The Sexton Records story itself is not presented or mentioned explicitly in the exhibition. The website created explains the narrative and the zine presents an abridged version of the story. Both the zine and the website has evolved to accommodate three publics. The general public, the art crowd and soul music aficionados. The initial designs attempted to mimic soul music fanzines while following some form typographic consistency. This didn’t work well and appeared messy and too congested. The design was pared down to accommodate more white space and the page count increased. The 8-page zine has become a 36-page book.
The increase in pages has dictated the form of the zine. The 36 page concertina binding had become unmanageable and time-consuming to produce. This would be ideal as a one-off or limited edition. So I decided to produce a version that would be easier to reproduce as staple-bound multiple copies. What began as a way of presenting the narrative has now transformed into a slideshow of images and text. The work of Dieter Roth and Ed Ruscha has informed this evolving change of design. Johanna Drucker noted that both Roth and Ruscha made “books a primary major aspect of their activity”. Both explored and innovated the potential of the book form and their contrasting attitudes towards artist’s books as an inexpensive edition or “democratic multiple” (Drucker, 1995).