1. Cosmo China: 20th Anniversary Exhibition by Josie Firmin (2010)
2. It’s Nice to Make by Mah Rana (2013)
3. The UK Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef How-To booklet by Crafts Council (2011)
4. No Words by David Key (2006)
5. Whisker: Issue Two by Hazem Tagiuri et al (2013)
6. The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649) & Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (2000) by Gerard Winstanley et al & the EU (2015)
7. Knowing Where You Are by Sarah Butler (2011)

1. Reflections on the city from a post-flâneur by Ruth Maclennan (2011)
2. Le Corbeau / The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe tr. Stéphane Mallarmé (1875/2009)
3. Atomic Scientists News by Gair Dunlop (2014)
4. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift (1729/2008)
5. Sole Rights by Roshini Kempadoo (2002)
6. I Feel Different by LACE (2009)
7. Tales of Things: Objects, Stories & Voices from the BME Communities in Greenwich by Chris Speed et al (2010)

1. The Octuplet: Story of Our Lives by Babette Wagenvoort (2009)
2. The Island Bell by Katherine Meynell (2000)
3. Pride Of The Moor – a song to Dartmoor’s tin by Jim Causley & Simon Pope (2010)
4. Marseille Mix – turn down the heat by William Firebrace (2008)
5. The Petition of Right (1628), Grand Remonstrance (1641) & Charter88 (1988) by various (2015)
6. Canyon Flow by Joyce Majiski & Zea Morvitz (2014)
7. A London Childhood 1926-1939 by Henry Long (2014)

1. H2O by Alejandra Canales, Anne Ransquin & Juan F. Salazar (2009)
2. An Agreement of the Free People of England (1649) & The People’s Charter (1838) by John Lilburne et al & The Chartists (2015)
3. The Anthropofferjist Charles Dickens: “Wapping Ghost Ship” by Steve Beard (2002)
4. Code by Gair Dunlop (2012)
5. Sea Shanties collated by Francis McKee (2008).
6. He Who Sleeps Dines by London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchsrist & Jo Joelson, 2011)
7. The Thetford Travelling Menagerie by DodoLab (Andrew Hunter & Lisa Hirmer, 2011)

1. The Fact of the Matter by Anne Tallentire & Monica Ross (2000)
2. Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein – 4 books (1914/2008)
3. Play Guide – Outside The Box by Proboscis (2013)
4. Phantom Shifts: Performance Notations by Aaron Williamson (2000)
5. Recollections of Geo. Benford & O’Shea by Alf & Nance Wood (2014)
6. Landscape 3 Acts: Return • Dispersal • Circulation by Kathryn Yusoff (2006)
7. The New Wizard of the West by Chauncy Montgomery M’Govern (1899/2013)

1. River Gap by Ben Eastop (2011)
2. State of the Union by Robert Ransick (2009)
3. Landscapes In Dialogue: reflections by Alice Angus (2010)
4. A Manual for Maverick Machines by Karen Martin (2007)
5. – – – – by Michael Atavar (2002)
6. The Show by desperate optimists (2011)
7. Skyline & Sightlines by Simon Pope (2011)

1. Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776/2008)
2. Hard Hearted Hannah: Classics from Nowhere (Part 1 of 6) by Cartoon de Salvo (2010)
3. The 36 Stratagems by anonymous (c.1600s/2009)
4. Seven Days in Seven Dials: A Week in the Life of London’s Cultural Quarters (1 of 3) by Dan Thompson et al (2010)
5. Remix Reconvex Reconvexo by Karla Brunet (2010)
6. Towards Psychonutrition by John Hartley (2011)
7. Layered City As Material: Underside by Alex Deschamps-Sonsino et al (2010)

1. Double culpability/ double subjectivity: Thomson & Craighead’s A Short Film about War by Lisa Le Feuvre (2010)
2. Dal Riata – A Little Tactile History Of A Scottish Kingdom by Alastair Somerville (2014)
3. A Conversation Between Trees by Active Ingredient (2011)
4. Excavations in the Temple Precinct of Dangeil, Sudan by Julie Anderson & Salah Mohamed Ahmed (2010)
5. Beasts and Super Beasts by Saki [H H Munro] (1914/2008)
6. Recollections by Harold Lun (2014)
7. Trail Song by Julie Myers (2009)

