Raymond Pettibon, Mike Topp:The Frontier Index

Hanuman Editions is a publishing project reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, the legendary and cult series of chapbooks that were printed in southern India and published out of the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York City between 1986 and 1993.

Guiding readers across the desiccated landscape of twenty-first century America in The Frontier Index is the cult duo of Raymond Pettibon and Mike Topp, two of contemporary art and literature’s wildest provocateurs in pen and ink. As they note, The Frontier Index is loosely based on Kenko’s 1332 Essays In Idleness, comprising a preface and 243 passages that can span a single line or a few pages. Essays In Idleness is similar to Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, from around 1000 AD, in that both books employ zuihitsu, a Japanese literary form that literally means “follow the brush,” where the creation of order depends on disorder. Zuihitsu demands as its starting point juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials and pieces of varying lengths. Oh yes, and wrestlers.