Thinking About Scarfolk - Momus Visual Review

Fascinating little 'documentary' by sometime outsider pop aficionado Momus. It's a overview of a website / book by  designer Richard Littler about the fictitious town of Scarfolk, a town which hasn't progressed further than 1979. A world populated by the Ladybird Book world view and the ever present public information films and documents of a perceived benevolent and benign nanny state. A hauntological world of strange possibilities and juxtapositions. Momus is to publish two books in 2014, one an digitally published novel about a writers Faustian pact with the devil to publish 100 Books of his choice, with the dark lord footing the bill for the characters various writing locations and publishing costs. The other is a novel proper, called Unamerican, which plot I've yet to find out about. I guess he's been using and processing stuff from the Scarfolk site as inspiration for his up coming writings. Much like myself, he admits to being an unfulfilled graphic designer, something I think he's hoping to overcome in the forthcoming  novel Unamerican.

Discovering Scarfolk from Ebury Publishers

"Ebury has acquired Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler, based on his cult blog, which gained over half a million hits in its first six months and has high-profile celebrity fans such as Caitlin Moran and Ian Rankin.

Editorial director Sarah Lavelle bought UK, Commonwealth and Europe English Language rights from Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedmann.

The imaginary town of Scarfolk, created by screenwriter and graphic designer Littler, satirizes the public information campaigns of the 1970s. In the book, Littler's realistic images will be threaded together by the frenzied archive of Daniel Bush, whose sons "disappeared" in Scarfolk in 1970.

Lavelle said; "Richard's created an extraordinary world where every image prompts a double-take – it's clever, it's dark and it's very funny. I grew up in the same era and it's all terrifyingly real to me."

Littler added: "Discovering Scarfolk re-imagines the flipside of the 1970s, taking aspects of the decade to absurd, sometimes disturbing extremes...It aims to make the reader simultaneously shudder and giggle."

Ebury is set to publish the book in October 2014 and will be supporting it with a unique, creative and integrated publicity and marketing campaign throughout Autumn 2014."