This Book is Extremely Receptive
ByJanet Zweig
Long Island, New York: Janet Zweig, 1989.

15 x 16 cm; 144 unnumbered pages. Flip book. Telephone dialogs by Holly Anderson. Computer error messages transcribed from Digital computer system. Television text transcribed from “The Burns and Allen Show, “The Honeymooners”, “The Love Connection”, “The New Newlywed Game”, and “The Peoples’ Court”. Generated on a Macintosh personal computer. Printed at Pyramid Atlantic, Washington DC by Brad Freeman. Sewn signatures glued into a reflective silver paper wrapper. Bound by Mueller Trade Binder, Middletown, CT.

Janet Zweig: "’This Book is Extremely Receptive’ is about misunderstanding in the age of telecommunications. It is a flip book with several ongoing threads. There are three continuous texts: computer error messages, excerpts from sit-coms featuring misunderstandings, and humorous stories of misunderstandings written by Holly Anderson. Using one of the first available 3-D modeling programs, Zweig makes a satellite dish turn throughout the book, as if looking for information to receive. There are also three different wavelengths accompanying the texts that wiggle through the pages as you flip them.”

Judith Hoffberg, Umbrella, Vol. 12, No. 2, December, 1989: “This book is extremely receptive” a flipbook with dialogs by Holly Anderson. This flipbook when rifled works as a circling satellite dish searching the airwaves picking up misunderstandings and miscommunications from telephone television and computer networks. When you flip the book the satellite dish keeps whizzing around. But the next step in manipulating the book is to read it. First you can read the telephone conversations … Some inept inane but quite real revealing wrong numbers bad connections and even other misunderstandings. Then the computer lingo may get you being formal and structured coming from the commands issued by a digital computer frustrating the user. Creating fatal errors among other sins an illegal character appears transmission is aborted. The third line of text comes from television programs … Yes this book is extremely receptive to any and all who realize that our everyday lives are controlled by technology. Which is frightening abstract yet even funny.”

Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, pages 257-258: “The way in which sequence is articulated gives each book its unique identity. A sequence can be made to move very quickly – the flip book is the extreme of this, but there are other sequences which have either very little resistance or else a great deal of momentum and thus move rapidly. In ‘This Book is Extremely Receptive’ … Janet Zweig and Holly Anderson incorporate the image of a turning satellite dish as a flip book motif on the lower right corner whose momentum is graphically reinforced by images of sound waves. The typographic text appears to move very quickly through this field, also generating the sensation of a fast moving book.”
$150