[PaperCamp] pirates & scalpels and 3D pie charts

There were a couple more sessions before lunch. First was Cheathco's Pirates and Scalpels: travel guides/one shot books/newspapers. As Chris confessed right at the start, he has "something of an obsession" with guide books (delineated in more detail in this post), although he is not particularly precious about them as objects. Quite the opposite; all of his books get dog-eared pages from having their corners turned down, and he has no compunctions about ripping guide books up to get at the pages that will be useful to his journey.¹

He made a few nice points about maps. They are populist ("maps are for people who obviously don't take taxis"), and can serve more than one need ("you don't always need a map to show you where you are, but where the cool stuff is"). Guide books are getting smaller to favour the pocket-size, and newer versions are produced more often, making them more-or-less disposable as information gets out of date. Taking this disposable nature into consideration, and inspired in part by DK's customised guides, the City Guide notebooks from Moleskine and the recent issue of Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet, Chris has been considering newsprint guides, compiled from various sources, including pirate maps and friends' recommendations, and printed in relatively cheap/small print print runs. Being cheap there's less of an issue about tearing them up to suit your own needs.

After that, another demonstration of nifty thinking, Nick O'Leary's 3D pie charts and paper graphs. He wants to make a pop-up book of statistics, which could work really well in bringing those numbers to life more than two-dimensional charts on a page, although Aaron's suggestion of topological mapping (e.g. a 3D map of the hills of San Francisco) was brilliant too. And the diagrams look so pretty in 3D!

¹This attitude reminded me of a poem by Adam Ford (the genius behind Monkey Punch Dinosaur), I Kiss This Book, which I've quoted in its entirety the comments in case anyone wants to read it. Hope Adam doesn't mind!