Just in time for June Gloom, Black Scat Books proudly presents the first in a series of Black Scat Broadsides: Alphonse Allais’s “A Curious Physiological Industry,” translated by Doug Skinner. In the spirit of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” this rare text is the master absurdist at his devilish best — a full-color, poster-sized (12 x […]

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The latest issue of Cabinet, #55, is devoted to love. It contains a postcard with an excerpt from my book Horoscrapes. You can buy a copy, and send a Horoscrape through the U.S. postal system! And the postcard can be viewed here.

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Another round for the holidays.  

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  The trade edition of Captain Cap is now available!  Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking, proto-pataphysical antihero, based on his friend Albert Caperon, bullies bartenders, swindles prostitutes, travels the world, and offers such useful inventions as the smell-buoy, the kangacycle, the bacteria motor, and much more.  This edition collects the four installments previously published by Black Scat […]

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The fourth and final volume of Captain Cap is now available from Black Scat Books.  In these sixteen stories, Alphonse Allais’s hard-drinking polymath proposes crocodile bridges, volatile ink, the kangacycle, smell-buoys, and much more.  Captain Cap, first published in 1902, and continually popular in France, has previously been translated into Czech, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, […]

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The third volume of the adventures of Captain Cap (there will be four) is now available from Black Scat Books, in a limited edition of 125.  The adventures of the prototypical ‘pataphysical antihero, first published by Alphonse Allais in 1902, have been scrupulously translated, illustrated, and annotated by Doug Skinner; they appear in English for […]

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Today is April 1, a day sanctified by the extraordinary French humorist Alphonse Allais; and I am happy to announce that it brings the release of Captain Cap, Volume 2. Allais’s stories of his absurd anti-hero, first published in 1902, have been meticulously translated and illustrated by Doug Skinner, in the second volume of a […]

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My translation of Isidore Isou’s Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara was displayed in the show “Manifesto,” devoted to Dada, Letterism, Fluxus, and other vanguards, and organized by Frédéric Acquaviva at Kings Place, London, 3/4/13.  Copies are still available, by the way, at Black Scat Books.

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These pinbacks are given to the first twelve who purchase Captain Cap, Volume 1.  I based the button on the only known photograph of Albert Caperon, the real Captain Cap.

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Alphonse Allais was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination.  Among other things, he wrote a series of wonderful stories about his friend Albert Caperon.  In Allais’s hands, “Captain Cap” became an adventurer and inventor, with a disdain for bureaucracy and a heroic thirst for cocktails.  […]

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