The Book That Can't Wait

Buenos Aires-based bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia (with the aid of marketing agency DRAFTFCB) have created a profoundly ephemeral literary object in the form of El Libro que No Puedo Esperar, or to translate that into English The Book That Can't Wait.

What makes The Book That Can't Wait so unique is that it has been printed using special ink which, once exposed to the air, will begin to disappear.


The book comes securely sealed, air-tight, but from the moment it is opened, the words will begin to vanish. Within two months, the fiction contained in The Book That Can't Wait will seem to be just that - a fiction - having completely disappeared, the book and its blank pages the only surviving remnants of the stories they once contained.



The Book That Can't Wait is actually a special edition of The Future is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction, a collection of short stories by emerging Latin American Writers edited by Diego Trelles Paz. It seems that the motivation for the special edition was to raise awareness of new writers - to make reading their works a priority and to provide them with greater exposure. And on all accounts this seems to have worked! The special edition sold out and certainly had a media-buzz surrounding it. Moreover, the marketing campaign won three Gold and a Bronze Lion at Cannes 2012. Here's the promotional video:

As for me, I'm still getting my head around the idea. Both the publishers Eterna Candencia and the ad agency DRAFTFCB contextualise the design by reference to contemporary anxiety over the death of the book, the threat of extinction to the book as physical object created by digital technologies. The Book That Can't Wait certainly engages in a self-effacing debate about its own materiality and immateriality. Yet as a reader and someone who appreciates the book as artefact, I feel strangely torn. On one hand, the concept of The Book That Can't Wait is beautiful and its transience is surely at the heart of this. But I can't help thinking that in three months from purchase date when I find myself looking down at empty pages, I might feel somewhat cheated. For now, like the future pages of The Book That Can't Wait, I'm lost for words.




(With thanks to my friend Tom Stafford for bringing The Book That Can't Wait to my attention.  Visit his blog Idolect.)