An artist has pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code and republished them as George Orwell’s 1984.
David Shrigley, a former nominee for the Turner prize, came up with the idea after learning that an Oxfam shop in Swansea had stopped accepting any more copies of Dan Brown’s bestseller.
Now 1,200 copies of Shrigley’s 1984 edition will go on sale in the same shop. The books cost £495 and each has a unique signed and numbered print. A portion of the profits from the books’ sales will go to Oxfam.
Brown’s book was published in 2003 to huge commercial success and made into a 2006 film starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Sir Ian McKellen. By 2017 it seemed people had had their fill and copies of the mystery thriller had begun taking over the shelves of the charity shop.
It had been receiving an average of one copy of the novel a week for months, leaving little room for any other books.
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Phil Broadhurst, the shop’s manager, and his colleagues made a pile of the novels by the counter with a sign that read: “Yeah you could give us another Da Vinci Code, but we would rather have your vinyl.”
A picture of the display was published by several media outlets and caught Shrigley’s attention. “I read the story in the Telegraph and that sparked my imagination in the sense that I was like ‘I want those. I don’t know why, but I want them’. So, I set about acquiring as many Da Vinci Codes as I could,” he told the BBC.
He scoured charity shops, but he was often only getting his hands on a single copy in each. Then he broadened his search.
“We made inquiries and there is a recycling place where all the unwanted books go. They had almost an unlimited number,” he said.
Wrap Distribution in Oxfordshire, a resting place for abandoned bestsellers, helped Shrigley acquire thousands of copies. He decided, because George Orwell was almost out of copyright, to turn the hoard into the dystopian novel, which the artist described as “a really important book”.
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“I had reread 1984 again recently and realised that George Orwell had died in 1950, so it was coming up for 70 years since his death,” Shrigley said.
He has not, however, read The Da Vinci Code from cover to cover and only “dipped into it” while trying to find a quote he could use for the foreword of his copies of 1984. He gave up after failing to find any relationship between the two books.
“It’s not literary criticism,” he stressed. “It’s almost as if the decision to use The Da Vinci Code was made for me. It’s interesting to take one book and make it into one specific other book. It’s quite a collaborative thing. I feel like we have collaborated with Dan Brown’s success.”
Swansea Oxfam says it is now almost in need of a ban on donations of another bestselling writer’s work: Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club.
Even the biggest potboiler can be 50 shades more worthwhile
If you’re whizzing along the M6 Toll, you are driving over someone’s literary dreams (Robbie Millen, literary editor, writes). When it was being built 20 years ago, 2.5 million unwanted books, many of them old Mills & Boon romantic novels, were used as part of the top layer. The pulp of the shredded books holds the tarmac and asphalt in place, and also acts as a sound absorber. Every mile of motorway needed about 45,000 books. See, that ends the debate: fiction is useful.
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Publishers are reluctant to say how many books are pulped. The educated guess is that about a tenth of books go unsold and find their way directly from printer’s warehouse to shredder. Little wonder: publishers print so many books — each year, somewhere between 185,000-215,000 thousand titles are issued.
Then there is the second-hand book market: we are awash with books. Fifty Shades of Grey was a huge bestseller, but what happened when our kinky love for Christian Grey died? In 2013 charity shops complained of an “erotica mountain”: they couldn’t shift donated copies. Books aren’t easy to recycle — the glue is a problem — so the over-supply inspired a Facebook advice page called “50 ways to kill 50 Shades”: flushing down the loo was a poor solution. And, of course, there are 200 million copies of Dan Brown floating around the world.
So we should salute the imagination of David Shrigley in turning 6,000 unwanted Da Vinci Codes — books that Oxfam charity shops can’t give away – into 1,200 copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The artist claims it’s not an act of “literary criticism” but it most definitely is an act of alchemy. He has taken the base metal of a clunky potboiler and turned it into literary gold.
