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I knew I was a publisher among many publishers, I knew I could make OVO anything I wanted it to be, but I had little faith that I could document the sorts of people and activities found in Re/Search (which was no small part of what I wanted to do). I didn't have access to the exotic lives of people in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, etc. I was stuck in dumb old Knoxville. Around issue seven I had an idea: while I might not have access to the 'scenes' I was interested in, I did have access to themes that were of interest to me. The first few themed issues were clearly influenced by Re/Search. If I'd known about semiotext(e) or Colors magazine I might have felt less clever about following themes instead of scenes; they had done just that and much better for some time.

I use the name OVO it because I like how it looks, and in reference to the surrealist magazine VVV. Later I learned ovo was a kind of chocolate drink in some European countries, and later still Peter Gabriel released a CD named OVO in association with a performace at London's Millenium Dome. In itself OVO means nothing.

OVO saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. When OVO was first published, George Bush was in the White House and the United States had just won the Gulf War. Now that OVO has been reprinted and new issues are in progress, George Bush is in the White House and the United States has entered another Gulf War. And so OVO is not alone in its nostalgia.

Earlier issues of OVO were created on an electric typewriter. Later issues were created using an IBM XT computer with 640 K of memory, VGA graphics, a 20 MB hard drive and a 5.25 inch floppy drive. I used Geos Ensemble v1.2 and a Star SG-10 dot matrix printer for text and address labels. Now I use OpenOffice running in Ubuntu Linux or on an iMac. Only one issue of OVO was created using Windows.

I used scissors and glue for the layout of the first fourteen issues of OVO; publishing software was available but I didn't have any. I believe learning how to do it by hand gave me an advantage when I later learned how to do it using a computer. I have yet to learn how to make collages on a computer – I still do it by hand, with scissors and glue and photocopier.

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