bibliostructures

I still try my hand at newspaper and magazine articles but increasingly it’s a hard sell because I’m not presenting individual ideas I’m presenting journalism’s equivalent of polymers, cut the chain of topics back to one thing and it seems marooned for me these days: I don’t isolate any more, I see, and note the links. If I’m online the links are active and clickable. In print they might be allusions or quotes.

Online it’s easy to click and cut and copy and quote and link. I still try to verify and find something I can trust, something solid to build the chain of links upon, just as I did when writing for newspapers was my main activity.

I keep an e-mail address that’s like a newsstand: I have blog feed updates, My New York Times Select newsletters, etc. delivered there, and that’s where I go first, over coffee in the morning. I’ve come to rely on Treehugger’s daily update. Treehugger operates as a polymer: pointing out things its editors have read elsewhere, building its own articles in a way that makes the sources and source material evident.

Today Treehugger posted a link to a blog by Seth Godin, whose concern is how to leave no footprints. A Treehugger article referenced a Seth Godin article that linked back to a New York Times article about a couple in New York City trying to live the whole year without leaving a trace. This in turn is linked to William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s cradle-to-cradle concept covered in their Durabook that I’ve written about:

In addressing their small share of this urban problem, the Beavans have embraced William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s concept of “eco-effectiveness”: “We will … figure out what our world can productively offer us rather than considering only what we want.”

What fascinated me in Seth Godin’s blog is this article, Art That’s Not For Sale, which ties in with my zen concept of custom bookbinding as a way of making less books.

Art that’s not for sale

Jordan Tierney and her colleagues have been working for months on the Periodic Tableaux, a one-of-a-kind art book that’s not for sale.

Why invest the hours and the sweat and the talent in a piece of art you can’t (and won’t) sell?

Two reasons. The best reason is that when you practice your craft for yourself, not for the market, it drives you in new and important ways. And the other reason is that people are going to talk about it.

Ideas that spread, win.

Posted by Seth Godin on March 27, 2007 | Permalink

This is Jordan Tierney’s description of her scrapbooks:

The 8.5 x 11″ sketchbooks are Jordan’s most important tool. They are records of anything and everything – overheard snippets of conversations, news clips, sketches and photos from travel, plans for finished work. This is where all the ideas big and small are gathered, distilled, recombined and either trashed or nurtured into art.

I’ve almost entirely stopped keeping scrapbooks: there are a few technical, practical articles that I need to keep in plain sight but everything else, now, is going into a de.licio.us file, and I’ve started a “secret” blog that’s a scrapbook experiment that I’ve called The Pound, where I keep stray bits of writing, newspaper clippings, etc. and it’s where I post potential newspaper and magazine articles, for editors, so that they have a sense of what I’m trying to achieve. It’s much easier these days to write the whole thing rather than trying to describe the polymer, and if an editor wants it he or she can adopt it from the pound. This is a new enterprise for me, and there’s only one of my own pieces of writing there at the moment, Drought, which is a polishing and paring down of my study The Food Chain, which has been commissioned by an editor, and will probably be reduced to just a profile of Justin North and his restaurant Becasse:

The philosophies of biodynamic farmer Patrice Newell, chef Justin North of Becasse, and Melbourne catering firm food&desire. The connections between the land and the city, the drought and what we eat, and, as lofty as it sounds, an aesthetics of food.

James Estrin/The New York Times. Manduca sexta and its silicone rubber analog.

I’ve been reading a lot about a form of paper grown in a vat, called microbial cellulose, that can be a foundation for electronic components. Sony, for instance, makes cardboard speakers (that are of a high fidelity) of microbial cellulose.

Karl Lagerfeld shoots a Chanel ad. Photograph by olivial.

Lagerfeld’s ability to create so much clothing for three different labels makes him unique among fashion designers, but he is also a photographer whose work appears in glossy magazines around the world. He shoots the Chanel press kits and catalogues that accompany the collections, as well as fine-art photography, which he periodically displays in galleries. (He recently had a solo exhibition in Berlin.) An avid reader in four languages—English, French, German, and Italian—Lagerfeld also publishes books; his imprint, a division of the German house Steidl, is called Édition 7L, and a few years ago he opened a bookstore, also called 7L, in space adjoining his photo studio, on the Rue Lille. Édition 7L has published forty-one titles, on subjects that range across his many interests, which include (besides fashion and photography) literature, humor, advertising, music, newspapers, mythology, illustration, and architecture. Some of these books have a bracing impracticality: an anthology of the first ten years of the magazine Interview weighed forty-three kilos and was packaged in a wooden trolley of Lagerfeld’s devising.

