NEWS: Bridge Books Announces New Cultural Criticism Title: Johanna Drucker’s “Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture”

NEWS

Bridge Books Announces Publication of New Cultural Criticism Title: Johanna Drucker’s “Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.”

AFFLUVIA WILL BE RELEASED SPRING/SUMMER 2025 WITH EVENTS TO BE ANNOUNCED

Bridge Books, publisher of the Bridge Journal, a division of Bridge Art Nfp, the registered Illinois 501 (c) 3 not for profit organization that also publishes the weekly online Bridge magazine at bridge-chicago.org, today announces publication of a new cultural criticism title, Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture by Johanna Drucker. Acquired for the press by Bridge Editor-in-Chief Michael Workman, the non-fiction narrative will be released by Bridge Books in Spring/Summer 2025.

Affluvia is a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” Approximately 60,000 words, the text is focused entirely on tracking the ecological costs of the author making coffee and feeding her cats every morning. The actions take less than ten minutes, but they are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts—the lifecycle of the beans, coffee grinder, coffee maker, pet food, aluminum can, label, bowls and spoon—and profiles each in turn.

“This study exposes the connections between seemingly ordinary patterns of contemporary life and the global systems to which they are connected. Tracking the lifecycle of familiar objects creates a vivid, dramatic narrative–with shocking implications for understanding every aspect of our (generally unexamined) daily routines.” 

“I’m a longtime fan of Drucker’s groundbreaking work going back to her early involvements in concrete poetry, and work in digital aesthetics among a long, long list of her other captivating, wide-ranging intellectual curiosities,” explains Bridge Books publisher Michael Workman. “So I’m beyond proud that Bridge Books will publish her Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture, a work of extraordinary simplicity in its conception that explodes out into an indictment of our means of Modern living as a whole, and of the illusions we entertain ourselves with through the lens of a basic morning routine. It’s a page-turner with Drucker serving as the psychopomp to our own underworld of strip-mined resources by the affluent that the rest of us pay for in myriad ways she makes painfully plain.”

About Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Virginia and been the recipient of fellowships from Harvard, the Beinecke Library, the Getty, and Fulbright.

Recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021).

Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. Other recent work includes Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), and Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Press, 2018).

In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2021 was the recipient of the AIGA’s Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism. She is currently working on ChronoVis, a platform for humanistic time modeling, as well as various other projects.

Her most recent publication, Inventing the Alphabet, was reviewed in The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books.

View the full press release here.