booktwo.org

I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year.

Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word - and think about holding an event!

The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind.

So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had printed by Lulu - a replica edition for my own use. It cost £5, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

If you’d like to do the same, here’s the blank, numbered interior pdf for a 200pp paperback notebook (what Lulu calls Pocket B&W, Perfect Bound, 10.795cm x 17.463cm). And if you have InDesign CS2+, here’s a blank cover file, complete with bleed and spine correctly sized for 200pp (I’m pretty sure this is copyright violation, so you’ll have to scan your own favourite cover).

Note that I messed up the bleed a little, trying to preserve the edges of Games’ design, but trial and error will out.

I’m starting to see the internet as an (admittedly very slow) cornucopia machine (yes, I’ve been overdosing on the Stross again). The number of web services that let you customise ‘things’ - and sell them on - is growing rapidly, and has quite profound consequences for traditional first-order (manufacturer) and even second-order (designer) producers. And quite interesting ones for the rest of us.

Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, Wordpress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography.

I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the Wordpress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books.

Marber is a real labour of love, and I’ve been working on it for some time. Despite setting up tens of Wordpress installations, all with customs themes, this is my first publicly-available theme, and I look forward to seeing how it fares. You can find out a lot more about the theme in a longer introduction over at Times Emit.

→ Marber Demo
→ Marber Info, Download & Instructions

Some people are going to hate me for this, but I think it’s great: The 250GB Book.

I did agonise over cutting up the book. I did reject several others in the charity shop because they were too nice to do it too, even if they were just going to rot on the shelf anyway. I did cut myself several times. Still.

I also recently ordered one of these, and I’m waiting for it to arrive. Any suggestions as to what I should do with it when it does?

Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement.

Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos - an open-access, distributed literary festival - and turning it into a template that anyone can use to set up their own festival. We’ll be using the same kind of tools - the power of the internet and free software - to create a resource for all.

We’ve already had plenty of outside interest in London Lit Plus and we want to use the momentum to build new and exciting literary cultures. We’ll need your help, so stay tuned.

Images courtesy of Yaniv Golan and Robert Brook, via Creative Commons.

I’ve been playing with Twitter recently (and if you’re a regular reader, feel free to join me). Initially, I thought it was annoying and intrusive - and it still is - but it’s also such a simple, open and versatile platform, that lots of interesting things can come of it. And nothing gets that much use from people unless it has something going on. Does it?

Some good examples of cool stuff made with Twitter include BBC News Feeds, Weather tracking, and Twitter Tube Updates.

So, in the interest of forcing lit into every crack of the e-ther, I present Swotter: a tool for reading books to Twitter, and through Twitter, to the world.

At the moment, Swotter is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, line by line, to Twitter and to all booktwo’s friends via the web, IM and SMS. Visit the booktwo twitter page to see what Swotter is up to and do make friends if you’re a twitter user.

If you’d like to know more about Swotter, there’s more information here.

I was recently re-reading my Masters dissertation, a rather inept analysis of the abstract classification problem: how to computationally document and classify not only the content of, say, images but also their emotional appeal and resonance. The problem was, unbeknownst to me, being solved or at least massively advanced by ad hoc systems such as tagging and folksonomies even as I wrote it. However, much of the paper was also concerned with the encoding of stories: how narrative, and the conditions that are required to make such a thing not only logically consistent but interesting, can be recorded on a computer; how it is encoded in the human mind; and the potential equivalences and interfaces between the two.

Obliquely inspired by these musings, I’d like to propose booktwo.org’s first Projects. One is a variation of the Surrealist’s Exquisite Corpse parlour game, also known as Consequences, where the first player draws the head of a body and folds the paper over to conceal their work, the next the torso, and so on. The other, more general, I like to think of as akin to British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates - a collection of bound chapters presented to the reader in a box, to be read in any order they preferred.

Both of these simple exercises provide possible models for the networked, or wiki, book - collaborative works that use the wisdom of crowds to create texts which surpass the knowledge of any individual contributor. Examples we have cited before include McKenzie Wark’s GAM3R 7H30RY and MIT’s We>Me, the former a massively-moderated work of analysis, the latter an edited, mass-authorship textbook. What I’d like to see created is the networked novel.

Plan One: Exquisite Corpus will present to the user the last few lines of an existing text, and an entry box. Only when they have added to the story as they see fit will they be able to view the text in its (temporary) entirety. Is this even possible? Can a coherent narrative develop from disparate strands? We shall see.

Plan Two: Infinite Entries will take the form of a Wiki, but unlike traditional information-bearing wikis this site will carry stories. On entrance, the visitor will be sent to one random entry containing a story, quote, or fragment, from which multiple linked paths extend. The possibilities are endless.

Comments? Thoughts? Suggestions? Please chip in. We’ll let you know as soon as the Projects are available for use…