Back in January, I was approached by Art Public and asked to build an application and website as part of their Bus-Tops project. This has just gone live over at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, so it seems like a good time to talk about the project.

Bus-Tops is part of the Cultural Olympiad, and benefited from a grant from Artists Taking The Lead, a nationwide series of arts projects sponsored by the Arts Council and London 2012. In short, we’re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we’re going to let people play with them.

One part of the first stage of the project has been choosing where to put these screens, so I designed and built the Shelters site at http://bus-tops.com/shelters/, which lets Londoners register and comment on all the (2-bay) stops in the capital, and pick a top 3 they’d like to see screens installed on. The visual design of the site has been significantly enhanced by Nicolas Myers and the rest of the Bus-Tops team.

I’m incredibly excited about this project, because it brings together so many of my interests, particularly in the possibilities of networked storytelling, and in the city itself. If, as many futures admit, the city will soon be infested with screens (see writings by Chris Heathcote and Adam Greenfield) then I think we’re in a wonderful position to get some out early and say to the public: you have a right to this space too. To talk about the city, the environment, about surveillance and social history—about a huge range of things, in unexpected and delightful ways.

Over the last few months of the project, my role has been slowly changing from a primarily technical one to something more creative. I’m now the Narrative Lead, an odd title which means I’m looking at ways to wrap all the aspects of this project into a single, coherent narrative, that both explains itself, and excites and guides the public into participating. I’m wary of the clichés of “public art”, which I haven’t been shy of attacking in the past, but I believe there are aspects of this project which enable us to overcome them. The other folk on the project are brilliant and uncompromising, and we’re all going to do our best to make it extraordinary.

There are 33 boroughs in London—I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t realise that. There’s going to be at least one screen in every borough, a multi-headed networked beast emerging all over the city, outwith individual or governmental control. It’s going to be fun.

A year ago this week, I went freelance. So this seems like a good time for a recap.

In the last year I’ve been extremely lucky to work with clients including Hachette UK, Bonnier, Art Public, Six To Start, Airlock, Newspaper Club, Proboscis, Dennis Publishing, and a number of others. I’m continuing to work with clients large and small on a range of projects within publishing and in the wider spheres of art and technology, which I’ll talk about here when I can.

I’ve also spoken at Playful, SXSWi, Port Eliot and a number of industry events. In the next few months I’ll be speaking at dConstruct in Brighton, and at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

This seems like a good point to thank those who’ve been so helpful in the past year, and to reiterate that I’m always interested in hearing about and discussing new work with interesting people. My CV and portfolio are always available. Do get in touch.

Onwards.

The Museum of Obsessions accepts donations on loan from collectors, enthusiasts and the sentimental.

The things that enthral us, but which we cannot give a home to; our treasured possessions from which we cannot bear to be parted, yet cannot keep: these are the contents of the Museum. If you have no more room in your house, if you lack the means to store the essential things of your life, then the Museum was established to help you.

The contents of the Museum, even cumulatively, are worth little on the open market. The value of each item lies explicitly and only in an individual’s obsession with it. Such items are accepted on temporary loan and their return may be requested at any time.

No gift is refused, although the curators have their tastes and know their audience: the Gallery of Childrens’ Drawings is much visited and constantly rearranged; the Hall of Old Phone Chargers echoes only occasionally with the bootheels of its devotees.

By far the largest collection within the Museum of Obsessions is the book depository. Here are to be found acre upon acre of stacks, mile after mile of shelves, repositories fathoms deep. Minor works of forgotten authors, first novels, the privately published, the great, thick and well-thumbed, the worthless, the obscene.

A catholic taxonomy is employed. Classifications mean little and are subject to frequent revision. Occasionally, random storage is employed: each object, tagged, is distributed randomly among all others. In this way, the collection more closely resembles the order of the real world.

A few weeks ago, while filming Battersea Power Station from the roof of a pub, I got chatting to Katie Bonham, a ceramics artist whose recent work includes pieces fired from the mud of the Thames itself.

As a result of this encounter, I’ll be showing a short film at a pop-up exhibition this weekend, documenting the progress of my London 2010 project, which, if you haven’t been following, is an attempt to reconstruct Patrick Keiller’s 1992 film, London.

