[BookCamp] [Papercamp] round-up

As you can probably tell from these extensive notes, I had fantastically interesting day on Saturday, learning about new projects, thinking in new ways, and making new friends, and spending all of Sunday thinking about them and writing about them. As Matt Ward said in his summation of PaperCamp, it was a fantastic convergence of the digital world and the print world (although I do think it's a shame that there wasn't so much crossover between the two camps), or to put it another way:

photo by Adactio [cc licensed]

That looks and sounds a bit pretentious and incomprehensible, perhaps, but is easily broken down:

craft = the skills in creating things, be they books or blog posts
bioinformatic = us and our branes
origami = complexity and more skill
unicorns = a bit of the fairytale

I think these are actually easy notions to get to grips with, despite the unwieldy nature of the phrase. It was a fun(ny) line to sum up and end the day with, anyway.

After the summations, we all tripped off to the pub where Penguin generously plied us with booze, and I had a better opportunity to get my box of mini-comics out for people to have a look at. It was nice; people wandered over our table and had a delve, getting excited about paper texture or ink, and even getting nostalgic in some cases.

It was funny, too, as I discovered that some of the people at BookCamp were friends with, or familiar with, some of the small press comics people I know. Ben Read and I not only bonded over a mutual love of Scary-Go-Round, but it turns out that he's mates with Matt Brooker and has "always wanted to go to Caption!

In the afternoon BookCamp sessions I went to, I sat next to Alex Milway, who writes and illustrates children's books (unfortunately, I missed the session he ran, which sounded pretty good). He's friends with Sarah McIntyre (who's just posted this great mini-comic on the pleasures of paper and pens), and acquainted with some other folk from the DFC like Gary Northfield and Woodrow Phoenix, so we had a good natter about them, amongst other things. Looking through my box of mini-comics, he suddenly started talking about the Lady Cottington Pressed Faerie Book that by sheer coincidence of timing I'd been given the day before! (I haven't even had time to read it yet.)

It's always so nice when my interests converge like that, and it served as a reminder for me of something that I wanted to mention before I finished writing all of this up, which is that there are loads of comicsy people doing interesting things using POD technology, papercraft, collaborative stories, and even social media, and I reckon they need to be getting involved with events like these, or at least considering the unconference/barcamp approach for their own events. If, as the Really Interesting Group say in their editorial of Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet, "2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world," it would be superduper brilliant to see more convergence and crossover, don't you think? Let's make it happen.