Verlag für Handbücher

We are a publishing collective specializing on manuals by artists. The most ubiquitous instance of the handbook is the instruction manual. It lacks both a price tag and an author. Public libraries do not collect it and the question of design is mostly neglected. Literary morphology assigns it (if at all) a place at the fringes of nonfiction among reportages, scientific and bureaucratic texts.

The instruction manual claims that things work out. Its inherent truth claim on what a thing is is naturalized to such an extent, that it governs the realm of sense-certainty almost unchallenged and thus informs our interaction with objects. The task of the Publishing House for Handbooks then must be to question this claim, liberate sense-certainty and set up an experimental fermentation lab for the recipes of the future.

Our authors are artists, that through their singular expertise confront the rhetorics of the handbook. Up until now fifteen handbooks have been published in three collections (organon 1, 2 and 3). Furthermore we interpret handbooks as scripts for a Theatre of Operationality and collect existing handbooks in Safe Operations.