The venue is 99 Delights, one of London’s loveliest secret restaurants, so from midday til 6 on Saturday and Sunday there will be breakfasts, teas, pork pies and drinks available in the garden. If you’re in Hackney, you should come by. It’s going to be a lovely weekend.

The book-buying started on the second day, and rapidly spiralled out of control.

In the Péndulo bookstore in the Zona Rosa, less celebrated than the branch in Polanco, but nevertheless serene, caulked with climbing plants and where I breakfasted on Huevos Mexicanos and cafe con leche amid stacks of books sorted by publisher (Sexto Piso, Siglo XXI, Almadía), I picked up Wallpaper Magazine’s guide to Mexico City: useless, somewhat irritating, but mercifully small, and totemic.

From Atrio, a bookshop and gallery on Orizaba, two bilingual monographs from Editorial Diamantina, Laureana Toldeo’s Paan and Pedro Reyes’ La Nuevas Terapias Grupales, and a blank notebook from Soloblock, inscribed simply and only: “Un 10% de la població mundial es zurda. Hay más zurdos varones que mujeres, sin que se sepa por qué” which I discover later means “10% of the population of the world is left-handed, more women than men, although we don’t know why”, and explains why the title is on the ‘back’ and the barcode on the ‘front’: the book itself is left-handed.

From the Librería Pegaso in the Casa Lamm on Álvaro Obregón, a signed and numbered edition of Franco Maria Ricci’s Carrol, printed on local paper in Milan in 1976 and containing Dodgson’s collected letters—in French—and tipped-in photograph of Victorian adolescent girls. It should be noted, independently and without context, that the finest bookshops are those that give you your purchases in plain brown paper bags.

In MUCA Roma, the local offshoot of the City University’s Arts Museum, a cuban artist’s film plays out his telephoned conversations with the tourist hotels he is not allowed to visit, many of which I have visited, if not stayed in. As the receptionists list the natural and luxurious entertainments on offer to state-approved guests, photos of an American couple’s idyllic holiday in Trinidad & Tobago play out on a large screen. On the floor above, artists Liudmila & Nelson have spliced together photos of old and contemporary Havana, digitally inserting the advertising hoardings so conspicuously absent from the real city and which seem, here, to be a small price to pay for that freedom.

At Conejo Blanco, bar, restaurant and art bookstore on Amsterdam, the wide boulevard that circles the former hippodrome in Condesa, I agonise over beautiful editions of Herodotus and Lucian—in Spanish, natch—but leave instead with a gilded portfolio of photographs by Gabriel Orozco, an artist whose show at the Serpentine Gallery a couple of years ago affected me greatly, in the hope that the connection between these images and his checkerboard, graph-papered art will somehow inspire my own amateurish attempts to capture his (occasional) home city on my cameraphone.

At some point, I begin to feel that I am carrying entire Latin American forests home with me. Also, I am afflicted with a terrible need to stop and write things down, at almost every corner, slowing my passage through the city and impeding motion. I am locked in this ridiculous two-step, unable to travel more than half a block before sitting down and writing out more, papering over the last thirty feet, dripping more ink onto the street: this absurd project, this incomprehensible, incompletable urge, this terror of forgetting and compulsion to record.

This city feels solid—I can see why Jonathan feels the need to leave regularly and get out to the desert or the hills. It must be easy to be claustrophobic here, to feel that there is no escape from the city which simply extends in every direction immeasurably on all sides, the streets like cuttings scored into the earth, the endless blocks excavated like the monolithic churches of Lalibela.

Stumbling by accident into an open-air book market (this happens to me a lot) in the Parque Mexico, I find the pocket English-Spanish dictionary I have actually been looking for. Collins, 1994 and badly faded, but unlike guidebooks, dictionaries take a long time to lose their usefulness. The park is full of emo kids, who I had also been half-looking for earlier, in vain, along Insurgentes, their reputed hangout and powerbase in the ongoing war with Mexico’s goths. School is out.

Crossing Álvaro Obregón again on my way to a second-hand bookshop where I find, amid the dusty stacks, a wealth of Mexican cookery books in English, I am nearly run down by a taxicab, whose occupant, a hennaed drag queen in crop top and lurid, Winehouse eye make-up, yells at me. I love drag queens, the more crazy and foreign the better, and all I can do is grin and eventually she does too.

