Categories
events news pitch up & publish

Islington & Wembley Pop Up Publishing Workshops

More workshops are being held next week in Islington & Wembley Libraries as part of the Librarypress project. Below is the presentation I’ll be using to illustrate my talk on bookleteer to participants and explore the kinds of things they can do with it.

Pop Up Publishing with bookleteer from Giles Lane
Categories
inspiration

Pop-Up eBooks: ‘Tangled Threads’

It seems that the posts tagged with ‘Pop-up’ on the bookleteer blog have been getting a lot of attention, so I’m reaching back into the Diffusion archive to satisfy you lot.

‘Tangled Threads’ was an eBook designed to act as a film storyboard, as part of Proboscis’ Sensory Threads project. Scripted by Karen Martin and Alice Angus, and illustrated by Mandy Tang, the book is a series of intricately rendered scenes and captions, but the real draw is how Mandy has incorporated pop-up inserts at the back which the reader can cut out and assemble, adding new layers of depth to the pages.

You can have a peek at the digital version below – minus pop-ups, of course – and read posts from Karen and Mandy explaining how it was made.

Download, make and read ‘Tangled Threads’ for yourself.

Categories
events

Publish and be Damned Soapbox

Last week, I featured the Portable Reading Room at the London Art Book Fair 2011. Also making an appearance with a pop-up stall is Publish and be Damned, who run annual self-publishing fairs in London. The Publish and be Damned Soapbox will have new publications by their members, as well as host the launch of the first PABD magazine for alternative publishing and distribution, ‘Three Letter Words’.

11am – 6pm, on Saturday 24th September, in the Whitechapel Gallery foyer.

Categories
inspiration

The Book Barge

I’ve just discovered The Book Barge, a canal boat that acts as a floating bookshop and workshop space, currently touring around the U.K. The interior looks amazing, and not least of all, inviting – perfect for a relaxed perusal of its shelves. Normally moored in Staffordshire, in May it set off on a six-month tour to highlight the struggle of independent bookshops to readers across the country, buying essential items using only its own stock as currency. Curious and commendable – best of luck!

Categories
inspiration

Book Sculpture Portraits

Knowing my penchant for unusual pieces created from books and paper, Giles turned me on to the extraordinary work of artist Nicholas Galanin, who hand-carves 3D portraits from lengthy volumes, as if they were inverted sculpture blocks. The source models for these surreal, paper death masks were first captured with a 3D scanner to produce an exact digital rendition of the subject, then cut out and bound at the back – a sculpture you can actually leaf through.

Click on the picture below to view the Flickr gallery.

Categories
inspiration

Typographic Paper Sculptures

I bring you another paper based marvel. Bianca Chang has crafted these 3-D paper sculptures of letters, laying subtly different HAND-CUT sheets on top of each other – no laser cutting or 3-D printing here. They have a marvelous depth that draws the eye in and around the texture created by the layering effect, which almost resembles reams of spun yarn – albeit knitted by M.C Escher.

 

Categories
inspiration

Paper Animations by Andersen M Studio

Andersen M Studio has created this amazing stop motion animation for Star Alliance airlines, using boarding passes that transform into a intricate paper representation of their destination, through some nifty cutting and creasing.

They’ve also animated scenes from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West, using the actual pages from the book. This one beggars belief.

These remind me of Karen Martin’s previous posts that featured similar concepts, particularly pieces by Yuken Terya and Brian Dettmer. Oh, what humble paper is capable of.


Categories
inspiration

Print / cut / fold

In my last post, I looked at some of the innovative ways eBooks have been made, using a variety of materials. Today, I’m focusing on some interesting printing and layering techniques that I’ve found, in a bid to inspire budding bookleteers.

Xavier Antin has constructed an extraordinary printing chain made from a stencil duplicator (1880), a spirit duplicator (1923), a laser printer (1969), and an inkjet printer (1976) – spanning almost one hundred years of technology. Each uses a single ink from the CMYK colour model, which explains why the book printed through it resembles a series of hazy retro 3D images ; a disorientating, yet impressive effect.

Abigail Reynolds collages different images of the same building or scene, then cuts and fold’s portions of the overlaying paper to produce new representations with depth and occasionally dizzying perspectives. A similar effect could be created with eBooks, by printing on both sides of the paper, and manipulating the top layer. Getting the orientation right would be tricky, but the end result could be intriguing. Anyone up to the task?

Categories
inspiration

Computational Architecture: Cardboard Columns

 

Another gem which has been featured on www.fastcodesign.com, and something my brain is still trying to recover from. Created by Michael Hansmeyer, and constructed from 2700 laser cut sheets of cardboard with wooden cores, these columns were spawned by an algorithm fed into a computer, forming “computational architecture”, with up to 16 MILLION facets. It’s absolutely staggering. After being cut out, the sheets left behind form a negative, empty-space column. The image of this is unreal; it looks like the hallucinatory imaginings of an alien spacecraft, mechanical yet almost organic, something that wouldn’t be out of place from the trippy sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blow your mind here.

 

Categories
inspiration

Pop-up Book Film Projection?

Rather than a Zine Highlight, I thought I’d share with you an astounding book/film/theatre piece that I’ve just spied (courtesy of www.fastcodesign.com – which features some brilliant stuff), which Karen Martin will surely love, after her exploration of Pop – up books and book / technology hybrids. “The Ice Book” , by Davy and Kristin McGuire, is a book of miniature stages made from pop-up cut outs. It seems innocuous enough, until combined with interactive light projection, and it transforms into a magical, ghostly tale that plays with shadows and optical illusions. I was performing a constant double-take whilst watching the video – its amazing to think such a vivid and cinematic effect can be produced with the materials used. The Ice Book website is currently down, due to massive interest it seems, but you can watch the video and read more about it here.