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Endings and Beginnings

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Last Autumn, after 3 years and much fun selecting and sending out fine publications made and shared on bookleteer, I decided to end the Periodical’s monthly service. There were a number of reasons – some practical and financial – but I felt that as a project it had achieved as much as it could in its existing form. At its height there were over 80 subscribers across the world. Something like 60 different books were distributed during the 3 years, and there will be a few more that will be sent out to the last subscribers later this year as part of the LibraryPress Legacy project.

Since many subscribers were keen for the project to continue I will be considering options – the most likely being a once yearly round-up. If you’re interested in subscribing to this, please leave a comment on this post to let me know.

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My work with anthropologist James Leach and the villagers of Reite in Papua New Guinea has defined much of my recent work with bookleteer and is shaping the trajectory of development in which it is heading. You can read about our fieldwork in PNG, about the TKRN project and the TKRN Toolkit or explore the lovely handmade books created by the community on the dedicated website I created for them. We are returning to Reite in April and May this year to do further work, and to expand the project into some neighbouring villages. We have also been invited to develop a parallel project with indigenous fieldworkers in the neighbouring island nation of Vanuatu. Later in 2016 we hope to facilitate some of the villagers from Reite to transfer their skills and knowledge of using the TKRN Toolkit to local people in Vanuatu.


This past year I have also been helping (in a small way) Grace Tillyard to develop her amazing Breast Cancer awareness and engagement programme for women in Haiti. The project is hosted by Project Medishare‘s Womens Health Centre in Port-au-Prince and recently received $60,000 in funding. Grace is currently co-developing with local people a new kind of Patient Notebook using bookleteer to help communicate more about the condition and the medical treatments available, as well as to allow people to record their own medical information in a dedicated book of their own. We hope to have a prototype ready this Spring for testing by the community.

LibraryPress Legacy
I have also been collaborating with Peter Baxter of Camden’s Library Service to extend and continue the work of introducing self-publishing using bookleteer into London’s libraries that was initiated in 2014 and 2015 through the LibraryPress project. Last week we held a professional development workshop for Librarians from Camden, Hackney, Brent, Hounslow and Harrow. Over the next few months the aim is for these librarians to use bookleteer to create publications with library users as part of the many events to promote reading and literacy that take place. We shall be selecting some of these to be printed and distributed as part of a special issue of the Periodical.

Lastly, I wish to share a stunning new book, Northern Musings, created by the Canadian artist and printmaker, Joyce Majiski:

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Magna Carta 800 Sets

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June 2015 was the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta – considered by many to be the keystone to Britain’s constitutional and democracy. To celebrate and see the impact this document has had, over six months in 2015 I published a series of 6 books, each containing several texts from across the centuries that have been inspired by the Magna Carta. From the English Civil War era, to the French and American Bills of Rights in the late 1700s, the Chartists of the 1830s though to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Charter88 and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union of 2000. The final book in series contains Henry I’s Charter of Liberties (1100) on which the Magna Carta itself is based, the original 1215 Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forests of 1217.

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What the series shows is a lineage stretching back to Saxon times of the struggle to assert and protect the inherent rights and dignities of ordinary people against the attempts by the wealthy and powerful to control and corral resources, assets and power for themselves, at the expense of everyone else.

Originally distributed to subscribers of the Periodical there are 35 sets remaining, each of which has been bound together with red satin ribbon in a special edition.
Each set costs £15 plus postage and packing: buy your’s here.

View the whole collection here – free to read online or download, print out and make up yourself.

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the Periodical issue 22

periodical_july2014

July’s issue, Sprouting Bonds : how growing our food connects us to places, land, families and culture is a handbook of results from the Grown Edible and Meaningful project, based in Leeds in 2013. A collaboration between universities and local community organisations, it explored the meaning of growing food and how it connects people to their environment, communities and to the wider world. The books combines social observations with recipes, personal stories, poetry, growing tips and reflections.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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the Periodical issue 21

theperiodical-june2014

June’s issue, Pride of the Moor, is a contemporary folksong created by musician Jim Causley and artist Simon Pope as part of Simon’s project “A Song, A Dance & A New Stannary Parliament”. The project was commissioned by Spacex gallery in Exeter and explored the history and local significance of tin mining on Dartmoor as a way of developing new understandings of the landscape itself.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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the Periodical issue 20

theperiodical-may2014

May’s issue, Recollections by Harold Lun, is the first fruit of our collaboration with The Museum of Soho – drawing on material from their archives. This book is a facsimile of letters and photographs in the archive sent by Harold Lun and describing his childhood growing up in Soho during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It is a moving story made more so by reading it in the hand of the writer himself, not just as printed text on a page.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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the Periodical issue 19

theperiodical-april14

April’s issue (a bit delayed due to Easter and school holidays), Metalanliguistica, is a departure from recent selections – a book of experimental literature by Nick Norton. In his own words, “Metalanliguistica is the investigation as an invention, the dream made as documentary; a work of nights and days hung on the Fibonacci Scale, it is teetering on the edge of paradise while wading through bo diddley hell, and it is therefore humorous in parts.”