Later, drunk, in the gay bookstore on Hamburgo: Muchachos, photographer Miguel Chavez’s typology of Mexican queens and the myriad ways they are subverting the traditional cultural and religious hegemony of the nation (“Mexico is the Iran of Christianity”, Jonathan says). It is so thick, outsized and printed on such heavy stock that I am forced to abandon it, disguised as a gift, with my hosts upon my departure, for fear of losing everything to the overweight baggage allowance.

* * *

Anyone who comes to Mexico City expecting the frenetic, insane rush of its reputation will be surprised by Sunday morning. Walking through Roma and Condesa at 9am I have the quiet, cool streets almost entirely to myself. Down Aguascalientes and Gral. Bejamin Hill to the Bella Epoca, a former cinema transformed by the Fondo de Culturea Económica into a bookshop of IKEA modernist delight—clean, white, square shelving and palm trees and coffee tables. The FCE also publishes a range of books in translation, and I pick up Pieces of Shadow, a selection of poems by Jaime Sabines, translated by W.S. Merwin and bound in vivid green. Merwin wrote of Sabines’ poetry that what captured him was “the jarring authenticity of passion in the tone, a great cracked bell note of craving and frustration, irony and anger, outrage and black humour all jangled at once, unabashed, unsweetened, unappeased, and all of it essential to the rest.”

Sabines himself wrote: “Some day I want to sing of this immense poverty of our life, this nostalgia for things that are simple, this luxurious voyage upon which we have embarked toward tomorrow without having loved enough yesterday.”

In the Museo del Arte Moderno in the Bosque de Chapultepec, filled now with ambling families, a series of wonderful exhibitions. In the (surprisingly academic) notes on ‘Mexican Abstraction, 1950-79′, intense, vividly coloured, geometric and brightly suggestive, Kazuya Sakai is quoted: “La pintura no es sina condensación de ideas, pictoriaso filosóficos. Posiblemento pintar es, ante todor, pensa.” Francisco Moyao’s Artesujeto – Sujetoarte takes this to its logical conclusion: two simple, white, blank sheets of paper pressed with lines and dots, the artist actively creating a blank canvas, a space for the viewer, or the next artist, to think their own thoughts.

More exhibiton notes, this from ‘Hecho en Casa’, object-based production from the mid-80s to today: “Between 1923 and 1947 Kurt Schwitters worked on something that he called the ‘Merzbau’: a work that occupied all the space that contained it. It was made of large three-dimensional assemblages which involved different kinds of objects and materials. In it, the art object and the space around it were integrated into a single language or plastic project.”

Perhaps in the merzbau is to be found a useful analogue for Mexico City itself; its solidity, its integration with and essentialness to itself, its denial of a separation between the individual and the urban environment. Here, people pose for photographs in front of paintings as if they are landmarks or famous vistas on a long tour of foreign places.

‘Remedios Varo and Literature’, an exhibition of Varo’s painting curated with accompanying texts by the poet Alberto Blanco, quotes the 19th Century philosopher Paul Vitalis Troxler: “There’s no doubt there is another world, but that world is in this one, and to fulfill it completely it’s necessary to acknowledge it well and make a career from it.” Blanco notes that “Remedios Varo always understood that Art is something besides the artwork: the artifact. … [Varo] believed in knowledge which was capable of being encoded; not just into a piece of art, but into a piece made with art.”

After all that, the museum bookshop is a disappointment, evidently having forgotten the lessons of Fernando Gamboa, the founding curator of the Museum and subject of a small exhibition which strives to emphasise his commitment to the total integration of museology and the museum experience, even down to commissioning well-known illustrators to design the stationary with which he planned each exhibition. I leave with only a postcard, having intended to purchase at least three catalogues, which are non-existent. The postcard shows, in poor reproduction, Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds.

The Creation of the Birds is extraordinary: a figure, part-owl or dressed and masked as an owl with wide eyes and feathered limbs, sits at a table in a bare room. From the mouth of a miniature guitar, slung round its neck, whose opening sits above the heart, extends a cord or narrow tube, which runs to a pen, with which the figure draws or paints. The ink for this drawing is produced by an arrangement of flasks which appear to draw in moisture from outside via a funnel which extends through a small porthole, as well as from the atmosphere of the room itself, depositing red, green, and blue ink on an artist’s palette, alongside the sheet of parchment on the table. On the parchment, the figure’s pen draws multi-hued birds which, when the light of the moon is focused on them through a triangular magnifying glass, take flight and exit the room through the window.

