radio free midwich

all thee beast from dr steg: recent ‘issues’ of spon

Dr Adolf Stegs Spon 25 The Late Christmas Present Issue

Spon 26 The It Came From Across The Pond Issue

Spon 27 Dr Adolf Stegs Pocket Sized Survival Kit

Who doesn’t love the post, eh?  An unsolicited parcel is one of life’s simple joys and, despite knowing that it takes an insane amount of energy and the exploitation of a gigantic workforce by a class of numbskull management idiots, it still seems magical that a stamp and a pillar box are all you need to teleport your object to a handwritten destination.

The mysterious Dr. Adolf Steg (perhaps not his given name), the artist and compiler of Spon, is fully aware of these pleasures and possibilities.  The items he troubles my postman with have mutated from eyeball-challenging neon coloured zines into intricate collections of detritus and slices of personal history, all re-figured into letterbox sized bundles.  What, for example, would you make of coming home from work to find a parcel encased in jolly, celebratory wrapping paper that contained this:

Front and back pictured.  It is one of those plastic boxes containing little compartments that ‘handy’ people have fuses and bolts in and sick people have on their bedside table full of pills.  This one, in contrast, is rich with the rubber letters from a John Bull printing set, a shoelace, a dog biscuit, rawplugs, various plastict trinkets, bottle caps, tiny tubes of unguent and so on.  It is an unnerving, strangely personal object, brimming with voodoo power.  Oddly moving, very funny too.  Somehow this comprises Spon issue 27.

The previous dispatch was no less impressive:

Spon 25 (which also arrived wrapped) is an A4 plastic wallet containing Spon 26…

…an augmented reprint of American zine-review-zine Media Junky #17, plus a badge, a Smell & Quim CD-r, and various items appropriated from the Steg archive: ink drawings, watercolours, comix, a lino print, letters, the Christmas card that heads this post and other paper oddities.  Given that most of these articles are originals, each of these ‘issues’ must have been unique.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking.  Here are some highlights:

…and, as they used to say in adverts, much, much more.  Extraordinary.  All sent unannounced, unsolicited and at his own expense.  It blows my mind.  Perhaps you should contact the chap and see about getting yourself onto his mailing list?  Visit World of Steg and drop him a line.