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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the Periodical issue 18

periodical-march2014

On November 23rd 1644, 369 years ago, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a speech to the English Parliament calling for unlicensed printing and freedom of expression. Reading it now, in the light of the unfolding Snowden revelations, it is all the more poignant in the face of massive state surveillance of private communications. How far will this act to drive freedom of expression underground? How much will people begin to constrain their thoughts and feelings against an unknowable and invisible censor? Re-reading the Areopagitica now is a reminder that freedom is not a given, but something that each generation must continue to strive for.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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Soho Memoirs

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I’m very excited to announce that we are collaborating with the Museum of Soho to produce a series of Soho Memoirs from materials in their archive. The three initial books are by people who grew up or worked in Soho during the first part of the twentieth century and were recorded or written during the 1980s and early 2000s. As personal remembrances and stories they are steeped in the texture and fabric of the social life of old Soho – something tenuous and precious, yet at the same time time hard and unremitting. What makes these accounts special is not a nostalgia for what has disappeared so much as the living connection they establish to how much continues even now within the community of people who live and work there or whose children attend the last remaining school there.

The three books will be distributed via the Periodical starting in May 2014 – subscribe now to get your copies as well as other treats through your letterbox each month. We will have copies too at a special event at the House of St Barnabas in May organised by MoSoho.

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the Periodical issue 17

theperiodical_feb2014
Whisker returns with its third issue under the increasingly assured editorial helm of Hazem Tagiuri. Featuring new work by Joani Reese, FMJ Botham, Kylie Grant, Alex Howard and Hazem himself, its a rich stew that transports the reader to deftly delineated imaginary worlds built of words, impressions and feelings.

From Hazem’s introduction, “Three dots. Three issues. The one you’re reading has been a long, a long time coming. It took a while to find these voices; to find the right words. Pardon the ellipsis”

Whisker is a pocket-sized literary magazine that showcases new poetry and short fiction, often from previously unpublished contributors. It has a tactile sense of merit: instinctive, curious, unconcerned with fixed styles, rigorous entry criteria, or authors’ backstories. Just fresh, fine writing that invokes feeling; that strikes a nerve.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription for someone special.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.

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the Periodical issue 16

dal-rialta-book

A few months ago I met accessibility and sensory design consultant, Alastair Somerville, who was in town to demonstrate using simple and cheap visualisation tools such as the 3Doodler pen. Over coffee we chatted about 3D printing, data manifestation and some of the tools and techniques we’ve each developed. Alastair showed me a material he has been using in wayfinding for people with visual impairments: Zy.chem swell paper, a specially treated material where the black ink ‘swells’ up to create a textured surface. Alastair had been using it to make simple tactile maps and for braille. We both then became excited about the possibilities of using the Zy.chem paper with bookleteer to create simple and low-cost braille and textured publications.

Very soon afterwards Alastair experimented with a wayfunding guide for a project he was working on for the University of Sussex’s new library, The Keep. He sent me a copy printed on the Zy.chem paper which confirmed for me that this was a material with hugely exciting creative potential. I then asked Alastair if he would consider making something special for the Periodical so we could demonstrate this to others. The result is this beautiful guide to Dal Riata, an ancient Scottish kingdom in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll which has some of the most extensive neolithic earthworks and structures in the UK.

Alastair’s book uses the zy.chem paper to impart the texture of some of the neolithic stone features of Dal Riata as well as some maps of significant sites. In addition to the tactile paper, one sheet is also printed on tracing paper, overlaying the bigger map of Scotland and Northern Ireland onto a tactile map of the kingdom of Dal Riata itself, and then providing a ‘mist’ overlaying a section about the disappearance of the kingdom during the Viking raids of the early Middle Ages. At once informative and poetic, it holds its own sense of magic and mystery within its very textures.

Alastair has posted a Vine video:

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Like what you see here? Then treat yourself to something lovely – an enigmatic, eclectic package arriving through your letterbox each month. Or buy a gift subscription.
Get inspired to create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too – each month I select something delightful and inspiring from the publications which are made and shared on bookleteer.