Tuesday, March 06, 2012

What-Might-Have-Been Wonders

Derek Pell, a visual artist, photographer, and author living in Northern California’s Bay Area, recently alerted me to a new project he’s rolling out in the online magazine Zoom Street, for which he serves as editor in chief. It seems Pell has created a pictorial series of 100 “missing mysteries.” These he touts as “rare books you never knew existed”--and indeed they don’t exist, except in his irreverent imagination. Pell has created both bogus book covers and the story descriptions to match.

A good example is entry No. 1: Eat Me Deadly, supposedly by Mickey Spillane. “When shrunken fetish-heads start popping up on the blue-plate special at [Mike] Hammer’s favorite dives,” Pell’s blurb begins, “it’s not just another case of indigestion ... but a case of cold-blood murder.”

This Zoom Street series began yesterday, and is set to continue with Monday installments until Pell’s “pictorial history of nonexistent mysteries (1840-2013)” finishes its run in early 2014.

Follow the series here.

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