Good Title for a Book: A Comprehensive List of Incomplete Works

Bethany Parkinson / Sofie Cato Maas
Alice Smith and Friends, London, 2026
Self-published artist book
Edition of 100
Handmade in London by the artists / collective
3.5 × 4.5 cm · 32 pp.
Colour and black-and-white images / text
Rounded corners · English language
TNR-2026-0672

A minute collaborative artist book by Bethany Parkinson and Sofie Cato Maas, cataloguing works that, by definition, never reached completion.

The subtitle gives the project away: A comprehensive list of incomplete works.

That contradiction is the book.

To make a complete inventory of incompletion is already to change the status of everything on the list. A failed idea, abandoned work, unrealised proposal or unfinished fragment is brought back into circulation simply by being named.

The work may be incomplete. The record is not.

Parkinson's practice is playful, narrative-led and often improvised, moving between object-making, curating and artist-led contexts. Maas approaches incompletion through writing and research: a film critic, editor and scholar whose work has examined unfinished cinema and the status of works that remain fragmentary, interrupted or unrealised.

So Good Title for a Book is not simply a joke about procrastination. Incompletion is already part of the material. The publication applies an almost administrative solution: make a list. Not finish the works. Catalogue them.

At only 3.5 × 4.5 cm, the object is almost absurdly small — somewhere between a passport photograph, miniature notebook, private archive and identification document. A passport-style portrait occupies the cover; another tiny image appears to the reverse. Inside, conventional book typography is compressed across thirty-two miniature pages.

Even the title retains the provisional language of something not yet resolved: Good Title for a Book. It sounds like a note left in place while waiting for the real title. The placeholder survives. The unfinished thing becomes the finished thing.

And because each copy was handmade in London in an edition of only 100, the modest publication sits somewhere between book, multiple and artist object.

An unrealised work need not be completed in order to enter an archive. It only needs to be recorded. The list becomes the work that gets finished.

The New Rare is pleased to present Good Title for a Book, a recent collaborative work by Bethany Parkinson and Sofie Cato Maas, at GLUE, ICA London, September 2026. Handmade in London in an edition of 100, the publication forms part of The New Rare's presentation of independent and artist-led publishing.

Condition: New / very good. Handmade production; minor variations between individual copies may occur and form part of the edition.

Read our journal: The New Rare at GLUE Book Fair 2026 →