John Colapinto. New Yorker. March 19, 2007

Naked Barcelona chair (designed by Mies van der Rohe). Photograph by moreikura.

I’m figuring out the accordian spine structure for a cookbook that can be easily opened up to reconfigure its pages, and my point of reference isn’t the traditional Japanese accordian book but the furniture of Mies van der Rohe, and the ‘exoskeletons’ of the Australian architect Sean Godsell’s shuttered buildings.

I’m on the mailing list for Printed Matter, the New York store that sells artist’s books, and in trying to pin down some kind of a working definition for a book for myself, and reading Printed Matter’s, I realised I’m not making art: however speculative and unusual my books are, I’m dealing with something practical and general, properties I’d like to see designed into electronic or organic books. My projects are eccentric white papers rather than artist’s books:

The topic of artists’ books and artists’ publications can be a controversial one. If one were to ask a room filled with artists, collectors, scholars, critics, and members of the public to define the term “artist’s book” the conversation would quickly turn into a debate. Many think of artists’ publications in the context of early 20th century European “livres de luxe” – those finely produced, limited edition, precious volumes of Picasso, Matisse, and other decidedly European modern masters. Others might describe artists’ books as unique or limited edition craft-objects that formally resemble books, but that are actually closer to sculpture. Still others would place artists’ books at the intersection of fine arts and literature – in either limited or short-run editions – and would cite the collaborations between Max Ernst and Paul Eluard as exemplary. Finally, some might consider monographs or exhibition catalogues as artists’ books or artists’ publications.

Printed Matter’s founders subscribed to the idea of the artist’s book as “artwork for the page,” focusing particularly on those publications produced in editions of one hundred or more. They envisioned these publications as democratizing artworks – inexpensive artworks – that could be consumed alongside the more traditional output of paintings, drawings, sculptures or photography. These books were not simply catalogues of pre-existing artworks, but rather works in their own right, “narratives” intended to be seen in a printed, bound, and widely disseminated format.

Printed Matter website.

Printed Matter’s books are made of any kind of material, are any shape, bound together in a variety of ways (or unbound) but the role of the artist remains crucially at the centre. A machine-made artist’s book at Printed Matter would focus, I suppose, on an artistic argument about the machine’s role in making books. My friend Ken Goldberg, who is an artist and a scientist, and whose telerobotic art projects on the internet I frequently write about also happens to have the largest collection of the different kinds of books that I’ve made. He’s a professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department at Berkeley, and he gave me what I consider to be a great compliment, that my hand-made books seemed very nearly machine-made.

Ken’s called my books “bibliostructures” and I think that’s a strictly more accurate definition than books.  They exist in the interstitial zone between electronic book readers and regular paper books. The writer I draw my greatest inspiration from (in considering the nature of books) is William Gibson. My holy grail is his existential sociologist, Shinya Yamazaki’s electronic notebook. I’m interested in how books are actually used, and how they’re manufactured: and my projects make suggestions on both. I don’t make a distinction between paper books and electronic books, between writing in music and writing on the page, it’s all part of the same world, the same voice pitched differently. I’m fascinated by the continuity between the traditional, printed world and the electronic book that’s alive in time, related to music. I’m fascinated by the way that Bruce Springsteen drew inspiration from the movie made from John Steinbeck’s novel of the 1930’s depression, The Grapes of Wrath, but that Bruce’s music inspires those at the leading edge of technology: his music was the first pressed onto cd, his song “Born To Run” was the first rock and roll song played on Mars (by one of the Mars Rovers when it touched down on the surface of the planet.) 

I imagine finding my niche in an area I read about in the New York Times today, “user-driven innovation“.

 …Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Masachussets Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. von Hippel is the leading advocate of the value of letting users of products modify them or improve them, because they may come up with changes that manufacturers never considered. He thinks that this could help companies develop products more quickly and inexpensively than with their internal design teams.

