Work/Races/Musical Chairs/The Stranger
Editions of 100
£12 each from ottoillustration.com
Otto’s (see also Zodiac 21 in Varoom issue 12) latest collaboration with poet Benjamin Heathcote is an exercise in the poetry of folding. Four two-colour A6 books, Musical Chairs, Races, Work, The Stranger, are parables of modern life and economics, deftly told in Otto’s flat Constructivist style and Heathcote’s rhythmic observations. These are what you call page-turners. 
Otto’s and Heathcote’s illustrations, rhymes, and card-folding combine to create the experience of expectation, as the reader unfolds the next visual pun, joke or unexpected take on modern life. Otto bought the rights to the poems and uses the words to provide narrative structure. “It was a relief for the images not having to do all the work of carrying the narrative,” says Otto, “so I had more freedom to play around visually. I decided on 4 typefaces, one for each book: The Stranger is Akzidenz, Races is Akzidenz in italics, the fonts for Work and Musical Chairs I designed myself. In all my work I like to fully integrate the type into the imagery.”
He showed Heathcote the roughs and needed to rearrange a few lines so the text still had the flow of the poem. All the books have a storytelling momentum, poking fun on the deep forces that drive us whether it’s Musical Chairs and its satire of modern manners and market forces, or Work’s absurd logic of modern economics. Otto’s images and layouts hold everything together but never take centre stage, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovery, and the four books offer a cutting critique of contemporary capitalism, with sardonic punchlines.
