Richard Littler’s Scarfolk Books

Richard Littler is a graphic designer and writer who has put together a cool art project that plays with the ideas of design and nostalgia, government, conspiracy, and paranoia and brings them into an imaginary town in England entirely stuck in the early 1970s: Scarfolk. Similar to the execution and storylines we see in Welcome to Night Vale, the books of Mark Z Danielewski, Look Around You, They Might Be Giants and other such cultural phenomena, we are treated to an upside-down version of Lake Wobegone that has little horrors around every corner packaged in a creepy trip back to our childhoods. These books are the result of the viral phenomenon that began with a blog and transformed into the physical world in the form of maps, books, and other strange paraphernalia emanating from the Big Brother of this intricate, dimensional fever-dream fantasy town of the alternate-past.

DISCOVERING SCARFOLK FOR TOURISTS & OTHER TRESPASSERS is pretty cool. It is a collection of new and unique Scarfolk signage and lore, but in this case, there is a storyline that ties it all together in the vein of Mark Z Danielewski’s House Of Leaves. In this story, Daniel Bush is searching for his two boys Joseph and Oliver Bush who have disappeared. We are brought along the meandering mysterious streets, government interventions, and ultimately an underground labyrinth where our protagonist is forced to rewatch rites in the third person that he unwittingly participated in like a bewildering tesseract. The Danielewski connection is alive in the Theseus and the Minotaur ending, never mind the third-person investigation using a variety of artifacts that come together to tell the story in a fun, strange, disorienting manner.

THE SCARFOLK ANNUAL is a much shorter, but much larger format book that contains much of the same material but lacks the same level of narrative. It is more like an Almanac geared toward children but contains many great gags and a gorgeous, funny, terrifying presentation of a discarded library book.

In all, the experience of reading both of these art books was a great deal of fun. I wish there were more of them and the blog was still being updated. There is a reason this went viral; it is hilarious, scary, and fun, and it has just the right level of non-sequitur on which the internet thrives. I could keep going with this, man.

For more information, please reread.