“It could drive manufacturers out of the design space,” Mr. von Hippel says.

It is a difficult idea for research and development departments to accept, but one of his studies found that 82 percent of new capabilities for scientific instruments like electron microscopes were developed by users….

There is currently no effective way for companies to harness the ideas of those millions. But the Web — itself created by Tim Berners-Lee, an Internet user looking to do something new — seems to offer an excellent potential idea-gatherer. Mr. Griffith’s industrial design firm, Squid Labs, last year spun off a do-it-yourself community site on the Web called the Instructables, which features items as diverse as the Minty Boost iPod power source, dachshund wheelchairs and guns made entirely of K’nex toys, along with detailed instructions on how to build them. The Instructables intends to offer software to companies that want to build communities of citizen product developers.

Mr. von Hippel, who has spent 30 years waiting for his ideas to take hold, says that as user communities like the Instructables spread, they will dominate innovation. He calls them “the dark matter of innovation.”

Elsewhere I’ve written about the large dreams of Venture Capital and how it necessarily needs to think about wide, general uses of a product or service in order to attract enough users to bring it to a scale so that it can be developed, and the small, particular, even contradictory uses follow along in the wake of the service a long way down the track. My projects, the electronic ones, often relate to the concepts, materials and formats in their pure state, somewhere before beta even (when I’m writing about Ken Goldberg’s projects, which are art and science drawn from his research as a scientist). I want to use products and services when they’re simple, cheap, ubiquitious, settled in. I heard William Gibson read from his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties at the end of 1999: the book has a sharp piece of technology, the matter-fax that’s developed for a global convenience store franchise, and a reference to a bio-technologically advanced material on the cover of Yamazaki’s notebook: he likened it the egg of a moderately successful marine species (and I’m thinking of fins and gills, something that doesn’t have a power-source, per se, but the skin breathes for itself in the environment it swims in.) But William Gibson characterised himself as an extremely late adopter. He said he’d just gotten e-mail, that he didn’t want to do e-mail until children and dogs were able to, and now they could.

There’s a particular sort of vision, confidence and patience that goes along with the creation of visionary products and services. Chris Anderson writes in a recent post on his Long Tail blog, about a book that’s about to come out that includes an interview with Google founder, Sergey Brin.

Google’s case against marketing

I’m reading a galley of Seth Godin’s latest mind-grenade, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), and came across this fascinating quote from a conversation he had with Sergey Brin:

“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”

All that is totally rational and smart, but one can’t help but notice what appears to be an extraordinary leap of faith: “we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it.” It raises all sorts of questions: How long into the project did they “know” that? What would they have done if take-up had slowed? Did their investors share their confidence and disdain for marketing in the early days?

The problem with extrapolating marketing lessons from once-in-a-lifetime success stories like Google and Apple is that most of us aren’t Jobs, Brin or Page, nor can we count on the luck that played a role on all of their successes. Products that market themselves are ideal, of course, but there aren’t many of them. And even those that are don’t always reveal themselves as such at the start.

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail.

In a post a few days before that he talks about the limitations in how music is defined to be sold and stored through i-Tunes, that goes straight to the heart of my Nick Cave Nocturama project.

But I was interested in Amazon’s classical music store for another reason: classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes don’t handle particularly well. They’re oriented around pop music, with its artist, album, track data format. Meanwhile classical music organizes around composer, conductor, performer, soloist, etc….

Amazon’s listing is customized for classical music, while iTunes isn’t.

However, neither of them does a very good job with Jazz, where the individual musicians are often more meaningful than the band. On Amazon’s Internet Movie Database you can click on practically anyone in the credits and see all their other work. Why can’t you do the same for the company’s music listings, too? (That’s a rhetorical question–I know the problem is the bare-bones metadata that comes from the music labels. But why not open-source the data collection, the way IMDB does?)

My conclusion from all this is that there are still many opportunities for vertical aggregators to compete with the one-size-fits-all giants. Just as Amazon competes with iTunes in classical by customizing the presentation of the music to suit the genre, so others could for jazz, DJ, soundtracks and beyond. In search, we now see a multitude of “vertical search” specialists  (from real estate to blogs) competing with Google. And in DVDs, Netflix now has niche competitors for Bollywood and porn.

