KATHY ACKER — Algeria: A Series of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works, Aloes Books, London, 1984

First edition, published by Aloes Books, London, 1984. Design by Jim Pennington; printed by Lithosphere. Saddle-stapled, offset-printed wrappers; 29 numbered pages; 14.5 × 21 cm. ISBN 0 85652 059 4.

Condition: good vintage condition; light rubbing, shallow creasing, edge and corner wear and surface marks from handling. Interior condition to be confirmed from the correct English-language copy.

Published immediately before Blood and Guts in High School, Algeria belongs to the small-press period in which Kathy Acker’s writing was moving from underground circulation towards wider recognition. Her practice treated appropriation, repetition and unstable identity as literary methods, drawing partly from the procedures of conceptual art. Here, sex, violence, revolution and national history are compressed into a short sequence of invocations rather than a continuous narrative.

The cover places an enlarged title above a tinted postcard view of Algiers: a country first encountered as name, image and reproducible surface. Beside the 1988 French DTV edition, the same text appears processed by two different publishing systems — from Jim Pennington’s restrained London pamphlet to Kiki Picasso’s graphic Paris translation.

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