This transfiguration through light is seen too in Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, wherein the choice between peace and war, socialism and capitalism, is framed through two enormous lenses. (As Chris notes after our return to Europe from the Americas, “the light is different here”—different too in New York, where Rockefeller, who commissioned the first version of this mural, destroyed it for its unsuitable political message.) Perhaps Varo’s birds are the same ones released by Benjamín Torres in his installation Guía de Campo (2008), which excises every illustration from a book of bird identification and sets them free across the green walls of the gallery.

In the next room to the bookshop, a dark negative which might be responsible for sucking the real thing’s energy away, is installed Marianna Dellekamp’s Biblioteca de la Tierra, a collection of book-sized vitrines filled with earth, sand, gravel and pieces of wood whose origins—Oaxaca, Paris, Saudi Arabia—are engraved on their spines.

I find myself, finally, back at Travazares, the bar beneath the Atrio on Orizaba, around the corner from Plaza Luis Cabrera. It was this neighbourhood that formed the background to William Burroughs’ sojourn in Mexico City in the early 1950s; where he began Queer, the novel which developed the style of ‘routines’ characterising the more celebrated Naked Lunch; and where he shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a disastrous game of William Tell, necessitating his flight from the country and casting a shadow over the rest of his life and his artistic output.

Burroughs liked Mexico City for its quack doctors who had few qualms about prescribing him the opiates he required to write—to function. Even if such purchases required long trips across the city, their undertaking could not be questioned: for all the distraction and the damage wrought, they are both fuel for and subject of his work, the backdrop to everything in which he engaged. Dragging myself, footsore, from bookshop to bookshop in a succession of unfamiliar cities feels much the same.

So, I’m off to the SXSW Interactive festival in a couple of days, where I’ll be going to lots of talks, meeting people, and appearing on a panel. You should come to that if you’re around on Tuesday. It should be fun.

The panel’s about post-digital design, or what we could and should be thinking about when we can blend physical and digital formats in new and interesting ways. As part of my own preparations and thinking, I (surprise!) made a book.

The idea is, it’s a book to last you the week, through SXSW. A one-time pad for the festival. Customisable. Personal. Travel and accommodation details. You’re probably going to need those a lot:

Maps of Austin – different scales, and several basic grid plans. Useful for scribbling directions on, as well as navigation.

Planning diary. Schedule. All the talks that are happening, alongside your maps and diary. (Yup, that’s what the XML was for.)

I’ve never been to Austin or Texas before, so I stuck Wikipedia’s entry on Austin in there, and the Lonely Planet chapter on Texas (which you can buy and download here – nice). I did get in touch with Lonely Planet to discuss licensing this properly, but we ran out of time. One of the reasons this book is not for sale.

Finally, I wanted to use the book as my notebook for the conference – trying to avoid carrying around a guidebook, and a programme, and a schedule, and notes. (Remember the DIY Classic Notebooks?) There are 70-odd blank pages at the back, together with some helpful suggestions on what to write if you get bored or distracted.

That’s it. Pulled together in a few hours at the last minute despite planning it for ages. HTML -> XML -> InDesign for the talks schedule. Simple PDF resizing for the LP section. Basic-as layout for the rest, with some running heads and page numbers to minimise endless searching. Printed 10 through Lulu – £5 a pop, plus £25 to expedite shipping (because I left it until the last possible moment). Arrived in 4 working days. Done.

More photos at Flickr. More thoughts at SXSW and after. Do drop me a line if you’re going to be around.

[This article is now available in Belorussian, provided by ucallweconn]

UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won!

Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…

Accordingly, I took myself to Bermondsey the following weekend, and did what I always do when I have a nose for something but little notion of the quarry. Accompanied by Rimbaud – borrowed from the London 2010 project – I went for a walk.

A quiet, cold but clear Sunday took me along the river, from Tower Bridge over St Saviour’s Dock, past Cherry Gardens and St Marychurch, the Mayflower monument and Brunel’s tunnel, into the reformatted docklands of the Rotherhithe peninsular. It’s a strange landscape, under-populated and defined by water: the filled-in docks that lie just beneath your feet and the constant cry of seabirds. I found the narrative I needed, and a destination: Stave Hill, a strange and marvellous earthwork that rises impossibly from the spoil.