As in culture, so in the business of aggregation: one size doesn’t fit all.

Chris Anderson. The Long Tail.

While I’m writing I find old bits of audio conversations, ghosts of radio shows past, to listen to, and over the weekend I listened to an old interview with Chris Anderson, recorded before his book The Long Tail, was released, where he talked about the concept of marketing a product that exists well-below the mainstream: that a product that has its own integrity and special purpose finds its own market by just being what it is, a general marketing campaign is mostly wasted, a voice becomes heard in its own way and in its own time.

I can think of a specific application for my curated conversation around a particular musical work, though: as a programme for the Sydney Festival. What isn’t reflected in the programmes for the individual shows, in the newspaper reviews and coverage of the events, and in the way that the music is packaged is that it’s an unofficial ensemble work, a whole world. Nick Cave always chooses musicians who have their own sideline projects, often very different from his own style and interests. He brings together a community of musicians, and their voices shade and add nuances to his own. His music has more resonance when it’s viewed in context, in the environment the symbols are drawn from, and when he’s not alone on the landscape. What’s missing is a way of drawing the works together so that they sketch a panoramic landscape: that’s what my book/music project does. At this year’s Sydney Festival Lou Reed and Rosanne Cash’s musical performances, and the dance shows Zero Degrees (with music by Nitin Sawhney) and the Holy Body Tattoo’s our brief eternity, though unrelated directly, inhabited the same world and what I longed for was to read or hear something that talked about that world.

This is a rushed introduction to a topic that’s been consuming me for many years and that I’m figuring out how to expand and bring into my discussions of paper: paper electronics. This isn’t electronic paper, but the components of electronic devices: transistors, power sources, speakers, etc. being constructed from paper, or embedded into or printed on paper.

I’ve started work on constructing a project based around Nick Cave’s Nocturama album. He’s one of a number of mature rock-and-roll artists whose songs are symbolic, and observing how the symbols come alive in the world is more important than figuring out what they might mean to Nick. Music writing tends to keep artists in a state of perpetual adolescence, introspectively wondering who they are and figuring out what they believe in. As they’ve matured and their focus has turned to their places in the community, the criticism hasn’t kept up and sketched a context for the symbols in their songs.

I’m eternally inspired by conversations between people from different fields, discussing what they have in common: and listening to these conversations, but, later, also reading and referring back to the transcripts.

Quite unconsciously I’ve been compiling a collection of transcripts of great conversations:

Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said talking about home and music.

Michael Ondaatje and the film editor, Walter Murch.

Cameron Crowe and the film director, Billy Wilder.

Jean Claude Carierre, the screenwriter for Peter Brook’s Mahabarata, and the Dalai Lama.

The chef, Justin North, and the farmers and producers who supply the raw materials to his restaurant, Becasse.

and the enduring work, the book I refer to more often and above all others, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth.

I’ve been writing about this project on my book-binding site. It’s fairly simple: a transcript of a discussion based around Nocturama’s themes is bound into a book, and the cardboard covers of the book are embedded with what amounts to a disposable cardboard i-Pod that contains the audio of the discussion and the music. It will have to have headphones, but in my mind I’m pitching it forward into a time when targeted sound, without headphones is possible.

What I’ll expand upon here is how the individual electronic components themselves are going to be made from paper. This is quick overview of the topic:

Physicists in Sweden have teamed up with leading paper and packaging manufacturers to develop a new breed of electronic devices made from paper and conducting inks.

Packaging materials that display animated adverts and containers that sound an alarm if their contents go mouldy are just two possibilities that could result from a new area of technology called “paper electronics”. The substitution of paper for semiconductors in electronic components might sound bizarre, but Swedish physicists are currently developing devices that can be printed onto paper using conventional industrial-scale printing methods.

Many electronic devices rapidly become obsolete as technology continues to improve. There is also a growing trend towards adding electronics to items that were previously difficult to make electronically active, such as plastic and paper. Both factors are motivating the electronics industry to find cheaper ways to manufacture products. Some 50 years after the first transistor was developed, circuit boards are still being manufactured from a large substrate that undergoes about 50 different processing steps before being cut into smaller circuit boards. A substrate that can be manufactured cheaply and quickly is needed to satisfy the industry’s demands.

