The South London Review of Hand Dryers is — and this is not a joke, or rather it is a joke, but a very serious one — a publication that reviews hand dryers. In the toilets of south London. The premise is absurd and the execution is deadpan, and the result is one of the most delightful objects in independent publishing: a zine that takes an utterly trivial subject and treats it with the critical rigour of the London Review of Books.
Each issue contains hand-dryer reviews from pubs, cafes, restaurants, and public buildings south of the Thames, complete with ratings, technical observations, and prose so carefully wrought you forget you are reading about a Dyson Airblade in a Peckham pub toilet. The typography is elegant. The production is considered. The tone is pitch-perfect — neither winking at the reader nor pretending the enterprise is anything other than what it is. It is the best publication about hand dryers in south London, and possibly in the world.