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

There were many sites, too, that it wasn’t possible to include – Cuckold’s Point, on the far side of Rotherhithe, fell just outside the realm of inquiry, but I’ll be sure to return in the Summer for the Horn Fair Procession. I thought the journey had ended at Stave Hill, but I was given one more sign as I returned to the underworld – as if a sign was needed: the great bulk of the Harmsworth Quays print works, “home of quality newspapers” that rises up at Canada Water. A final treat for those who follow the map.

You can pick up a copy of A Wide Arm Of Sea from the Design Museum from now until the 6th of June. As ever, huge thanks to Newspaper Club for indulging my ramblings (and I have some beta invites if you’re looking to make something yourself) – and there’s more about the paper and the awards on their blog.

More photos of the walk and the newspaper at Flickr.

… And there are still limited copies of Immanent In The Manifold City available for sale.

You know when you’re reading an author, and you get the sense you could reach across time and space, and shake their hand? Like if you met them in the street, or in a shop queue, you could talk to them, and get on famously, and not run out of things to talk about, because you would talk about books, and the reading of them, and the treasure of their stories. (Other writers I feel this way about: Gabriel Josipovici; and Yevgeny Kharitonov, sending up his own little fireworks in a locked room.)

Like Kharitonov, Krzhizhanovsky was banned from publication in his own lifetime, but through the kindness of NYRB Classics and the generosity of Joanne Turnbull’s translation, we can read him now. And so I excerpt thus, from the story “The Bookmark”:

The other day, as I was looking through my old books and manuscripts tied tight with twine, it again slipped under my fingers: a flat body of faded blue silk and needlepoint designs trailing a swallowtail train. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time: my bookmark and I. Events of recent years had been too unbookish and had taken me too far from those cabinets crammed with harbariumized meanings. I abandoned the bookmark between lines as yet unread and soon forgot the feel of its slippery silk and the delicate scent of printing ink emanating from its soft and pliant body wafered between the pages. I even forgot… where I had forgotten it. Thus do long sea voyages part sailors from their wives.

True, books had crossed my path here and there: rarely at first, then more often; but they did not read bookmarks. These were travelling signatures glued pell-mell into crookedly cut covers; along the rough and dirty paper, breaking ranks with the lines, brown-gray letters—the colour of military broadcloth—rushed; these reeked of rancid oil and glue. With these crudely produced bareheaded bundles, one did not stand on ceremony: shoving a finger in between the sloppily pasted signatures, one tore the pages apart the better to leaf through them, tugging impatiently at the raggedy, tooth-edged margins. One consumed these texts posthaste, without reflecting or delectating: both books and two-wheeled carts were needed then strictly to supply words and ammunition. The one with the silk train had no business here.

And now again: the ship was in port, its gangway down. Library ladders scanning the spines of books. The statics of frontispieces. Silence and green reading-room lampshades. Pages rubbing against pages. And, finally, the bookmark: just as it had been, all that time ago— except that now the silk was even more fade, and its needlepoint design covered in dust.

I pulled it out from under a paper mound and placed it in front of me—on the edge of the desk; the bookmark looked affronted and slightly grumpy. But I smiled at it with warmth and affection: to think of all the voyages we had taken together—from meanings to meanings, from this set of signatures to that. Now, for instance, I recalled our difficult ascent from ledge to ledge of Spinoza’s Ethics—after almost every page I had left my bookmark alone, squeezed between the metaphysical layers; then the breathlessness of Vita nova where, at passages linking one poem to the next, my patient bookmark had often to wait until the emotion that had taken the book out of my hands subsided, allowing me to return to the words. And I couldn’t help remembering… But all of this concerns only the two of us, me and my bookmark: I’ll stop.

Especially as it is important in practice—since any encounter obligates—to repay the past given us with some bit of the future. In other words, rather than tucking the bookmark away at the book of the drawer, I should include my old friend in my next reading; instead of a series of memories, I should offer my guest another bundle of books.

