A Captain from Portugal

A Captain from Portugal is a short story Guy de Cointet wrote entirely in a cipher of his own devising. He self-published it in Los Angeles in 1972, and Primary Information reissues it here in facsimile.

Across 48 pages the book keeps the furniture of a mass-market paperback: section breaks, illustrations, captions. The text itself is set in a hand-drawn polygonal alphabet that reads as pattern before it reads as language, arranged densely enough to throw a moiré on the page. Alongside the prose sit box-like codes, a short song in staff notation, and drawings that anticipate the jagged triangular work de Cointet made in the early 1980s. The last page carries a pyramid of 36 letterforms answering to A through Z and 0 through 9, which is the key to the whole thing. Rick Myers designed the facsimile, printed black and white at the original 5 by 7 inches.

De Cointet (1934 to 1983) was born in Paris and moved to New York in 1966. He passed briefly through Warhol’s Factory, then followed Larry Bell to Los Angeles as his assistant. In a city given over to Minimalism he built his work out of language instead. First French set against the English around him, then the English of newspapers, advertising and daytime soap opera. His first published work, ACRCIT (1971), was a newspaper of verbal structures handed out free at newsstands and later reused as a prop in his stage pieces. Saussure and Raymond Roussel are the usual reference points for a practice in which writing works as code and image at once.