Artist’s Book, 2014
104 pages, 2 colours, / 23.5 x 16.4 cm
Monolingual: Croatian or English, softcover
Publisher: Igor Kuduz
Graphic design: Igor Kuduz
Edition of 300, Bound Stich

The book My Dear Noble Friend by Igor Kuduz is the result of many
years of collecting and archiving unwanted emails, specifically the
spams that offer to the recipient, by speaking directly and
personally, opportunities for a sudden wealth or a possible love
affair. Besides the fraudulent intent with which they are written,
these texts are touching in a bizarre way. The letters are full of
tragic stories about the deaths of the closest relatives, people in
distress or life threats. These people can be saved only by recipient’s
greed for wealth, his loneliness can be overcome only by a desire for
a soulmate. The exciting conspiratorial schemes trigger reader’s
naivety while blasphemous cries can be responded to by reader’s
godliness.
By publishing them in the book, Kuduz actually recognizes the
authenticity of those confessions and redeems them from the
criminal intent of their real, anonymous authors.
What is reproduced in the book is in this sense the closest to the
manuscript, or the ultimate faithful facsimile of the ‘manuscript’ of
the sender.
The layout of the text is like the senders did, they are faithfully
taking over the relationships of sizes, spacing, text positions,
typography and everything else. As for the ‘collection of texts’, all
the translation of content from digital to printed media takes place
through typography, which is also faithfully downloaded from
spamming itself, and although it is only the system fonts that
everyone has on their computers, they all are duly listed in the
Impressum of this book, as if it were the best commercially available
fonts. This is the book written, partly translated, and in large part
formulated by someone else. This spam book is an example of
design without design as much as the design of a book without a
writer, editor, and lecturer. Bastard, pure freak.

Igor Kuduz, (Zagreb, 1967) is a visual artist and graphic designer, a
professor at the Department of Media Design, University North,
Koprivnica One of the founders of the Institute for Contemporary
Art. Member of the Expert Council of Croatian Photographic Union.
Member of the Management Board of the Croatian Designers
Society.
He has exhibited at shows and video festivals in Zagreb, Split,
Ljubljana, Clermont-Ferrand, Bonn, Budapest, Berlin, Aachen,
Dessau, Tirana, Cairo, Trieste, New York and more other places