Malicious Damage: The Defaced Library Books of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton

Donlon Books, 2013, Hardcover, 186 pages, 27 x 19 cm

New / Sealed copy

In 1962, a then unknown couple, John (Joe) Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, were tried at Old Street Magistrates Court, London, charged with, ‘larceny, malicious damage and wilful damage’, involving hundreds of Islington Library’s book stock. Over the previous three years the pair had been secretly stealing these books, removing what amounted to thousands of valuable art plates and either using them to create alternative dust jackets for other books, (which were then returned quietly to the library’s shelves for unsuspecting browsers to find), or pasting them directly into a large and uninterrupted collage spanning the interior walls of their one-roomed flat on nearby Noel Road. The pair would receive a six-month custodial sentence for these actions. The reconfigured dust jackets were part of a decade of often shared creative endeavour; the two had written, collaged and entertained themselves with the combined fragments of Arts history and contemporary culture.