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Henry Darger (1892-1973) was an artist and writer who lived and died in obscurity, leaving behind a largely unseen oeuvre of collages, sketches, journals and manuscripts. The largest of these, In the Realms of the Unreal, totals more than 15,000 pages. This project's goal is to transcribe it in its entirety for the world to be able to easily read, scrutinise, and reference.

Darger's name is one of many to be connected to the label 'outsider art', a loose collection of idiosyncratic work created by self-taught (and largely mentally ill or neurodivergent) artist - the baggage of this term is too much to get into in this short introduction, though I do plan to write more on it in the future.

Suffice it to say, the condescension with which Darger and his outisder cohorts are often viewed obscures the fact that this body of work is fascinating in the same mode as any great author. His command of language is no less idiosyncratic than Joyce, his worlds no less surreal, and his artistic intent no more coloured by personal circumstance than any other. "Realms" in particular is a truly unique piece of writing - bizarre and crushingly real, hilarious and horrifying, sprawling and monomaniacal. It does not alternate between these states; it is often both sides of each coin at once. It is an entire folklore for a divergent world - Ovid reincarnated as a Chicagoan Catholic fixated on childhood innocence - it is a million other exciting descriptions that will hopefully make you want to read it pretty please.

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Dargerheads may already be aware of a reproduction of Realms in the Illinois Digital Archives, albeit in the form of a series of PDFs containing monochrome scans of his manuscripts. These scans are sometimes a little hard to decipher, and if you are interested in reading his work, they are probably not as ideal a medium as plain text. As I work through the volumes, I will also make them available as EPUBs available for free download here.

VOLUME ONE (pages 1-643)

NOTES ON THE TRANSCRIPTION: Realms, as it existed originally, contains multiple spelling and grammatical errors, aborted half-words of spellings given up on, bizarre strings of punctuation, etc. I have elected to preserve some of these elements in order to more truthfully recreate Darger's work - the spelling and grammar errors remain more or less intact, but the half-words are omitted (e.g. the word 'hello' misspelled as 'helo' would be rendered in this transcrption as the misspelling, but were Darger to type 'h hello' in such a context where it were obvious that the extraneous 'h' was printed in error, said 'h' would be omitted for readability).

My choices for what to include and what not to include are, of course, subjective, but generally speaking I have decided to air on the side of 'authenticity' rather than strict 'correctness'. To spell-check a Henry Darger piece would be, if we are again speaking in 'outsider' terms, no different to auto-tuning a Daniel Johnston song. Also, due to this being a large one-man project, there are no doubt spelling errors of my own, or reproductive errors where I have subconsciously corrected Darger's erroneous spelling. I'm sorry to say that I am stretching myself by trying to type up 15,000 pages - going back and proofreading would probably kill me.

If you are a fan of very very long and very very niche stories by eccentric geniuses, please check out the impetus for this project, that being me finding out that the entirety of Neil Oram's 22-hour 10-play cycle The Warp is available online.