ANATHEMA

A tiny volume (2 & 5/8 inches by 3 & 3/4 inches) purporting to offer “a complete understanding of everything.”

By all appearances, more care has been spent on the look of this book, including its binding (Sturdite Black Skiver 209), paper (100# matte text), typeface (Bembo), ink color (bright red for the title and the first letter of the text, green for an emblem of four interconnected rings on the title page, black for everything else) and front and end matter (extensive, including all the details about binding and so forth) than its actual content, which consists of 32 words arranged into four short sentences, each sentence on its own page. Given that the subtitle is “A Complete Understanding of Everything,” one can imagine that the four statements aspire to some kind of enigmatic wisdom, and if their syntax were scrambled, they might be the sort of pronouncement Yoda could offer Luke Skywalker as advice: “Until the end, nothing but a chance there is.” As they stand, however, the statements are too vague and general to resonate with the reader. The book might also be reminiscent of those picture books full of inspirational slogans printed in italics over photographs of striking landscapes—but there are no pictures in this book, and the vast quantities of white space only serve to reinforce how vain, in the sense of being trivial and meaningless, the statements are. The front matter includes the url of a website, anathemahall.org, that, as of this writing, was not fully operational, but one assumes additional information may be available there at some point.

An attractive package whose contents are too brief and cryptic to register.