Paper seems an obvious replacement: it is flexible and we have produced more of it, in terms of surface area, than any other material. These days paper is manufactured in an environmentally friendly way and can be printed on in a fast “reel-to-reel” process. Indeed, a diverse range of printing, coating and lamination processes is used to convert paper into products.

Physics Web. July 2001

“I look at the essence of a song,” muses Holly Cole. “If it’s a great lyric I often love to slow it down, explore it, dissect it, deconstruct it and look at it in an entirely different way. In the process it often becomes more evocative. That’s a big part of my art form. That’s a huge part of what I do.”

Holly Cole

Cole conceived of the arrangements [on her new self-titled album] with pianist/accordionist Gil Goldstein (Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker), and bassist/producer Greg Cohen hand-picked the musicians based on their strength as both ensemble players and soloists, as well as for their possession of an individual sound. Their contributions enabled Cole to sing with an often understated quality and more subtlety than ever before. As well, returning to jazz, with its emphasis on spontaneous interpretation and complex communication between musicians, helped Cole emphasize the emotional intricacy and irony in her material.

“What you hear on the record,” she says, “is the moment in which the light bulb turns on for everybody — about the arrangement, about the song itself, about the people we’re playing with, about themselves. When you have musicians that are really good, that moment decays really quickly; they’re cleaning things up and going, ‘Let’s make it perfect.’ I love the fact that on so much of [the album], you can hear people discover things.”…

Cole’s love of mystery informs her album’s whole aesthetic. Usually a self-titled album is a statement of artistic intent, but she claims her new release’s lack of a descriptive title is more about not making a statement. The cover, in which she is mostly shrouded in darkness (only part of her face and her bare calves and feet revealed), is like a photograph the Surrealist Man Ray might have composed in the 1920s.

“You’re just given little tidbits of things,” she says, “my name, and my legs and my head, and you say to yourself, ‘Where is she? Is it night? Is it day? Is she alone? Is she in bed? Is she naked?’ There’s a bunch of suggestions about what’s going on, and loads of empty black space for your mind to go where you want it to be. Less is more, most of the time. It means that people are able to process what you’re singing or saying, to find it for themselves.”

Mike Doherty. National Post, Canada. March 13, 2007

The huge surprise for me in publishing my writing online has been how well it’s suited my tendency towards stillness and reflection. I had a few panicky preconceptions about the need to keep throwing new stories into the mouth of a hungry blog, and wondering if the short, snappy, snarly writing that was increasingly being requested of me in newspaper articles (a tone I can’t master) would also be required online. I’m grateful, and astonished, that it’s the polished, considered, lengthy stories that are the most popular. One of them is almost ten years in the writing (the Nick Cave project, suggested by him when I was living in Los Angeles and starting my bookbinding business and mentioned to him that I saw parallels in the symbols in his songs and those Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers discuss in The Power of Myth) and the other almost four years old, considering the new way of life and social rituals, based around food, that are being adapted to cope with the Australian drought as an eternal state, through a close reading of the poetic and practical books by biodynamic farmer, Patrice Newell, and the philosophies of the catering company, food&desire.

I’m less earnest than I used to be about trying to define what makes writing different on the screen or the page, but the need for multiple screens for electronic books is more and more important. There’s something about knowing the density and weight of a story that can’t be conveyed on a single screen: I suppose we all design the tools we long to use ourselves, but the outer limit of my stories is about 7,000 words, or about 30 pages of a regular novel or non-fiction book. Being able to flip backwards and forwards through about twenty pages of text at a time while reading is an important part of the reading process for me (a few Plastic Logic flexible electronic readers stapled together). I don’t read a lot of fiction (Michael Ondaatje, Haruki Murakami and Amit Chaudhuri are the exceptions) and the densely thoughtful spiritual studies by Pankaj Mishra, Karen Armstrong, and Elaine Pagels are my preferred reading. But I read a bushel of newspapers a day (online) the New York Times and Calcutta Telegraph are my staples, Worldchanging.com, and a number of blogs — Dayna Bateman’s Detritus is my favourite — and I want to be able to see more than one page, or one article at a time, no matter what I’m reading.

