Signature Strengths

Signature Strengths was inspired by the direct approach to marketing of the No-Frills grocery store novels in the early 1980s, which employed the non-branding strategy of supermarket staples for the mass-marketing of genre fiction novels. Four complete books from the ''generic'' pulp fiction series titled Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance are reproduced in total in this artist book. The repackaging of these unique American pocket-book novels into a non-structured book is conceived and edited by designer, researcher and member of the Slavs and Tartars art collective Boy Vereecken. The only additional writing featured is a critical evaluation by Toronto-based writer Mark Mann on the fascinating experimental endeavor in genre writing and mass-market publishing.