The appearance of the book, now especially, seems radical, upsetting any notion of an honorific reproduction of artworks or images from a gallery. The book has no title on the cover, has no preliminary pages, and is unpaginated. It is printed more-or-less monotone (there are two pages with yellow ink flourishes), a pragmatic solution to the then much higher costs of full-colour printing, and a tactic (or workaround) to avoid costly high-resolution scans. In place of these I scanned pages from previously printed catalogues, reused or reworked image files I already had, or further treated images (for example using a photocopier to degenerate an image by copying and recopying) to distance any expectation of fidelity.68 68. ‘Fidelity, clarity and noise suppression have all been historic concerns of graphic design.’ (FitzGerald, 1997: 23) In this and other ways I found possibilities through mechanical processes I could respond to, in turn shaping my next step, in an input-output exchange. Using a thermal fax machine (a to-hand tool in the office of the 1990s) as an imaging tool rather than for image transmission, I could distort images and text by dragging the input sheet, or by rewinding the paper roll to re-image, producing multiple layers.>>> This was akin to improvising, or to spontaneous composition in music, and was a time-based event – reacting in real to time to the results being produced. The machine’s characteristics – significant distortion of the original – when in the usual context of office usage were understood as part of the transmission language and were habitually disregarded, but when reproduced in a book the reading and meaning of the material are dramatically affected by this treatment.