Beginnings and battlings

Progress:

and the good lady’s introduction:

Time adds tide to its takings

[image via deartroy]

Sure it’s been a while. Sure I should be book binding, blagging and basting but I’ve an MA to begin, continue, and complete; National Poetry Day to enjoy; great things – “men at the top of their field!” To meet – to be done; and a great many lesser things to be done.

Until I’m ready to alter the new notebook I bought – yes I know that I’m flaking by buying something but it’s for practice, yo… – then you shall have to make do with this excellent free publication on the very nature of text itself, it’s future and its evolution here.

Yup, it’s a FREE BOOK!

Go little ones and read.

Post-Medium Publishing

“I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my shelves. Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people refuse to buy them? The answer turned out to be one step short of phonebooks. As long as it isn’t floppy, consumers still perceive it as a book.

That worked as long as buying printed books was the only way to read them. If printed books are optional, publishers will have to work harder to entice people to buy them. There should be some market, but it’s hard to foresee how big, because its size will depend not on macro trends like the amount people read, but on the ingenuity of individual publishers.” – from an essay titled ‘Post-Medium Publishing’ at http://www.paulgraham.com/publishing.html

I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this essay but I do think that theabove quote is true.

Read it. See what you think. Maybe even reference it.

1, 2, 3, 4 – a-Rock Boudoir

After being pointed toward Christey Johanssen’s work by good Faith, I saw an excellent addition to the mixverse universe: illustrations made on the nature of mix.

Enjoy.

Notebookery notebookery notebookeroo, a book is as lucky as lucky can do

In researching the various attempts at reinvigorating the form of a book, I came across Notebookery. A very cool idea, indeed.

A plain [probably Moleskin from what I can see] notebook is bought and then added to…by seperate contributors from all over the world.

From the entries on the site, contributors seem to have freedom to: use 1 or 2 pages; make it just text, text and etchings or anything that puts ink on paper; and, interestingly apt for Mixverse Books, contributors can edit the outside also.

Collaboration is a great way to get something beautiful made.

Music of choice for this kind of work? The Postal Service.

Taping a tape to ruin a tape.

Confusing as the [admittedly rubbish] diagram is, this one’s for the sonic explorers.

Basically ruining any tape you have left by writing on it and then somehow expecting your loved one to read it after it’s been put back into said original tape, this is easily one of the more tricky ones.

Tricky to do, tricky to make good and tricky to read! However, if you’ve the acumen, I’m sure you could build a device which plays the open tape head slowly so that it can be read as the words slowly go from one side to the other! Enjoyable for the inventor, perhaps killer for the reader.

More cello, please. This requires delicacy.

Today I’ll be progressively posting up more initial ideas here at Mixverse. So do please check them out and tell me what you think.

Or, better yet, use these initial forms to create your own mixverse book, document your process and end result and send me the pictures! That address is…

mixverse.books@gmail.com

“Post your love…”

So, you’re getting the archetypal ideas thus far – a book arranged or formed in a different way – however what if what you don’t want a book or book shape at all?

What if what you start with is a blank canvas? Seriously, an actual piece of canvas or a large sheet of paper…

Some might call it a painting. Others, a poster. As the picture shows, this archetype isn’t restrictive – hell, anything goes.

Normal book shape. Not so normal content.

This is just a quick mention that good friend to Mixverse, Benjamin Jiva Dasa Norris, has recently published two books.

I don’t know what the books are like as I haven’t read them, however, Ben’s a good friend and I wish him all the best.

Links to the two books can befound here.

My Johnson’s square.

A la B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates ‘book-in-a-box’ novel – where readers could, and were encouraged to, take any chapter at random and read it then do the same until all the chapters were read – here we have a simple example of how to do a Mixverse Book quickly:

1) Take a box.
2) Put all the pieces you want in there in
3) Design it how you like
4) Take some pics and send ‘em to me
5) Give it to whoever you like!

Done.