Josecho, in a meeting with a handful of executives from Other Directions, the publishing house, and Chanel, the fashion house, in the hut that is his home atop Madrid’s Windsor Tower, signs a contract for the publication and circulation that will link the 3 things. For some reason not visible to the eye of comprehension, the moment Josecho puts pen to paper Marc comes to mind, and the fact that he has not written to him in almost a year. Josecho is the kind of person who just has to look across the Madrid roofscape to feel enlivened, or imagine changes to its geography, topography, and, as in this particular moment, to the advertising billboards. One night, 2 years previously, he had a clear vision of his next transpoetic project. The idea was to devise a novel, an artifact, really, something never seen before: taking the openings, just the first 3 or 4 paragraphs, of already published novels, and placing them one after the other, making one flow into the next, the final result being a perfectly coherent and readable novel. So, beginning with the first lines of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, going on to the opening of The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq, followed by the first fragment from Manganelli’s The Definitive Swamp, followed by the opening of Corín Tellado’s Atrevida Apuesta [“Bold Bet”], then that of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs, then that of Einstein’s The World As I See It, appending parts from over 200 of the titles that make up universal literature, The Divine Comedy included, and ending with “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember…” Knowing that Spanish publishing houses lack initiative, he pitched the idea in the U.S. instead, and the team at Other Directions, Philadelphia, were immediately taken with the idea. The second part of Josecho’s strategy was to put together a similarly unprecedented marketing campaign in the history of publishing. He suggested that the Other Directions executives pick the capital of a Western country—Madrid, for instance—and flood 50 percent of the advertising billboards with an advertisement for the book and a photo of him dressed and posing like a model, and have the whole thing sponsored by a big fashion label. The fusion between fiction and catwalk object excited the publishers still further: the novelty of the phenomenon would resonate around the globe and the media response alone would ensure sales. It was a montage they considered to be the end point of contemporary art. With a single, spectacular incursion into just one point of the socio-informational network, at just one node and in just one city, and letting TV, radio, and word-of-mouth do the rest. Several labels were approached and Chanel selected—as well as offering to pay for the billboards they had the idea of a clothing range inspired by the book, garments spliced together from an assortment of other garments, along with accessories: earrings, brooches, perfumes, et cetera. After long consideration and much wavering, Josecho chose to entitle the book Helping the Sick, in a nod to the Siniestro Total EP [or single? we’re not sure] of that name.