Confidential was the gritty pioneer in the dubious genre of scandal, gossip and exposé journalism. It was infamous for turning out the world’s garbage vicarious thrill food, with plenty of side helpings of rumor and innuendo, which in itself was kind of fascinating to follow. But I found another aspect of the publication’s history that may or may not reveal a secret visual language.
Confidential is a curious source of unintentional concrete poetry. I discovered this entirely by accident while attempting to export a PDF of these scanned pages to JPEGs; mysteriously, some text became separated from the image portion of the documents, resulting in multiple versions of the particular spreads that look like poetic compositions. Headlines were torn from articles and sprinkled around the pages. And the outcome at once has a constructivist and deconstructivist feel to it.
Look for yourself and try, if possible, to decipher the logic … of the “case of the moveable type.”
