These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies – The Star, The Sun, The Times and others – in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along the roadside of every major arterial road in the city.
These tabloid posters – candid and often outrageous epigrams of news – have been displayed along this road since the First Anglo-Boer War. They live momentarily in the minds of passing drivers and pedestrians, and by midnight they are already defunct.

I began collecting South African tabloid posters in 2008 with no other purpose than to preserve them. I thought they were funny, clever and true. Composed in a local vernacular of shebeen English, these statements are part of the texture of our urban fabric; so familiar as to almost disappear. Loud and colourful, tough and sharp, replete with a droll wit and blunt gallows humour, their blatant iconoclasm and muscular use of language is invigorating and oddly reassuring. The newspapers themselves were not keeping an archive, and however ephemeral they might seem I thought there was a relevance in them that was not being recognised; something uniquely South African.

Driving down Louis Botha Avenue, the rhythmic flash of passing headlines reads like a journalistic version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. It’s an alternative history of the city, a tabloid summary of our age. Constructed from political sound-bites, public innuendos, colloquial bon-mots and hard, bitter truths, they read like an everyman’s state of the nation address, full of comedy and antagonism.

“They are,” as one of the copy editors remarked, “the perfect marriage of a corrupt society and a progressive constitution.”

– Laurence Hamburger

Language: English
Pages: 208
Size: 19 x 27 cm
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780957161221

49€
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The Little Joe Clubhouse Reader, David Edgar & Sam Ashby, Ditto Press / Little Joe.

The Little Joe Clubhouse is a specially commissioned, crafted environment that draws on ideas of withdrawal, defiant separatism and delicious seclusion, at once a den, a commune and a cinema. An expanded, interactive version of the magazine, The Clubhouse incorporates an eclectic programme of films as part of Little Joe’s ongoing endeavour to (re)map the queer histories of film.

Specially published to accompany The Clubhouse, The Little Joe Clubhouse Reader includes contributions from the artists, filmmakers and writers who selected the unique programme of films.

Contributors include A.K. Burns, Ben Campkin, Stuart Comer, Jon Davies, Ron Gregg, Bruce Hainley, Ed Halter, R Justin Hunt, Shanay Jhaveri, William E Jones, Tom Kalin, Jonathan Kemp, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, James Mackay, Billy Miller, Bradford Nordeen, Jenni Olson, Liz Rosenfeld, Patrick Staff, A.L. Steiner, Edward Thomasson, Scott Treleaven, Mark Turner, Ed Webb-Ingall and Matt Wolf.

Risograph printed
Limited edition

D 6.50 €

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An exhibition catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition Dagmar Heppner Hannah James Charlotte Moth at Cole Gallery London  2012. This publication archives a conversation that took place over a period of one month between Dagmar Heppner, Hannah James, Charlotte Moth and Allia Ali, as a response to the to the exhibition.

D 6.50€

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Ninja Turtle Sex Museum
James Unsworth
Ditto Press

Every once in a while, you see something that literally takes your breath away. Ninja Turtle Sex Museum by James Unsworth is that thing. Really really really not suitable for children or anyone who objects to lots of TMNT-related gay horror action.

D 12€

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