‘I want to bury it under a roundabout!’ Kim Noble on his unusual approach to promoting his graphic novel

The unsettling performance artist, who has made some electrifying stage shows in his time, is taking a leap into literature with an eye-opening book, In Pursuit of a Wonderful Nothing. A hard sell, he thinks

There are commercial strategies to promote your first book, and then there’s what Kim Noble planned. “I asked the publishers if I could hire a digger, then go to a roundabout, dig a massive hole and bury the books under the roundabout,” he tells me, deadpan over coffee. “They didn’t think it was a good idea.” You don’t say, Kim. This is a book that has been decades in the making, Noble reports – while his conversation makes clear why previous efforts came to naught. “Someone once approached me to write a book about a show I’d made. I started to do drawings for it. But I didn’t give them to the publisher, I left them around London in public toilets, so the publisher had to go out and search for them.

“And then,” he adds dolefully, “they decided to do another book instead.”