Applicant

(Paperback, 2nd Second Edition, Second ed.)

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Description

One night while rooting through the recycling bin for magazines, I found all the confidential Ph.D. applicant files for the biology department at an Ivy League university from the years1965-1975. Stapled to many of the yellowed documents were photographs of the prospective students. They were treasures! I tore through the folders and rescued every portrait I could find. I had to have them. Only later did I realize I had to publish them." So begins the preface to Jesse Reklaws Applicant. A priceless time-bomb of pop culture, Reklaw serves a compelling and secret look into an impossibly lost era. The book collects photos from the 1970s paired with accompanying comments from employers and professors. The results are absurdist, confusing, often hilarious and disturbing. Applicant provides unique insight into outdated 1970s social attitudes and ephemera. Much of the books appeal however is found in what the book fails to say: the blank and despondent stares of its subjects, the outdated fashions and hairstyles and its understated text. Equal parts Ann Taintor and Found Magazine, Applicant is one of those books you read once and then want to show to everyone.

Reviews

Applicant is a wonderful piece of 'found art' featuring photos and extracts from a bundle of rejected CVs and interview summaries that Jesse stumbled across. - Spider Fan

One of the best one-off 'zines I've run across. - Mental Floss

You will read this book and laugh, and think, and marvel that such a simple concept can affect such bipolar feelings. - Verbicide

This is such a simply constructed book, and yet it really makes you think. A quick read-through is funny and voyeuristic, and you can laugh at the funny dweebs and the harsh judgments passed upon them. But there's something more to it here: there's the disturbing and uneasy snap judgments of these strangers' characters, but there's also our own reactions as we match these quick quotes (most without context) to our own snap judgments and find congruence. Yes, he could be 'rather tense.' And I bet she is 'self-deprecating.' This is a book about shallowness, theirs and ours, and in that, this book finds something very deep. - Adam Coozer, ReadJunk

Author Bio

Jesse Reklaw is the author of the syndicated strip, "Slow Wave" and the comic journalTen Thousand Things to Do. He is an instructor at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) Comics Program. He lives in Portland, Oregon.