Awnings are unobtrusive yet ubiquitous elements of the city. For this book photographic records were compiled between 2014 and 2018 in the New York boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, collected together in book form and presented in a combination of the Risograph process and screen printing in an extremely coarse halftone screen on almost felt-like paper. The materials (and imitations of materials), the solutions for corners and the ways awnings can be fixed to houses are so well observed and drily recorded that it is only after a second take that you start to see the joke, even though Jordan Hruska’s essay presents a highly serious investigation of the awning as ‘urban vernacular’, while an intriguing ‘subjective index’ at the back of the book uncovers another layer of the subject. The unusual way in which the perforated unfolded sheets are folded has produced very tactile sides for the book block as a result of the perforations ending up on the outside. With its crêpe binding tape and informal air of a product catalogue the book radiates the enjoyment taken in thematically using its own design to elaborate the subject, and the technical limitations of the Risograph technology are employed as an aesthetic principle. But the book also amounts to an inquiring and intellectually stimulating investigation of a specific aspect of the city – in this case a conspicuously inconspicuous aspect of New York’s historic boroughs.