And Krzhizhanovsky’s discourse on the bookmark, and the process of reading, like a long journey (Sinclair’s walks, or Josipovici’s opposite of bicycling), reminded me of another piece of writing, that I had to hold in my head all day, and spend an hour tracking along the shelves, retracing those old journeys, back a decade to a dog-ear I had left in another house, another time, on another trip.

Albert Hourani, in his History of the Arab Peoples, quotes a legal and medical scholar of Baghdad, ‘Abd al-Latif (1162/3—1231), on the scholar as one of the ideal types of man. I copied it out then, in that house, and have done so again, now. Here you go:

I commend you not to learn your sciences from books unaided, even though you may trust your ability to understand. Resort to professors for each science you seek to acquire; and should your professor be limited in his knowledge take all that he can offer, until you find another more accomplished than he. You must venerate and respect him… When you read a book, make every effort to learn it by heart and master its meaning. Imagine the book to have disappeared and that you can dispense with it, unaffected by its loss… One should read histories, study biographies and the experience of nations. By doing this, it will be as though, in his short life space, he lived contemporaneously with peoples of the past, was on intimate terms with them, and knew the good and bad among them… You should model your conduct on that of the early Muslims. Therefore, read the biography of the Prophet, study his deeds and concerns, follow in his footstep, and try your utmost to imitate him… You should frequently distrust your nature, rather than have a good opinion of it, submitting your thoughts to men of learning and their works, proceeding with caution and avoiding haste… He who had not endured the stress of study will not taste the joy of knowledge… When you have finished your study and reflection, occupy your tongue with the mention of God’s name, and sing His praises… Do not complain if the world should turn its back on you, it would distract you from the acquisition of excellent qualities… know that learning leaves a trail and a scent proclaiming its possessor; a ray of light and brightness shining on him, pointing him out…

The main reason for this is that in August I went freelance, and now work on a greater range of projects than I did previously. Many of these come from outside the publishing world, and booktwo provides a space to write about those things too.

And so. There’s been a bit of a flurry of weeknotes recently. Individuals, teams and companies writing up their work, their experiences, their hopes and fears. This seems good, so I thought I’d do an annual review. The week is probably not going to happen. And I’m going to talk in a fairly light-hearted way, about work, and about other things. It’s almost New Year.

January seems like a long time ago. The booktwo year started with Bookcamp (photo CC Matt Biddulph). This was good. I should have known that hooking up with Jeremy Ettinghausen and Russell Davies would produce interesting things, but I was still amazed at the range of people that came. I still tell people how it’s the only place I’ve ever seen an author, an agent, a publisher and a retailer all sitting around a table, having a proper chat. Bookcamps have since happened abroad. We should probably do another one. I met a lot of people who went on to shape the year. If you want to know more, Billy and Hugh have longer write-ups.

And then I went to India.

(Photo by Peter. Mine are here.)

I haven’t written much about India, which is a real shame. I went as one of the shortlisted UK Young Publishers of the Year, courtesy of the British Council. It was incredible – not least because of a great bunch of people: Pablo Rossello, of the BC, Jessica Purdue from Orion, Nii Parkes of Flipped Eye, my Apt colleague Peter Collingridge, agent Lucy Luck and Davy Nougarede of Heavy Entertainment. We met all kinds of publishers, from little independents to the major corporations, as well as retailers and everyone in between. It reignited my love for India, which I first visited ten years ago, and got me excited about the possibilities.

When working in one small corner of the industry, and frequently alone, and sometimes in opposition to most of the industry, it’s good to be reminded that the industry is nevertheless very broad, and filled with people who are passionate about what they do, and we’re all in this together. When you couple that with the extraordinary changes taking place in India, you see the vast scope of what literature means at all these different levels. I hope I get to go back soon, and I still want to develop some of the connections made when I was there. It’s important not to let these die.

If I had to pick one thing that made an abiding impression on me, from a business perspective, it’s probably the stories by, and the story of, Chetan Bhagat – one of the few things I did write up. Bhagat’s story shows that even in the vastness of India, it’s still possible to make a big impact through innovation, fearlessness and conviction.

On a personal level, the people that I met – like the folk at Seagull, Zubaan and Katha – were a huge inspiration. As were the guys at Pegs N Pints – who got their wish four months later and I wish I’d been there to celebrate.

