that through thinking together, through trying to figure it out on the page, we can reach new and increasingly nuanced ways to understand each other and the worlds we inhabit.

"We didn’t have anything & we hadn’t seen much. So, naturally we understood less & felt owed something. We weren’t entirely wrong, though. It was 2011."

Part archival remix, part recruitment manual, this pamphlet’s cast of BAD HORSEY GIRLS will teach you how to neigh, dance and flirt until the vampires come home. A Series of Attempts #3 opens with Jordan/_Hell’s new manifesto ☆ LOVING WOMEN ★, that takes the Nomadic Sisters 1976 publication by the same name as a departure point. From here, ★ LE PONEY ☆ then follows a string of lesbian ponies through a dimensional split. A dimensional split that looks suspiciously like the L.A./Parisian+ queer scene… (͠≖~≖ ͡ )

About the author:
Jordan/_ Hell is a Black trans(2s) artist, writer, & scholar. Hell is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2021) & AUTOLINGO DIDACTICA (Monitor Press, 2023), amount others. Hell’s writing has been internationally published in multiple languages in press, interdisciplinary projects, & exhibitions by Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (DE), Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishing (UK), Monitor Books (UK), Real Review (UK), Soft Opening (UK), Mousse Magazine (DE), 032c (DE), Rosie’s Disobedient Press (UK), Sticky Fingers Publishing (UK), The Bittersweet Review (UK), Pratt Institute’s The Felt (US), & others. Hell studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art (US). Currently, Hell is a doctoral candidate in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London.

This Masturbatory Reader asks three main questions.
1. What power and pleasure can we access through attending to the erotics of knowledge production?
2. How are the sites, systems and tools of knowledge-making designed to reiterate violent norms (and in turn, erase deviant practices)?
3. What could the making (and unmaking) of these systems allow us to imagine?

To unpack these questions the edition gathers 16 contributors across 136 pages, conjuring the thinking (wondering, studying, lusting, sweating, ranting) of an expanding chorus of references that sit distances apart, folded here between facing pages. A chorus calling to action, calling to theory, calling to bed.

Featuring D Mortimer, Wes Knowler, Biogal, Tallulah Griffith, Brooke Palmieri, Carl Gent, Sophie Mak-Schram, Alice Butler, Jessa Mockridge, Nat Pyper, Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Sammy Paloma, Donna Marcus Duke, and Ryan Boultbee, with a forward by Emily Pope.

“In this anthology, reading is cruising, and cruising is reading.” – Sam Moore, ‘The (Bad) Taste Test: Radical Acts of Queer (Self) Pleasure in The Masturbatory Reader’, Polyester Zine

The very first issue of Viscose tackles the expansive notion of “style”. Both a noun and a verb, style can be understood as the most basic unit or currency of fashion. Style names the very movement of aesthetics in society, and thus holds an important place in the critique of art and visual culture more broadly.

As a verb, it connotes a tactic: a dynamic tool for persuasion and communication through the bricolage of signifiers. It also relates directly to the contemporary profession of “styling”; a practice native to the fashion industry, but increasingly prevalent across the arts, media, consumerism, and politics. Thiss issue of Viscose sets out to critically gesture to all of these connotations and their potential intermingling through concrete case studies and cross disciplinary philosophical speculation.

with contributions by:
Shanzhai Lyric, David Lieske, Bakri Bakhit, Dena Yago, Matthew Linde, Burke Battelle & Ada O’Higgins, Davide Stucchi, Taylore Scarabelli, Mahoro Seward, Jordan Richman, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, & Milos Trakilović, Laura Gardner, Avena Gallagher, Alex Esculapio, Elise by Olsen and Jeppe Ugelvig

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to design. It is as much a practice as it is a methodology or way of thinking, a multifaceted discipline that moves with society’s progression. Throughout the creative process behind every design, learnings happen. Designers learn to adapt, adjusting their positions relative to the context. This volume spotlights self-organised, spontaneous, sporadic, and informal educational initiatives within the realm of creative practices, both historical and contemporary. The initiatives presented here show that any attempt to control a narrative and limit it to a single understanding risks stifling potential innovations that might arise from unexpected origins.

Featuring contributions from Amanda Ariawan, Andriew Budiman, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Chabib Duto Hapsoro, Czar Kristoff J.P., Filippo Sciascia, Fiorent Fernisia, Gideon Kong, Jacob Lindgren, Jeremy Sharma, Keni K. Soeriaatmadja, Limestone Books, Livian Aurel V. Purwanto, Mac Andre Arboleda, Nishkra, Prananda L. Malasan, R.A. Dita Saraswati, Reza Afisina, Rouzel Waworuntu Saad, Savira Aristi, Trevor Embury, and Virliany Rizqia Putri.

Werkplaats Typografie presents a catalog of Works from the Collection of Holly van Houten. Spanning multiple decades and personally selected from around the world, the collection includes over a thousand items that memorialize the life of this candidly private, bohemian connoisseur. Carefully examined by our specialists, a curated selection of rarities, antiquities, oddities, and works of art is available in this catalog, which accompanied an exclusive auction held during Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair in May 2025 in Los Angeles, Van Houten’s beloved city.

Project by: WT Year 25 & Year 26 for LA PMABF led by Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho

Designer: Hannes Drißner, Lisa Lagova, Nuno Beijinho. Objects photographed by Augustinas Milkus and Jordi de Vetten

The Domestic Encyclopaedia is a collection of stories that explore the material body of architecture, of houses. In the midst of ongoing ecological disaster and increased alienation from nature it invites you to travel beyond the screen, to practice attention and probe the nature of domestic space.

Watch the bathroom merge with mountain streams, kitchens sizzle on sandy beaches and a bedroom drift into a nocturnal choreography.
Let them seep underneath your door.
Welcome home.

In this encyclopedia of domestic space Annee Grøtte Viken enters in a dialogue with the conventional spaces that surround us, the semiotic skin we call home. She uses her first love, literature, to imagine and give voice to the seemingly mute spaces we inhabit, collecting bits and pieces from the western canon and non-western counter-canon, to find characters lying in bath, dreaming in bed, cooking in kitchens. By each time articulating the imagined voices of these spaces, she embarks on a poetic journey into the home, this drifting island.

Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.

As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.

THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”

The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.