1st 2021 98pp Potential Books trade paperback. Illustrated including colour. NM.
 
Ltd. ed. 5/12. Signed with a quote by Iain Sinclair on title page. Further signed by Brian Catling by way of an original pen illustration oppositee the title page of his essay.
 
A Documentary Novel of the Plague Year by The Envoys. Led by Iain Sinclair, and edited by Trevor Datson, this is the first publication from Potential Books, a new small press associated with the Centre for Potential Literatures (LitPo) at the School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey
 
‘We would conduct our own version of the Mass Observation exercise launched in the late ‘30s of the last century. A bunch of well-intentioned snoops, social scientists, anthropologists, surrealist poets, artist-photographers, and Hampstead communists, were sent north to the industrial heartlands, to... observe. En masse. To eavesdrop in pubs. To scribble down dialogue overheard on buses and in cafés. To register this English otherness. A doomsday survey from which to contrive legislation for a better society […]
 
Rumours of what had been found out there trickled back to me. The reports were partial, disjointed, troubling or serene, reflecting with precision the unquiet world of the Grid. Many observers chose not to file, their blank scripts nonetheless taking equal place among the bulletins that were daily forming themselves into a mosaic in my scriptorium. Others reported back in mystic ways, according to the nature of their data.’ - Iain Sinclair, Controller.