1. Dispersals by Gair Dunlop (2013)
2. making/do by Jane Prophet (2011)
3. The New Worker’s Songbook Songwriters’ Workbook for New Worksongs! by Tor Lukasik-Foss (2011)
4. If London Were Like Venice Oh! That It Were!” by Somers L. Summers (1899/2012)
5. Phantom Tomes from an imaginary library by Clara Angus Lane & Giles Lane (2017)
6. Blakewalk 3 by Tim Wright (2009)
7. Spaces and Places of Convergence by Anne Galloway (2006)
8. Dominion Dundas by Seth (2009)
9. Whisker Issue One by Hazem Tagiuri et al (2013)
10. Aerial Stories: notes about gravity, bodies and the view out the window by Louise K Wilson (2005)
11. Out of it, Into It by Deborah Levy (2002)
12. Bottle Orchestra by Tony White (2007)
13. Hackney Rebel by Dawes Gray (2014)
14. An A-Z of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes – A by Marie-Anne Mancio (Part 1 of a 16 book set, 2009)
15. The Robinson Institute by Patrick Keiller (2002) 
16. The Cabinet of Alchemical Curiosities by Joyce Majiski & Zea Morvitz (2019)
17. Waiting For Crisis by Will Davies (2009)
18. The Psychogeography of Zeros and Ones by Stewart Home (2002)
19. Picnic: order, ambiguity and community by Kevin Harris (2011)
20. Voiceover by Mohini Chandra (2002)
21. Poets from the Horizon: Scrapbook of Words by Poets of New Horizons Centre, Peter Baxter & Rosie Knight (2015)
22. Single Step Guide to Success – Day Planning by Heath Bunting (2006)
23. The Life and Adventures of the Celebrated Walking Stewart: including his travels in the East Indies, Turkey, Germany, and America by a Relative (1822/2010)
24. specious spacious by William Firebrace (2002)
25. Travelling Through Layers by Alice Angus, Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods (2009)
26. Systems/Layers by Nurri Kim & Adam Greenfield (2011)
27. Areopagitica by John Milton (1644/2013)
28. Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition by Professor William Starling (Andrew T Hunter), Lisa Hirmer, Leila Armstrong, Josie Mills, Hazem Tagiuri & Giles Lane (3 books, 2012)

From the Archives
This month we have selected small numbers of 5 books (of over-prints and tests) to be distributed among the subscribers. They are by very different users of bookleteer as well as representing dramatically different subject matter and range in date of creation from early 2010 right up to February 2013. From whimsical tweets, to researched blogging, artists working alongside people with disabilities and researchers working with communities to document and record their heritage, to a catalogue of art and craft practice.

Stories in Their Place 1 : The Makers of Leeds by Matt Edgar is the first volume in a projected series of three collecting together blog posts written between 2009 and 2013. This book gathers together some stories of Leeds’ heroes, its industrial and scientific pioneers.

My Brother, My Sister by Joyce Majiski. A group of young people who have siblings with disabilities were brought together in a series of gatherings and asked about their lives. They were asked the following questions: list the things you like or admire about your sibling, create a timeline of your life, list the things that you don’t like, or things that annoy you about your brother or sister. What things do other people say about your sibling? This book is a compilation of these responses.

Greenhill Historical Society : Digital Storytelling Guide by Gillian Cowell is a practical guide to recording and sharing stories with and by communities. It was part of a research project by Gillian with the community in Greenhill, Stirling.

Cosmo China 20th Anniversary by Josie Firmin. Our neighbour and friend, Josie Firmin (daughter of Bagpuss creator Peter Firmin) has run the Cosmo China shop in Bloomsbury for over 20 years. To celebrate their 20th anniversary exhibition we helped Josie put together a book of works by ceramic artists featuring in the show.

Cummerbundery Volume 1 : The Collected Tweets of Brandon Cummerbund by Russ Bravo. Brandon Cummerbund was the Henry Pooterish alter ego of Russ Bravo. The book collects about a year’s worth of tweets written in the persona of Brandon Cummerbund during 2009/10, with illustrations culled from Victorian magazines.

Click on the links to find out more about each one, read them online or download, print out and make up your own copies.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PERIODICAL HERE
Treat yourself to something lovely each month – an enigmatic, eclectic package of beautifully printed books dropping through your letterbox. Get inspired and create and share your own publications on bookleteer to take part too. We’re currently aiming to reach 50 subscriptions – with free copies of artists bookworks for every new annual subscriber.

