LYDIA ECCLES

JOKES ABOUT BOMBS

WILL NOT BE TAKEN LIGHTLY.

First Edition

Publ. by Road House, May 2025

Softcover, soft touch finish (29.7 cm x 21 cm)

ISBN 978-2-488450-00-3

200 pages

60 copies

Printed in Italy

Price: 65 € (+P&P)

The publication presents and unpacks Eccles’s seminal project, Unapack: Unabomber ‘96 Presidential Write-In Campaign (1995–1998), a provocative intervention that took the form of a political campaign to elect the Unabomber as a write-in candidate in the 1996 U.S. presidential election.

The campaign’s Shermanesque slogan — “If elected, he will not serve” — was a subversion of the political spectacle. Its theoretical foundation was rooted in the Unabomber’s anti-technology, pro-collapse manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, published in The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19th 1995, and in the subsequent arrest of its author, Ted Kaczynski — a mathematics prodigy and former academic who had renounced modern society to live in isolation in a Thoreauvian cabin in the Montana wilderness for 25 years.

The publication follows Eccles’ project through to its completion, including the post-election campaign. The Exploded Manifesto and her personal relationship with Kaczynski until his passing in 2023.

Bio: Lydia Eccles, born in 1954, lives and works between Boston, Massachusetts, and rural Vermont, USA