Paper Trails examines how ephemeral artefacts can function as storytelling devices that expand a readers understanding and interpretation of a historic fiction novel. Through illustrating print artefacts—ration cards, telegrams, letters, train tickets—that Stefan Zweig implies and explicitly references in his 1930 fiction novel, The Post Office Girl, this publication facilitates reflection on the narrative potential of historic ephemera.
Written throughout the 1930s, ‘The Post Office Girl’ was an incomplete fiction novel left considerably fragmented among the literary remains of Austrian-Jewish author, Stefan Zweig. After being considerably reworked, Zweig’s novel was first published posthumously in 1982 and since then publishers have patched together the translated manuscript, reworking and re-editing over nine new editions before their release.
Paper Trails is a publication that continues this process of bricolage to encourage contemporary readers to expand their experience of the narrative. On a playful level, this publication is an expensive piece of design fan fiction, yet on a more responsive and critical level it is a piece of design research that uses fictional ephemera as a speculative object to help readers to expand a historic fiction novel.
This work was produced in the Visual Communication Honours degree at the University of Technology Sydney under the mentorship of Dr Zoë Sadokierski.
