One of the great oddball artist books of the postwar avant-garde. 

Daniel Spoerri records the objects lying on a table in his Paris room and describes them one by one. A jar of Nescafé, a paper bag, a spool of thread, tools, crumbs, packaging — nothing is too trivial to enter the record. From there the book mutates. Each object opens into memories, stories, jokes, associations and corrections, with Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams and Roland Topor gradually turning Spoerri’s inventory into a collaborative thicket of digression. 

Originally published in French in 1962, this expanded English “re-anecdoted” version became one of the defining books associated with Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme. The mundane object becomes an archival trapdoor. The more exact the description tries to become, the further the book wanders — which is largely its charm, and also its theory. The edition includes one hundred illustrations by Topor, with the French translated and further complicated by Emmett Williams. 

Edition: First US / first English-language softcover edition, Something Else Press, New York, 1966. 214pp. Translated from the French and further anecdoted by Emmett Williams, with contributions from Robert Filliou and illustrations by Topor.