The quality of Alcorn’s artistry, however impeccable it may be from a formal and technical point of view, did not guarantee the publication of all that he produced. Indeeed a number of commissioned works weren’t published. In the archive are conserved the sketches and often the correspondences that help to find out the reasons of the refusal of the case and the dynamics of the relation with the clients. Here are some examples.

Emblematic is the process behind the realization of the cover for Diario dalla galera by Pietro Valpreda – the anarchist wrongly accused of the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan. The first definitive version that Alcorn proposed originally showed a portrait which was too obviously superimposed with the features of the Marquis de Sade. The proposal was rejected, and the cover that was eventually published showed the idea of Valpreda’s innocence reflected through a more intimate view of a prison cell.

A more complex situation happened to the sequence of four political posters denouncing industrial workplace hazards, which Alcorn designed in 1972 for the Italian Communist Party. Although the communicative potential of this series was fully recognized, the posters weren’t published. However, they were later exposed at the 36th Venice Biennale the same year.

Similar was the case of the satirical volume Kid&Ketty, another work of social commentary where Alcorn expressed his disenchantment with the status quo. Here the artist interpreted an open condemnation of the abuse of power through a very explicit, comic-strip-style vernacular which clashed with the ideological rigidity of the time and unfortunately never went to press.