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.

- physicality
- fixity
- boundedness
- authority
- universality

The physical shape of books is underlined by the cost of production and thinking in units — how many you can fit into a shipping box or bookshelf. Books as physical objects are bought and sold by unit, so making money from copyright is logical, but if you are selling content on the web which is not confined by physical shape, you need to find new business models.

There was a pretty interesting discussion generated from this, with some useful input from Cory Doctorow who provided legally recognised definitions when we were struggling to define ideas, but sadly had to leave halfway through to do his share of looking after the baby (which was disappointing for the session, but also lovely for his wife, I think). I was taking part in the discussion quite a lot myself, so my notes from this point don't make a lot of sense, but here are some of Mary's ideas I wrote down:

Web-based stuff "almost needs redundancy" to make it believable. There is always something more interesting to look at on the internet, which incurs the need for short, tactical posts to grab the attention. Printed matter conveys authority; even vanity publishing conveys more authority than online writing if the printed word is considered more valid than non-print. An interesting example of publishers who confer status is science publisher Nature who don't even pay their authors, because getting published by them confers so much status that writers don't mind (which could actually be the biggest scam around, if you stop to think about it!)

Instead of fixity on the web, there's version control, but even (for example) the Wayback Machine is an unreliable record of what went before. "People don't publish for posterity; they publish to share" so it doesn't seem to matter to them that it disappears after a while. There has to be a space for people to engage with the work or it's not going to work.

This stuff makes sense to me, but there were some ideas that I didn't agree with because they oversimplified into an either/or scenario that was a bit didactic. For example, the idea that "the web is searchable which makes knowledge ambiguous" seemed specious, as libraries are searchable, too; full of physical books that can be referred to on every subject). The idea that, online, "you have to write as a character" is another one I have to take issue with, as there are no hard and fast rules about writing online; you don't have to do anything, and in any case most print-based writing is often done with a specific tone or "voice" that represents the character of the author, so it's not just limited to web-based writing.

There was also a brief look at the interesting development of formerly analogue material that has been digitised and then turned back into analogue material, with the amazing BibliOdyssey blog cited as an example, which amused me, considering the way people had been venerating the written word over imagery, as it's very image-heavy, basically an art gallery of a blog. Curated by the mysterious peacay, who hunts through online archives to find interesting illustrations and posts them on the blog, a selection of which have now been collected in a lovely hardcover book published by FUEL (I was lusting after it just before Christmas, and almost bought it for my mum just so that I could have access to it myself!).

This was another great session inspiring me to think about lots of good stuff, although I am sad that attending it meant that I missed some interesting presentations upstairs at PaperCamp, especially Sawa Tanaka's incredible illustration work with edible paper, glow-in-the-dark ink and thermochromatic ink, which sounds amazing.

Following that, Alex Deschamps-Sonsino gave a fun workshop on Thinking Through Paper, encouraging us to think in 3D, and to think about how to build ideas into objects. She asked us to remember the last thing we'd made with paper (which was easy in my case, being the contact-info cards I'd made the night before). She also had a couple of interesting things to say before we started the hands-on participation, including a horrifying anecdote of teaching a class of 16-20 year olds how to make paper airplanes. Apparently none of them had ever made one before, and took so long to be convinced that she had to download plans off the internet before they would even try! No, really, that horrifies me. What kind of culturally deprived lives had these people been living?

Alex expounded on how this fear of the blank page can be damaging to the creative process, talking about different attitudes to "old" paper versus "new" paper. If paper is already printed on, it can often be an invitation to use it for something else (e.g. cards etc.) whereas a pristine blank page can be quite scary. I understand this "fear of the blank page" myself; every time I get a new notebook, I struggle to think of something worthwhile to put on the first page, and frequently start using it a few pages in, or sometimes right in the middle of the book — as I happened to do with my notes from Saturday's sessions. (Although, to be fair, my new notebook does have different sections, and I chose a specific one for taking notes.)

During this session, we also heard from Giles Lane of Proboscis Studios, who have been producing Diffusion Shareables; e-books and StoryCubes that you can customise and download. (Not to always bring it back to the comics thing, but while he was talking about this I was reminded of a cube-shaped minicomic about a box that Sally-Anne Hickman made a couple years ago, utilising the box shape to parallel her story.) Watching Giles demonstrate the idea of using the cubes as building blocks to create a larger story, I was also reminded of the pizza-box comic that some of us made at Caption in 2003.)

Inspired by a product design workshop she'd taken at college, Alex challenged us to make either a chair, a building, or something we liked; an activity we all dived into with great enthusiasm. Despite only having ten minutes to come up with something, there were some great designs at the end of it, and it's a shame that no one took photos of them all (but I think some of them were captured for posterity). I made a bracelet from scraps of yellow paper linked together with yellow paperclips, each scrap printed with "PAPERCAMP 09″ on both sides, using a nifty little moveable type rubber printing set provided by Matt. (I so want to buy one for myself now!). As I commented to Tom Taylor when we sat back down for the next presentation, "you know it's been a good morning when your hands are covered in printers' ink before midday!"

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.

Having got myself a place, I had a think about what I was going to take with me. Rather than bringing along a book as suggested, I delved into my shoeboxes of mini-comics and old zines, and dug out some good examples of things people have made and printed independently, to show off what paper and books can be like outside of standardised formats. It took me a while to whittle down my selection, but eventually I managed to have an interesting array of stuff to take on Saturday; everything from old Slab-O-Concrete missive devices to Jeremy Dennis' teeny Tiny Tea Comic and jewel-encrusted Owl Is Angry; even a couple of issues of Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library with embossed covers and clip-out coupons. I also put a pair of scissors and a Pritt Stick in the box, figuring that there would probably be some hands-on cut-and-paste taking place.

a selection of some of the things I took with me

I also remembered that it's always a good idea to take contact-info cards to these things, but in a nod to PaperCamp's hands-on tactile approach, and the satisfaction of getting my hands dirty that I mentioned in my last post, I decided to make a special lo-fi PaperCamp edition. I spent a satisfying half hour chilling out with some music and getting into a creative flow-state, dividing a sheet of card into a grid, writing down contact details with an HB pencil and prettifying one side with a brick wall image, made from a piece of dolls' house paper glued down to the sheet of card before I cut it into separate mini-cards. (Dolls' house paper is neat. I buy it from the art dept at Paperchase and use it to write letters on and stuff.) Initially I was going to make the cards all different, using stickers and things cut out of a magazine, but I liked the solidity of the brick wall image; the way that a wall can be a support structure or a blank canvas seemed to mirror the way that paper can be a support structure or a blank canvas. Plus, I really do think brick walls are pretty. (So does Michael Sporn) Everyone I gave a card to on Saturday said it was a cool idea, too, so I'm inspired to think about what kind of mini-cards I could make for similar events, like the Zine Fest at the Women's Library next Saturday, for example.

Funnily enough, I came home on Friday night to discover a copy of Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book from my mum. It's a good example of the book-as-fetish-object, complete with padded cover and a section of it sealed with brown paper, so the timing of the delivery was rather apposite!

Anyway, I took a bunch of notes at Saturday's event(s), and in my usual way will be posting separate articles on the sessions I went to at both BookCamp and PaperCamp. It will be a lot of stuff to read, because I wanted to get it all online in time for some of the content to be considered for addition to the book that Jeremy Ettinghausen is compiling on Monday night (to be available for POD on Tuesday — ambitious, or what). Also, I find writing it all up in detail a useful way to get my thoughts clear and process all the information and ideas after an event. Hopefully it'll be interesting for other people, too.