[PaperCamp] Taking a Line For A Walk

In the same way that it was cool to be told people liked my hand-made mini-cards, it was fun to rock up to the big table at PaperCamp and pull out my shoebox of printed stuff, instead of pulling out a laptop like everyone else. It felt a bit like a magic box of tricks at times, when I could reach into it and get my hands on the perfect thing to demonstrate what someone was talking about. This happened during Aaron Straup Cope's's keynote presentation on the papernet and alternative mapping, when he was trying to describe a particular way of folding a piece of A4 paper into a booklet. It was neat to be able to dig out my copy of Chris Stonehill's recent mini, Choosing How To Enter The Sea, which is folded this particular way, and pass it around the table so that people could see what Aaron was talking about. (Likewise, during Alex Deschamps-Sonsino's Thinking Through Paper session later in the morning, it proved rather useful that I had thought to pack the scissors and glue.)

Aaron had some really interesting things to say during his presentation. His papernet idea reminded me of Jon Burgerman's lo-fi biroweb (even though they are different), but it was his comments on wanting books in serialised pieces for easy transportation that really caught my attention. Having ripped a 400-page book in half so that he could fit it in a small pack on a three-day mountain hike in a remote part of Hawaii, Aaron thought this could be a useful business model for getting people to read big, unwieldy books. It's not exactly an original idea, when you remember that early novels were serialised in portable formats, but it's an interesting one in today's publishing climate. It makes a lot of sense to me just on a practical level — especially with huge weighty tomes like Neil Stephenson's novels, for example — but seems to be the exact opposite of what is happening with most fiction that was traditionally serialised; for example, the way that comics readers, and some comics producers, are moving away from the episodic nature of single issues (or "floppies") in favour of collected editions.

Aaron's points on alternative mapping were very interesting, too. As he says, no one wants to be the tourist "standing out like a dick" holding a map on a giant piece of paper. Small, manageable pocket maps are the way to go — this was where the folded sheet of A4 paper came in, creating something small and light enough to fit in a pocket but with all the useful information on it. Another method is "pirate routing" (i.e. copying the layout of street names into a simple diagram; Chris Heathcote referred to this as "pirate mapping" in his presentation later in the day). This is something I do all the time because it often makes more sense than taking the whole A-Z, and it makes a neat little record of new places I have visited. I never used to keep these pirate maps once I'd used them, but I think it might be interesting to do so now. As Aaron said in his summing up, "artefacts are the soft porn of memory." Rather a crude and funny way of putting it, but true nonetheless.