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events news

Bookleteer at Magazine Library 10, Japan

Hot on the heels of our recent representation at the ARCHIZINES World Tour, City As Material will also be featuring in Magazine Library 10 in Japan, from May 3rd to May 13th, 2012, alongside a diverse selection of books created with bookleteer over the years.

“Magazine Library is a travelling series of events and exhibitions that celebrates print culture in all its forms, and it returns this spring for a 10th edition! For Magazine Library 10 – held for the first time at Hillside Terrace in Daikanyama – the basic premise of introducing innovative and hard-to-find international titles to Japanese audiences will continue, but this time accompanied by a series of workshops, installations, markets, and various live events.”

Check out the Magazine Library Facebook page and Flickr.

Categories
ideas & suggestions inspiration

DOG EAR: The Bookmark Zine

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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.

Categories
inspiration

Zineage Kicks

I haven’t featured any Zine related stuff on the bookleteer blog for a while now, so whilst we’re busy producing the eBooks for City As Material 2, I thought I’d share a blog I’ve just discovered.

Zineage Kicks is a behind the scenes look at a number of the early Zines of guest contributors, chronicling their conception and what it took to get them made via interviews and testimonies. It’s a side of small scale publishing that rarely gets heard, unlike the wealth of talk that surrounds the inspirations and working practices of mainstream writers, artists and designers, and might surprise people who perceive Zines to be generally low-consideration, offhand artefacts. The blog seems to have been started a few months ago, but already I can see it becoming a regularly visited bookmark, especially due to the parallels with our latest series of eBooks, Material Conditions.

Oh, and I left the most obvious comment to last… great name, eh?

Categories
events

City As Material / Archizines Live @ Friday Late, V&A – 25/11/11

Thanks to Archizines curator Elias Redstone, tomorrow night, as part of Friday Late at the Victorian & Albert Museum, and to coincide with the transfer of the collection to the National Art Library hosted there, I’ll be talking about City As Material as part of a conversation about the role independent publishing can play in celebrating overlooked and underappreciated spaces in our cities.

Coincidentally, this morning we’ve been developing our proposal for a digital “sketching tool” for collaborative book production, using content gathered from events such as City As Material. This will allow participants to aggregate and curate content from different sources, annotate and tag via themes, then automatically produce draft eBooks for shared discourse and the exchange of ideas, fostering interesting discoveries which will inform later publications.

Archizines Live starts at 8pm in the tunnel entrance, but is just one of many features of the night, this month focusing on “contemporary graphics, typography and illustration through the lens of independent publishing”. Come along!

Categories
events

Archi Zines

Archi Zines, due to open from the 5th of November at the Architectural Association, is an exhibition of international alternative and independent architectural publishing, curated by Elias Redstone. There’s an online catalog, where every publication featured is available to view online, along with specifications. The entire collection is also going to be permanently housed in the National Library at the V&A.

Aside from the obvious wealth of interesting content, particularly relevant to City As Material, I think this could act as a valuable resource of inspiration and how-to knowledge for those wanting to create their own publications, thanks to the level of detail attributed to each exhibit – I can only hope more archives like this are compiled in the future.

Image by Sue Barr

Categories
events

London Art Book Fair Picks

I paid a visit to the London Art Book Fair last Saturday at the Whitechapel Gallery, and have finally got around to writing a brief piece about it now – we’ve been swamped in the studio.

Along with large publishing houses, the fair played host to a number of small publishers and unique handcrafted artists’ books. A few of my picks…

Ruth Martin‘s charming fold-out creations.

Vicoria Browne’s (founder of Kaleid Editions) amazing sculptural pop-up book, ‘Dark Matter’.

This interesting cork cover from a/b Books (artist unknown).

Apologies for the meagre amount of photos – after taking a handful, I discovered photography was apparently FORBIDDEN. Bah.

Categories
events

Upcoming Zine Fairs

I’m giving a shout out to two upcoming zine fairs, both held on the 25th of September 2011 – an unfortunate clash, alas.

“THE BRISTOL COMIC AND ZINE FAIR

When: Sunday 25th September 2011, 12pm – 6pm
Where: Start the Bus, 7-9 Baldwin Street, Bristol, BS1 1RU (map)

FREE ENTRY

The Bristol Comic and Zine Fair brings UK self-publishers together for a one-day market, offering a wide array of comix, zines and other alternative publications. There will be stalls from individual creators, and a communal table full of work from across the small-press underground.”

It’s run by Bear Pit Zine, who describe issue 1, “Upheaval” as a “collection of comics, narrating various disruptive possibilities, imaginations, and alternative futures for the city of Bristol.” This strikes a chord with the sort of themes Proboscis have explored in the past, and aim to do in the future. I’ve just ordered a copy, as we visited Bristol as part of the City As Material series – it’ll be interesting to see an insider perspective.

There’s also…

THE SHEFFIELD ZINE FAIR, at Brezza, 10-14 Wellington Street, Sheffield, S1 4HD, from 11am to 6pm. Get in touch via sheffieldzinefair@hotmail.co.uk.

Categories
inspiration

Sketchbook Zines – Ying-Chieh Liu

I’ve found Etsy to be a great source when looking for remarkable zines, often not featured anywhere else; either a sign that unfortunately, no-one has picked up on them yet, or the author is simply satisfied with creating and making their zines available to whoever stumbles upon them. Certainly the latter can make the reader feel as if they have discovered a hidden treasure of their own volition, rather than via the many zine groups floating about the internet, or word of mouth within the community.

This couldn’t be more true for anyone viewing Ying-Chieh Liu’s reprinted sketchbooks, containing stunning, ethereal illustrations from her numerous travels. It’s an interesting concept to reproduce a personal sketchbook (in I assume, its raw form), without interpretation or much of a narrative, but when they contain such intriguing artwork it’s hard not to be engrossed.

View her Etsy store.

Categories
inspiration

Stop Sharpening Your Knives

An anthology series of poetry and illustration, Stop Sharpening Your Knives has been around for a good few years, and is currently accepting submissions for its 5th edition. I had the good fortune to hear a performance by one of its editors, poet Jack Underwood, at the launch night of the London Word Festival a few months back, who was equally hilarious and heartfelt. No doubt he’s got good taste as well, eh?

Categories
inspiration

“False Dichotomy” by Junyi Wu

Whilst perusing Etsy for interesting zines, I was taken aback by the amazing False Dictotomy by illustrator Junyi Wu, filled with sombre, yet beautiful black and white artwork, paired with scrawled passages from the work of poet Emily Dickinson. The pen and ink illustrations of flora are set against sparse white backgrounds that highlight their delicate intricacy, occasionally clouded by expressionistic smudges. Junyi describes False Dictotomy as “journal-like” – the handwritten excerpts, complete with mistakes and ink blots, adds to this feel and gives the artwork, despite its still-life subject matter, an emotional intensity that is captivating.

Preview it here, and buy it from her Etsy store.