Material Conditions: Epilogue is both a companion to those books – for those who read it, for the artists involved – and, as a pleasant paradox, an introduction for those who are not familiar with them. Five of the original contributors – Sarah Butler, Jane Prophet, Karla Brunet, Janet Owen Driggs & Jules Rochielle and Ruth Maclennan – have created new pieces for this publication, as they look back on the series, reflecting on their book and those by the other artists. Far from mere commentary, these responses are works in their own right, and are as poetic and profound as the initial eight books.

It’s also the first publication to launch the Periodical, to suggest the kind of iterative and experimental forms we hope to see being made and shared with bookleteer. As Giles stated eloquently in his ‘manifesto of sorts’, we’re striving for publishing as conversation; despite the finality of its title, this book can be seen as only the most recent part of a process. Here’s hoping for more.

More and more beautiful, thought-provoking and inspiring eBooks are being created with bookleteer all the time so, with a nod to such illustrious forebears as William Hogarth, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens we’re creating the Periodical, a regular monthly publication to share some of the best examples – from the most beautifully designed, illustrated and written to the most experimental uses of bookleteer, its API and what can be done with the format.
Update : check out the new bookleteer Library page to browse what people have made.

For a small monthly or one-off annual subscription (see below), you can receive by post a different printed eBook each month crowdsourced from bookleteer. Our target is to launch the Periodical with at least 100 subscribers in October 2012, selecting and printing a new eBook each month for distribution. Whilst we build up the subscriptions we’ll be sending subscribers a choice eBook every month selected from among those we’ve previously printed for projects such as Professor Starling’s Expedition, Material Conditions, City As Material, As It Comes, Agencies of Engagement and others.

What Will Subscribers Receive?
The Periodical will be a monthly delight landing on your doorstep – you can expect consistent eccentricity and eclecticism in our choices. We will be seeking out the most extraordinary and unusual eBooks created and shared on bookleteer. Some will be selected by us at Proboscis, others will selected by invited curators and from time to time we’ll invite subscribers to vote for their favourite eBook to be printed and sent out as the monthly periodical. Anyone who wants to take part can contribute a book for consideration for the Periodical by signing up to bookleteer, then making and sharing an eBook. Each month we’ll post on the blog about what we’ve chosen and why – but only after we’ve sent it out, so the subscribers have the pleasure of an unexpected arrival landing on their doorstep.

Over the past 18 years Proboscis has built up a reputation for being eccentric and eclectic – for always choosing the oblique, less anticipated path. We have surprised and confounded people by building partnerships and collaborations that have taken us on a meandering journey of creativity, imagination and invention that spans a huge diversity of people, practices, places and situations. At any moment we might be found at the forefront of technology, citizen science or social media innovation (Urban Tapestries, Feral Robots, Snout, Private Reveries, Public Spaces); leading a landmark science-art collaboration (Mapping Perception); inventing new hybrid digital/physical publishing formats and platforms (Diffusion eBooks, StoryCubes, bookleteer); co-designing social innovation with grassroots communities, government and industry (Conversation & Connections, Pallion Ideas Exchange, Perception Peterborough, With Our Ears to the Ground, Sutton Grapevine); experimenting with new spaces, processes, materials and craft skills (Being In Common, As It Comes, Navigating History); working with schools (Experiencing Democracy, Everyday Archaeology) or taking a leading role in cross disciplinary research with academia (Sensory Threads, Agencies of Engagement). It will be this spirit of adventure, curiosity and exploration that will guide our curatorial choices – much as it drove the editorial policy I pursued with COIL journal of the moving image back in the 1990s.

To kickstart the Periodical we’re inviting a number of our friends, colleagues, fellow travellers and others whom we admire to explore using bookleteer themselves and to create some new publications with it that will seed the initial pool of publications from which we choose the first few issues. We’ll announce more about these soon.

Commissioned Series
To complement the crowdsourced eBooks, we are also seeking sponsors to help us commission new experimental and imaginative publications using bookleteer. These will be printed and distributed to subscribers as well as shared digitally on bookleteer for all. We’re looking for sponsors who see the opportunity that bookleteer and the Periodical offer for commissioning exciting new experiments in publishing – sharing new ideas, new knowledge and experiences in multiple ways to people all over the world. They might be themed series in themselves (following on from our previous series such as Material Conditions, City As Material, Transformations, Short Work, Liquid Geography, Species of Spaces, Performance Notations) or simply a one-off commission.
*** Please contact me for details of sponsorship opportunities.

