——

There's a PaperCamp heading to a city near you. If that city happens to be New York, anyway. One in San Francisco is being mooted, with maybe more to come elsewhere. You could always set one up yourself… Yes, you.

——

Further to the questions I asked at the end of this post on creating new readers, I found Pete's suggestions on local blogs helping local business full of useful ideas and information, and a possible approach to getting started that we hadn't considered, especially his last point:

"Above all, start small. Don’t try and run a local media outlet from the outset. Gradually build to being a local media outlet as you add more people to the team. If you just have 5 or 10 posts a week that’ll be fine. Once people know there’s a venue for their news they’ll bring it to you."

Maybe that's the best way to start a UK version of the 826 National; find a community centre or something with an attached cafe and begin small, rather than trying to find ways to set up a shop with no capital. Another interesting model is the one that the LUC guys used last year, using a market stall for outreach, and getting beyond the usual market of people who would buy and read comics. Might be something to look into (though maybe later in the year when there's no need to stand around all day in the freezing cold). It could be a good place to start selling crazily-themed toys and stuff to make money for the project, though, rather than trying to rent a shop. Once the things have been designed and made, of course.

One thing I've been learning is that it's better to start small and have something to show, than to wait for someone to bring you something big. It's the same attitude Pete mentions in point 9 that made me ask "what next?" immediately during the session on Saturday. Lots of people at these things say, "wouldn't it be great if…?" or, "someone should do something like…" and everyone says, "oh yeah, great idea!" but half the time you know they're all thinking, "as long as I don't have to do it."

One really simple place to start could be to set up a blog, with all the people who attended the session invited to have posting permission if they wanted to continue the discussion/brainstorming — that way, no one person is entirely responsible for trying to get the thing off the ground all on their own (I don't want to wrest control away from Kevin, since it was his idea, but I'm pretty sure he would be keen to have the collaborative input, as it's a pretty daunting idea to have to undertake all on your own). Plus, other people who want to get involved with the discussion have a place where they can take their own comments and ideas, and somewhere to link back to in order to spread the information. It might even give an idea of how much interest there would actually be in a project like this, outside of a small group of book geeks. (Probably quite a lot, but I suspect most of it will take the attitude mentioned above, that they'll be interested as long as someone else is doing the work.)

As I said after Amplified last year, all the really interesting conversations were going to take place outside of the realm of the main event(s). The only trouble with that, even though I expected it, is that it's all too easy to lose track of where the conversations are and what action is being taken. I guess Kevin's idea was the first one that got me excited enough to want to do something (or at least suggest something) proactive myself, instead of doing the usual thing of waiting for someone else to do something (or suggest something).

So: a dedicated blog might be a useful place to dump ideas and get discussion flowing. What do you think? I think one of the first things is to find a good, catchy name for the project rather than just "826 wannabe" — any suggestions? (And apologies to Kevin for posting this here without discussing it with him first, but hopefully it's at least an idea he'll think worth considering.)

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.

First up was a session suggested by Kevin O'Neill (not that one) to discuss the creation of a UK project along the lines of the McSweeney's-affiliated 826 National in America, which has created a series of themed shops run by volunteers, that host writing workshops and education sessions, often run by professional writers. These workshops have produced collaborative books inspired by local observations, professionally illustrated by cool artists and designers. The interesting thing about the 826 National is that it is the shops and the design of them (e.g. the Chris Ware mural in San Francisco) and their products which initially brings people in. They are exciting, unusual and playful, full of fun objects and entertaining ideas to catch peoples' imaginations.

Everyone agreed that starting a project like this in the UK was a great idea, it was just a matter of hashing out essential issues like logistics and cost. We also thought i was a good idea to extend the remit to literacy for all, the same way that Roddy Doyle's Fighting Words project has done in Ireland. This was a really great, inspiring session, which caused me to get so excited that I may have dominated the discussion a little (although later someone came up and thanked me for all the things I said, so it might not necessarily have been a bad thing). One of the things I suggested, and felt needed reinforcing, is that it was focussed on the written word at the expense of visual storytelling, which still has a place in books. This is especially true in the case of books for young children, which are almost always illustrated, or in the case of art and photography books.

This way of ignoring visual media was something that I found myself having to reiterate several times at BookCamp, actually, and it became something of a bugbear with me. I'm a very visual person, so obviously I'm a bit biased, but lots of people are visual, and we do not live life in non-visual terms¹. Images have always been used to illustrate wordy ideas all over the place, from advertising to newspaper stories to book-jackets to comics etc. and it's long past time people stopped thinking about books in terms of text only (it was an attitude prevalent at Amp08, as well) and started to remember the illustrated aspect. Literacy is not just about words, there's a visual literacy of symbolism and ideas that is just as important, especially as more communities are filled with people who don't all speak the same language.

Actually, there are a couple of good stories which, ahem, illustrate my point, linked to at The Beat: one story about a "reluctant reader" who discovered Diary of a Wimpy Kid (a sleeper hit that's been racing up the best-seller lists), and was so hooked that he polished off nearly 450 pages in two days; and another about the similarities between medieval illuminated books, and contemporary graphic novels ("both genres were designed to make the written word accessible to everyone, and both combine words and art". This is not an original idea, and they seem to have mistaken genre (stylistic content) with platform (typically the medium used to present the genre), but it's a timely link anyway).

Right, getting off my high horse, now, and back to the session in hand. As I said, everyone was enthusiastic, as only a bunch of book geeks can be, and we came away with a list of things to consider if the project is to get off the ground:

* finding out about getting available shop space for low rent
* registering as a charity
* recruiting volunteers. This includes
– people to work in the shop(s)
– designers to create fun artefacts
– authors to run workshops, or at least promote the project in interviews etc.
* what "theme" a shop could take (e.g. in America they have a pirate shop, a superhero shop, a robot shop etc.)

Kevin's posted his own list here.

So, one last question on this subject before I finish the post and start writing up the next session: is anyone reading this interested in this project? Can you help? Do you know someone who can secure it funding, or how to cheaply rent a shop? Do you know how to run a shop? Do you want to volunteer to run workshops? Do you just want to big it up to everyone you know because you like the idea too? Please let me know in the comments.

¹Except for blind people, obv. And that brings up something I hadn't thought about on Saturday: braille. Maybe someone who's more of an expert than me can do a session on that at the next BookCamp?

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!

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.