The first half of the year at Apt yielded a range of fascinating projects. The Bookseer, which started out as an in-house experiment, went viral, garnering great interest across the web, and from some commercial entities. It may yet evolve further. The real meat, however, was Enhanced Editions, our advanced ebook reader for the iPhone.

We worked on Enhanced Editions for over a year, the product of an ongoing conversation about ebooks and the role of publishers. I learned a lot: about project management, about the iPhone platform, about development. It was good working in a bigger team that included different roles, all working towards the same objective. The reaction was brilliant: our Nick Cave app received awesome feedback, and I look forward to seeing how the books do in future.

Throughout the year I’ve also been working on smaller, side projects. I built a website for Detained Lives, a really important charitable campaign, that I’m pleased to see making progress highlighting the horror of indefinite detention. I built a site for my friend Rafa, a great photographer. These projects are good for stretching the muscles, trying out design and development ideas. They make a pleasant change.

There have been a range of print-based projects too. The Tweetbook, of course, which generated a quite absurd amount of coverage. And the newspapers – for Book Club Boutique in the summer, and for myself at the end of the year: Immanent in the Manifold City – which, due to popular demand, will be going into a second printing in January. Probably.

The newspapers were a real joy to work on, combining my own ongoing love of print and print technologies with the privilege of working with some very, very smart folk – the Really Interesting Group. I’ve seen (and helped a tiny bit) the Newspaper Club offering develop, and am as excited as anyone to see it released in the New Year.

I first met Russell of RIG in 2008, when he asked me to speak at the second Interesting, and he was kind enough to ask me back to MC – badly – at Interesting 09. But the Interesting connections have been fundamental to the sort of work I’ve been doing – and the gigs I’ve been getting – throughout 2009. People are good, and I’m really excited that I’ll be working at a desk in the RIG (and BERG) offices from January, surrounded by clever, clever people.

One of the highlights of the year, which resulted from my appearance at Interesting, was Playful, for which I had to throw something together in a week after realising my intended talk had been done the previous year. The result – A New THEORY of AWESOMENESS and MIRACLES, concerning CHARLES BABBAGE, HEATH ROBINSON, MENACE and MAGE – went down rather well on the day, and was picked up by Boing Boing, Gizmodo and others, which was hugely gratifying.

Playful Photo CC Roo Reynolds

Meanwhile, other projects rumbled on. Bookkake, which I set up in 2008, has yet to produce any new books since the first tranche – although there are plans – but it has provided a venue to continue ruminating on literature, censorship, poetry and, of course, filth in the form of the Bookkake Blog. I hadn’t done much writing on literature since the closure of the original STML blog some years ago, so it was extremely satisfying, and creatively useful, to do so again, whether it was ruminating on the lost gothic classics of English lit, cataloging dirty poetry, silly cooking, or designing subversive flat-pack furniture. These explorations of the edges of literature – the literature I love, and want to learn more about, are, I think, an essential part of any new business, and I hope I’m able to continue them.

Writing itself is something I want to do a lot more of in the New Year, whether its pitching articles on my specialities, or writing fiction – like I did for Bad Idea magazine’s Future Human night back in September – a hugely satisfying experience.

Actual real projects have also been going on under the radar. bkkeepr continues to chug along nicely, if quietly, and there are some exciting plans for its future which I can’t wait to get started on. There are a couple of other things too, which I apparently need codenames for.

So AwesomeSecretProject#1 just got turned down for funding, but I’m confident it will make it through in the Spring – it’s a real business, with a plan and everything, and it fills a niche in the publishing industry that I’ve been eyeing up for some time. It would have real benefits to publishers and readers, as well as – I can dream – actually pay me a salary, which would be A Good Thing. If I can learn to talk Business, and explain it a bit better, it might get interesting.

AwesomeSecretProject#2 has taken a bit of a beating this year, and I don’t think it’s going to happen in any way that I envisaged it. But I’ve learned a lot trying to make it happen, about the publishing business and what it means to be a publisher – the responsibilities and the risks thereof, when to take things personally, and when to let them go – and I’m going to take those experiences, and do something else with them in the New Year.