Subscribing to the Periodical
You don’t need to use bookleteer or be signed up to subscribe and subscriptions from organisations and institutions are very welcome (email us with a purchase order to subscribe). The Periodical will be a great way to tap into the creativity generated with bookleteer, having some of its best creations delivered to your door.

Subscribers will also receive a 10% discount on any Short Run printing orders of their own (recouping their subscription by just ordering a minimum 25 copies each of 4 of their own eBooks).

Subscription Rates
UK – £3 monthly or £30 annual (Pay by Direct Debit, Barclays Pingit to 07711 069 569 or Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)
European Union – £12/€15 a quarter or £40/€50 annual (Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)
Rest of World – £15/US$24 a quarter or £50/US$80 annual (Email to Subscribe by Credit Card/Paypal etc)

Subscribe today to receive your first eBook.

Dispelling the naive notion of a vast land of unified thinking, Shi Cheng (“ten cities”) tells not the comprehensive biographies of each city, but zooms in further, allowing the reader to connect with individual voices on an almost cellular level. Yet, as the editors suggest, when looking this close it’s possible that we can all relate to the universal human themes.

Axis Design Architects have used bookleteer once again, this time for ‘Community Consultation & Neighbourhood Planning’, which showcases their work with residents during design processes (they even mention using our blank Storycubes during workshops!) as well as ‘BIM and the Affordable Passivhaus’, detailing a recent collaborative project.

Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination have also created this lovely book, entitled ’37 Shadows: Listening to children’s stories from the woods’ – a collection of stories gathered from class trips to a local park.

If you’re thinking of using bookleteer to create your own books, we’ve just slashed the cost of A6 printed books between 30%-50%, and our minimum print run is now just 25 copies. Check out the price estimator to see how much it would cost you. Get cracking!

After concocting a brilliant, Terry Pratchett inspired scenario for future book technologies to diffuse any stale printed vs digital debates, Harkaway outlines what he believes is the real manifesto for books:

          “What is the future of the book? A physical object which communicates with the digital realm; a paper book which has an electronic shadow. A hybrid which sits easily in the on and offline world. 
”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

It caught my interest as Giles and I have written a ‘speculative fiction’ piece for City As Material 2 (part of our collection of investigations, observations and musings on the cities we visited with Professor Starling, Dodolab and co, almost ready to go to print) which is rooted in distinct locations and events and informed by real-world experiences.

Despite all that flows in and out of these places over time – and indeed Hackney – they seem to maintain a certain character which influences those that live in them or pass through, seeping into creative works regardless of the author’s intent. I’m looking forward to picking up a copy, and will be keeping a keen eye out for the next offering from Influx Press.

Read a nice little interview they did with BookMachine here.

Cue lengthy pause for breath.

Aside from being a fascinating read, it chimes with our aims for the City As Material series – to temporarily put aside our daily travel routines and concerns, the well trodden routes and second nature responses to familiar buildings and spaces, so that we may discover hidden facets of the city and in turn create work inspired by them. Instead of being blindly directed by technology, we use it to document our shared experiences, and evoke new forms of engagement with the places we live in and roam.

Speaking of which, we’re just in the process of finishing the books from City As Material 2. Stay tuned!

‘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.

A very clever idea, this.

DOG EAR is a magazine in the form of a concertina bookmark, with ten slim pages of writing and illustration selected from online contributions. It’s available for free from independent bookshops and libraries (cunningly hidden between the pages of books to perk up surprised readers, I like to imagine).

I love the way the content must fit the unusual dimensions of the magazine. Rather than being a restriction, it seems to inspire imaginative uses of space, containing drawings akin to comic book panels, and flash fiction. There’s also snippets of funny overheard comments and quote-worthy status updates, the latter making messages borne on the most transitory of mediums appear more like transcribed responses from interviewed authors, or the one-sentence reviews that adorn film and theatre posters, simply by harnessing the fleeting digital in print.

DOG EAR reminds me of “reverse shoplifting”, where people plant copies of their books in shops or libraries – subversive D.I.Y distribution. I fancy the idea of self-publishing writers creating their own collections with bookleteer, then quietly slipping them into the bookshelves of esteemed literary establishments. Using any means to spread the word.