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On Friday I met Elinor Jansz & Richard Embray from Four Corners Books. With backgrounds in publishing and the art world they came together to create one of the most beautiful small presses around.

Four Corners publish art books, with their first serious success being Come Alive!, the examining the work of Sister Corita, Catholic nun and Pop artist. Their one stated intention was “not to produce catalogues” and so the book is the primary object, with the work selected first for book and not gallery display.

However, the Come Alive! launch was…

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So it’s started again: the planes rumble overhead. The first I’ve heard is right above me now—for a few moments it drowns out the birdsong and childrens’ voices rising from the gardens below my window.

I grew up beneath the flight path of Heathrow. From my bedroom window I could read the flight numbers of the planes. There was a railway line too, the main line from Waterloo, and rail strikes or maintenance on the line frequently resulted in garden parties. No such respite from the air—until this week.

For most of us, the eruption of Eyjafjallajokull has been…

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I was recently asked by the good people at Proboscis to undertake a virtual residency, exploring their Bookleteer suite of tools. Bookleteer is described as “a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening—creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information”, and also as a form of samizdat for the twentieth century.

I’ll be further exploring the Bookleteer API in a future post. The code for the experiments can be found on the Bookleteer blog.

One of the subjects that came up in my thinking for SXSW, and which I mentioned briefly, was the…

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I should have mentioned this earlier, but I am joining the shadowy forces behind CoverSpyLondon for one week only.

If you have any tube book sightings, please follow @coverspylondon and send us a direct message.

I thank you.

I’m very pleased to announce two new Artists’ eBooks: Niven Govinden’s L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire and Kenji Siratori’s Guerilla Sex Generation.

L’histoire de Bexhill Baudelaire includes links to YouTube videos which comprise the book’s soundtrack. I’ve been a fan of Niven’s work for some time, and he approached me to see if there was something we could do with one of his stories. While the limitations of the ebook format – discussed below – didn’t allow the full expression of the ideas we had, I’m pleased to get a soundtrack in there.

Guerilla Sex Generation includes…

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