© Lawrence I. Charters
AppleTree, December 1, 1992, p. 3.
Fenton, Erfert. Art of Darkness: The After Dark Companion. Berkeley, CA: Peachpit Press, 1992. x, 115 pp. $19.95. ISBN 1-56609-012-1. Includes disk.
When I saw Art of Darkness at Mac World Boston 1992, I laughed. Several times. And on one occasion, I laughed at one of the Peach pit editors responsible for this book. But I laughed for the wrong reasons, as I discovered when a copy of the book arrived, unsolicited, in my mailbox. I’m sure the Peach pit editor is laughing, now.
I thought that the very idea of publishing a book on a computer screen saver was a joke. This was an error, for Art of Darkness is useful, fun, and funny, but deliberately funny. After Dark, as millions of Macintosh owners know, redefined the quiet, pedestrian world of utilitarian screen savers by offering sound, spectacular graphics, a modular format, and wicked humor. Art of Darkness is, in its own way, just as revolutionary since, rather than spend countless dry pages on dry subjects, such as how to optimize your hard drive or do relative cell references in Excel, it devotes 115 fast-paced pages to a utility that performs a trivial task in an excessively complex, artistic fashion.
Or, as Fenton suggests in answer to the question of why write a book on a screen saver, “Well, why not? After all, After Dark probably shows up on your screen more often than any program you own.” From personal observation, I would bet more computer power has been devoted to generating After Dark displays on Mac computers than has been spent on the entire U.S. space program. I know, again from personal observation, that users spend more time customizing and playing with the After Dark modules than they spend learning how to use the programs they’re paid to use at work.
If entertaining text, dubious but funny history and science, tips on customized settings (including the horrifying Strip Mining MultiModule setting), ResEdit hacks, and bad puns are not enough, there’s more: a disk with nine new modules, plus an update utility to improve compatibility with System 7.
One final reason for getting this book: justification for a larger hard drive. If you add the After Dark modules included in the book to all the others you have on your drive, including the 43 megabytes of freeware and shareware modules you downloaded from bulletin boards, you’ve probably discovered there isn’t any room for less important programs, like Word, PageMaker, FileMaker, and other boring things. So, if there is any room left on the Visa card in January, this book may help you buy a bigger drive.
And you won’t have to toss any After Dark modules.