A Quarter Buys Your Fortune From Raymond Biesinger's New Contraption

Verdun’s new oracle takes exact change: Sitting inside Pulp Books until the end of July is a 1950s USPS stamp vending machine that Montreal artist and illustrator Raymond Biesinger has sanded down, repainted by hand, and reborn as what may be the world's first coin-operated, fully bilingual fortune-telling machine. Drop in a quarter, American or Canadian, and it dispenses one of 300 fortunes, half in English, half in French. It does not make change and it does not take other coins.

May be the world's first, mind you: "Some things are too good to fact-check," Biesinger says. "When the stakes are low like this, this fits the bill."

The machine is his third attempt at the form, an idea sparked by Novelty Automation, a London arcade filled with bespoke machines built by British artists, including one simulating a visit to the podiatrist, complete with a slot for your actual foot. Mark 1, a 1970s notepad dispenser, proved too finicky. Mark 2 had a broken rod his metalsmith friend Tony Alfonso declared unsalvageable. Mark 3, bought for $150, finally cooperated after about a year of work, including evenings spent learning to paint on metal with lessons from Mr. Sign, a.k.a. Dave Arnold.

The fortunes inside come from roughly three dozen of Biesinger's favourite writers, artists, cartoonists, and poets, from novelist Waubgeshig Rice to Jay Ferguson of Sloan, cartoonists Walter Scott and Pascal Girard, and closer to home, Biesinger's brother and his wife. Each wrote about five fortunes in exchange for a crisp $5 bill mailed with a personalized note, and each chose the colour their fortunes would be printed on, producing a rainbow effect inside the machine.

"Everything costs so much money these days, but a quarter is nothing to people. You can't get anything for a quarter," Biesinger says. "So even if the fortune is off-putting, or too weird, or not really understandable, it's not like someone's going to complain, 'oh, what a ripoff.'" Besides, the slips are printed in his studio on the same equipment as his art prints. "Even if there were no fortunes on it, the coloured slips of paper alone would, I think, be worth 25 cents."