(There’s a story to the table)

Going freelance has been another opportunity to figure out exactly what it is that I do. I still don’t have the answer. I thought I’d be working on more projects that cross the boundaries between publishing and technology – but, with the exception of the newspapers, most jobs have fallen into one or the other camp. It seems to be getting increasingly hard to get cross-media projects off the ground, as a third party, as publishers get more savvy and take more of this stuff in-house. This is undoubtedly A Good Thing but it’s meant I’ve been working more on the tech side – I recently did all the frontend HTML/CSS for the new ITV Player, for example, as well as other things I can’t talk about.

In turn, this has left me more energy to devote to more esoteric projects, like Mattins and Artists’ eBooks, which have been great but decidedly non-revenue-generating – while I don’t doubt they will lead to, and inspire, things that are. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m in this to enjoy myself, after all.

So, 2009 was Good – and I’ve probably missed loads of stuff – and here’s to 2010. I have some really interesting projects lined up for the New Year, which you’ll probably hear about at some point. My general mood swings wildly between total elation and utter terror – but the emphasis is on the former, and that’s the freelance life, I guess.

I’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to, and what you’re doing in the future. If you’re interested in working with me, please get in touch: I’m always looking for new projects. You can check out my (almost) full portfolio, and I’m very easy to find and get hold of.

As a bonus, here’s (almost) everything I cooked in 2009.

Happy New Year. May it be full of joy.

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”.

A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, his own, multitudinous, works forgotten, but his footsteps echoing through the recollections of his contemporaries. I’ve wanted to do something with him for ages.

When Newspaper Club offered me another chance to make a newspaper – following the summer’s Book Club Boutique paper – I decided to attempt that something.

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road – despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

Drawing upon OpenStreetMap, styled with Cloudmade to resemble antique atlases, I collected these routes and anecdotes, and present them here in newspaper form. But the newspaper is a foldable, pliable thing, just as Stewart himself seemed to fold the cityscape around himself. And so we have maps that can fold upon themselves to delineate not only the narrator’s journey, but that of Stewart himself. Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.

There is also an introductory essay – a meditation on ubiquity, immanence and time travel, drawing on Stewart’s life, Jewish mysticism, Deleuzian metaphysics and special relativity – together with selected quotes and sources.

The first edition of the newspaper is produced in a limited run of five copies. Following investigation and use, there may be a second edition at some future point in time – or space…

Update: This newspaper is now for sale.

Full image set at Flickr →

A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the world for shorter, regular podcasts – micropodcasts if you will – to fill the shorter gaps: bus stops, changing trains, a stroll to the shops, that kind of thing.

Lots of non-podcast content works well at this length – things like Thought For The Day (OK, there is a podcast of that) or Channel 4′s 3 Minute Wonder films.

TFTD – or rather, the Humanist Society’s secular version, Thought For The World – collided in my head with the daily readings we had to do at school. At my (rather posh) school, every student was issued a mini Gideon Bible on arrival, and the first lesson of every day was 5 minutes longer than the rest to accommodate a mandatory daily reading. “Today’s lesson is taken from Matthew Chapter 5, beginning at the third verse…” and so on. Together with the increased ease of creating podcasts these days, I thought I’d give it a go – with a literary bent, obviously.

Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract. Audioboo takes care of uploading, hosting and syndicating each “boo”, and I can also extract this quite simply by munging the RSS to a standalone site with Feedburner and a bit of Simplepie tweaking. The choice of extract is almost-random – I like finding bits I’ve dog-eared in something I read a long time ago, or a good bit I read the night before, or I might just read the first couple of pages (five minutes is a lot shorter than you think).

I hate the sound of my own voice, but I’m aware that’s pretty common, so I’ll let it go. I’m also not a great reader-out-loud in general, and given it’s first thing in the morning and I’m only half way through the first caffeine shot, it’s not exactly broadcast-quality material. I stumble occasionally, and mispronounce stuff. But it is a nice thing to do for myself, and some people might like it too.

So, here’s Mattins: a daily reading. If you like that kind of thing.

Micropodcasting is officially easy. I look forward to seeing more things made this way.

I don’t know much about games, so I’ll be talking about books. Surprise! But they will be playful games, or playful literatures, or playful ways of constructing literatures… or something.

Get a ticket!

UPDATE: due to a previous speaker on the same subject, I didn’t talk about books, but about AWESOMENESS, MAGIC, and a computer made out of matchboxes. You can read the full talk, with slides, at shorttermmemoryloss.com/menace/.