Antonio Pigafetta’s questionable 1591 travelogue Regnum Congo was based upon stories from Duarte Lopez, a Portuguese explorer who supposedly visited the Congo in 1578. Pigafetta’s travelogue introduces an odd vision of European landscape inhabited by fantastic creatures. South African artist Ruth Sacks re-contextualizes these historical interpretations by re-appropriating them into contemporary conditions. Hence the logo of her fictional publishing house, Garamond Press: a fantastic animal based upon a description of one of the possible animals from Regnum Congo.
The first publication to come from Garamond Press is the enigmatic False Friends, which, according to the book’s introduction, was submitted to the publishing house anonymously in 2007. The narrative of the book derives from the storyline of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders at the Rue Morgue’ from 1841, generally agreed to be the first detective story ever written. This contemporary version is set in Antwerp, Belgium, and its text is split up into three languages: Dutch (Flemish), French, and English, so that a seamless reading of the book requires fluency in all three languages.
