MARIO PIANO

Poetry / Object. New Material Books with Space Dust Editions, 2026. Manual + blue receipt paper roll in watermelon AMAC Plastic 530C box. Manual: 20 pages, 5.5."x4". | Scroll: 2.25"x35". | AMAC box: 1.6"x1.6"x2.9".

Text by Brandan Griffin
Design by New Material Books
Scroll Printed by Space Dust Editions

♦️Now open for pre-orders🔹
Release date: November 14

All pre-orders include a free Mario Piano sticker.

Customers in Kansas City can select "Pick Up" to get their copy in-store on or after Nov. 14th.

🕹️🕹️🕹️🕹️

From NMB: Mario Piano is poetry as video game, piano score, instruction manual, and artificial life—two interacting texts in unique physical media.

The first part, Mario Piano itself, is a scroll that maps Level 1 of Super Mario Bros. The reader scrolls left to right as the poem traces platforms, clouds, enemies, power-ups, and possible paths a player might take. 

Unlike our previous receipt publications, this scroll is fully legible. Punctuation, letters, word fragments, and unusual sentence rhythms travel up and down the horizontal page, a reading experience hovering between video game and music. The scroll is inspired by both ASCII art and player-piano rolls, whose punched holes visualize sound patterns that are fed through an automated piano. The scroll is printed by our steadfast companion Space Dust Editions, currently based in Paris.

Next, the Mario Piano Manual uses poetic diagrams and prose poems to “instruct” and “explain” how Mario Piano automatically comes to life in the reader’s mind. In doing so, the manual takes on a life of its own, buoyed by a semi-grammatical syntax that emulates the leaps, sprints, and reversals of video game movement.

Together, Mario Piano and the Mario Piano Manual form a looped aesthetic system, an artificial life-form that plays into existence as the music of reading. A poetry console.

Published by New Material Books, with receipt scrolls printed by Space Dust Editions.

*Mario Piano and Mario Piano Manual are unofficial, unaffiliated works of poetry inspired by Super Mario Bros.