Extras

The most heavily mythologized of all Cryptid texts, the story of the reception, editing, and (near-)publication of EXTRAS has been told and re-told at least five separate times in three different voices.

In its distilled form, the story goes as follows:

On the morning May 23rd, 2020, two months after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, Josh Glasman left his home, intending to go for a walk in the nearby Cedarvale Ravine. His progress was arrested by a large, plastic bin planted almost perfectly in line with the angle drawn by his screen door. It was not addressed to any person or place in particular and bore only one external mark, the word EXTRAS written in bold, black marker. After examining its contents, Glasman divided them into three categories: 1) Notes, excerpts, and other fragments; 2) Manuscript about the author’s impending death; 3) An abandoned exegesis of Perec’s work, Life, a User’s Manual.

The reception of this box precipitated a set of conflicts between Glasman and Andrew Murphy. First, Glasman accused Murphy of fabricating its contents, a claim that Murphy denied. Later, in the midst of the editing process, when an unrelated dispute led Glasman to expel Murphy from the press, Murphy absconded with the entire collection of reference material that the editing team had developed to classify and keep track of the various fragments.

Though Glasman was able to finish editing the manuscript, a process which seems to have severely taxed his emotional health, he committed suicide soon after its completion. While the edited manuscript passed on to Ed Suerr in 2022, the original box has since been lost. In this sense, the current volume of EXTRAS can be considered the first of at least three, volumes which are still waiting to be discovered.

EXTRAS will be published in a digital edition in October of 2023 in celebration of the fourth anniversary of Cryptid Editions.