Pulp: A short biography of the banished book
Vol I of V



Included in '50 Greatest Works of Singaporean Literature'

Shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2018 (non-fiction)

Selected as one of the best books of 2016, Singapore

Featured in the Singapore Writer's Festival 2016

Selected as one of 50 books of the year by AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers for 2016

D&AD award for book design, 2017

Certificate of Typographic Excellence,
​the Type Directors Club: Communication Design Competition, New York.

Included in Typography 38, and at the 63rd TDC Awards Exhibition, New York. Also included in 8 exhibitions touring nearly 40 cities in the United States, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Included in Asia Pacific Design Annual



available at

Books Kinokuniya Singapore stores and online (with international shipping)
Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film online (local delivery to Singapore)

for other enquiries
 please email [email protected]

"Rao's 10-year timeline to produce five books might have been just an ambitious statement if the first instalment of the series wasn't so jaw-droppingly impressive. Pulp feels like a 268-page love letter to books, libraries, illustrations and marginalia. It is playful, enigmatic and erudite all at once. And because Rao is a visual artist, Pulp is also the most beautifully-designed book we've seen in 2016."
Helmi Yusof, Business Times

excerpts

About the project:

Since 2014 I have been working on 'Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book', a decade-long film, book and visual art project about the history of book destruction, censorship and other forms of repression, as well as the book as symbol and resistance. This involves visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally that have served as flashpoints in history, collecting fragments, ephemera, anecdotes, buried secrets, and piecing together (through the film, book and artworks) a composite chronology of the conjoined literary and violent trajectories of our species.

This is the first volume of five, released January 2016
The remaining four volumes will be published every two years

The first exhibition of artwork and rough cuts from the first film was in 2017
more here