This is the first paid advertisement for Free Space Comix: The Blog. Of course, I’m not being paid for it; Matthew will just owe me. Virtual capital!

CREDIT by Mathew Timmons
Just Released from Blanc Press in Los Angeles!

CREDIT by Mathew Timmons
Hardcover, 800 pages, full color
Blanc Press, September 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9814623-4-9
Dimensions: 11 × 8.5 × 1.75 inches
Price (w/o shipping): $199.99
Download price: $299.99

BUY CREDIT!

CREDIT is an 800 page, large format, full color, hardbound book, available for $199.99 from Blanc Press in Los Angeles–the longest, most expensive book publishable through the online service, lulu.com. Divided into two sections, Part A: Credit–26 parts (a-z) and Part 2: Debit–10 parts (1-10), CREDIT is a highly revealing and emotional work chronicling a personal tale of credit.

In late spring 2007 as an irrational exuberance and promise of financial fortune hung in the air, mailboxes were filled with generous and gracefully worded offers of credit. Just over two years later, in midsummer 2009, the shape of the financial environment changed radically and mailboxes still filled up with statements of credit. Something had to change, offer turned to obligation.

Retailing for $199.99, CREDIT is a book the author himself lacks the cash or credit to buy.

BUY CREDIT!

Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT has been roundly praised by a number of artists, writers, editors and critics, including:
Harold Abramowitz, Stan Apps, Marcus Civin, Brian Joseph Davis, Ryan Daley, Craig Dworkin, Brad Fliss, Lawrence Giffin, James Hoff, Maximus Kim, Matthew Klane, Janne Larsen, Matthias Merkel Hess, William Moor, Joseph Mosconi, Holly Myers, Sawako Nakayasu, Sianne Ngai, Ariel Pink, Vanessa Place, Dan Richert, Ronald Quinn Rudlong Jr., Ara Shirinyan, Danny Snelson, Erika Staiti, Brian Kim Stefans, Robert Summers, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener and Steven Zultanski.

Read Advance Praise for Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT.

View Images from Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT.

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Read Advance Praise for Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT:
Let’s face it, only those who see the invisible can do the impossible. However, miraculously, and right on cue, just short of a decade into the 21st century, Mathew Timmons has given us a momentous, lucid, and gripping book that makes visible what used to be, exclusively, invisible, the wide terrain of credit. Buy “ CREDIT,” tell your friends to buy it, and take its lessons to heart: Credit is expensive!… Credit is not cheap… Credit is hard, not easy, to get…
—Harold Abramowitz

If you want to pay a penny for a thought Mathew Timmons has 19,999 of them, but like Master Card suggests, Timmons keeps it simple. CREDIT is a work ripped from both the headlines and the mailbox.
—Brian Joseph Davis

I will send a very special, one-of-a-kind, only-available-via-purchase-and-full-completion and proof-of-reading-of-this-book, to all who purchase and read this book. Offer not valid in Kentucky.
—Sawako Nakayasu

CREDIT by Mathew Timmons captures the entire postmodern economy under one cover. Like an avalanche of fine print, CREDIT reveals absolutely everything required to be disclosed by law. Timmons aestheticizes the angst of indebtedness into a colorful durational novel, complete with a lifetime supply of rate, fee, and grace period information, plus all the “__ _ !lI” •••••••• •••••••• & •• ‘.”~.’lf ’ CIa … “ of modern life. This is a book “that do_es lL all for you” and best of all “_.s:ard ~ith _no annu~lJee.”
—Stan Apps

Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT: Approved.
—Sianne Ngai

The output is a sprawling, modular form-letter with all the personal/financial affirmation cut down through razorbladed erasure-transcoding. CREDIT’s procedure traces an unfollowable map from the macrodistortion of mass-market advertising onslaught to a subjective microdistortion of noise stream granulation and reassembly. CREDIT is problematic in terms of numbers, transaction, hardware and software. The text’s operation is ravenously lossy, feeding on filtering byproducts and mistranslation; emphasis on information loss/breakage makes the text self-genotoxic and it sprouts mutant poetry from attractive shapes and corners. The text can be rotated. CREDIT is unreadable and CREDIT is a vibrant autobiography and CREDIT is a rainbow dream.
—Dan Richert

What kind of Art would Human this kind of Receipt?
What kind of Receipt would Art this kind of Human?
What kind of Human would Receipt this kind of Art?
What kind of Art would Receipt this kind of Human?
What kind of Receipt would Human this kind of Art?
Fuckers.
—Rodrigo Toscano

Quite possibly the oldest system of exchange, credit is almost inseparable from wealth. Credit is the laxative to the stubborn bulk of capital. Similarly, how easy can form be separated from content? Or is content itself a kind of para-form? Paraformaldehyde, even? Disinfectant indicating content’s historicity in its obliteration? Content is form not yet recognized as such. Content is form on credit. And it is to Timmons’ credit that he seems to be particularly susceptible to this confusion, bombarded as he seems to be with offers. And though credit and wealth may be interchangeable to the point of identity, still Timmons is all the more duped for believing so.
—Lawrence Giffin

Not since “The Tzanck Check” has a work so conscioned the infra-thin of capitalism—a tour de fort-da.
—Vanessa Place

This work could have easily been called “Labor”—like “Credit,” one of the least understood, least visible of our foundational abstractions. (“Milk” might be the other.) Mathew Timmons has managed to squeeze a Dummy’s Guide of both into a mere 800 pages. Sure, this is art in the age of digital reproduction, but you’re not getting anywhere near this thing.
—Brian Kim Stefans

It seems only natural that with this book I re-appropriate a blurb about another book (Fiona Banner’s The Nam):
“It has been described as unreadable.”
—James Hoff

Congratulations! You’ve been preselected to apply for a copy of the new book by Mathew Timmons at a low introductory rate of just 199.99 and no annual fee ever. Documenting the social and economic space defined by the writing that falls between bulk mailing and fine print (full color and some of it very fine indeed), CREDIT appropriates direct mail credit card solicitations and advertisements in order to explore the nature of disclosure in a series of plays between display and censorship, see-thru windows and security envelopes, financial promise and legal threat—or simply, in Guy Debord’s terms, between monologue and true communication.
Testing the limits of publishing—CREDIT is the largest and most expensive book publishable via Lulu—Timmons’ book is well beyond most readers’ means. But remember, you could always charge it and hope to juggle some good balance transfers down the road…. Respond Immediately and Request Your Copy Today.
—Craig Dworkin

Rarely has the mind-numbing banality of consumer capitalism’s fine-print underbelly been employed to such elegant effect. Mathew Timmons’ CREDIT is a timely epic in this crumbling age of debt.
—Holly Myers

You know Timmons is just saying what Patti Smith said thirty years ago, although he’s saying it even more: “And when we dream it, when we dream it, when we dream it, / Lets dream it, we’ll dream it for free, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, / Free money, free money, free money, free.”
—Matias Viegener