My writing is really an elaborate frame-work for the quotes I’m bringing in from other writers and the people I’m writing about. I rarely do my own interviews any more, and those are mostly conducted through e-mail. I like considered thoughts, and always give my interviewees time to reflect upon and polish their words: my stories tend towards the symbolic, there’s nothing to be gained by snagging the unvarnished first thought that pops into their heads. My newspaper editors began to despair of the lack of the direct quote in exactly the same proportion that I began to become excited about the indirect quote.

The Nick Cave project which is a curated (to use the fashionable term) conversation between several people who have a great deal to say about the context for the symbols in Nick’s songs and how they exist in the world, is the direction my large-scale projects are headed. I have no desire to do my own interviews. I’m always a few steps behind Nick (the charm and value of his songs to me are that they’re waiting for me when I arrive somewhere: Pankaj Mishra is the writer I want to be, but Nick’s words are the ones my heart agrees with.) Whenever I hear one of Nick’s new albums I imagine being at a restaurant and overhearing an intelligent and impassioned conversation about it from the next table: Elaine Pagels applying the Gospel of Thomas to Nick’s records, Jack Miles talking about Christ as a figure in literature, Pankaj Mishra talking about compassion and the joy that comes from sadness, and James Surowiecki talking about the wisdom of crowds (how the value in Nick’s symbols is how they’re compounded and used by people without needing experts and critics to tell them how to use them).

A discussion over dinner is something I’ll be putting together. The quality of people being relaxed while they’re sharing stories important, the nourishment of body and soul, the connection with philosophers gathering in cafes. I’m aiming for close microphones that cut out background noise so that the conversations can happen in the real world, not a studio or artificially quiet place. My favourite radio programmes with a long interview format all have that intimate quality though, even though they’re recorded in studios.

Quite unconsciously I’ve been compiling a collection of transcripts of great conversations:

Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said talking about home and music.

Michael Ondaatje and the film editor, Walter Murch.

Cameron Crowe and the film director, Billy Wilder.

Jean Claude Carierre, the screenwriter for Peter Brook’s Mahabarata, and the Dalai Lama.

The chef, Justin North, and the farmers and producers who supply the raw materials to his restaurant, Becasse.

and the enduring work, the book I refer to more often and above all others, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth.

What’s as important as the content, or the form of the book, and the number of screens, and whether or not the words are still on a sheet of paper or sparkling on a screen is the layout. The writing needs to spread out to be on left and right pages, the quotes need to be indented or footnoted somehow, one needs to be able to sink into a text, to have it displayed panoramically, like a landscape, something calm to consider slowly, something in stereo not mono. I don’t know exactly what this kind of book will look like, but when I gain the next round of financing for the Nick Cave project I’m going to bring in the designer Steven R. Gilmore. When I think of a dense layering of information and making it beautiful and resonant, without untangling it or diluting its complexity, it’s Steven’s work I think of.

Steven is a painter and photographer as well as a graphic designer and works with still and moving media, and by painstaking hand processes and with the sharpest digital tools. I admire his work in the way that I admire Holly Cole’s approach to songs written by other composers, he also finds the sadness and darkness in the works he’s given to interpret, and they become sweet and transcendent somehow, against expectations.

Laden with color-coding, mixes of type and page edges that depict a tulip field when seen from left to right, and a Dutch poem from right to left, the book contains found text and images but no page numbers. “It started out as a dream project,” Boom said, “but became a nightmare, because of the time.”

Alice Rawsthorn. International Herald Tribune. March 18, 2007

Winning prizes is nothing new for Boom. Working with a single assistant in her Amsterdam studio, she is also accustomed to struggling — in one way or another — to make each of her books as inspiring and surprising as possible. Over the years, she has experimented with everything from elaborate color-codes and hidden motifs to scented bindings, printing on filter coffee paper, producing a 2,136-page book with no page numbers or index,and hacking page edges with a circular saw.

Unexpected though Boom’s books look, feel and smell, there is always an underlying logic to their design….

While working at the government printing office, Boom met Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, chief executive of the Dutch conglomerate SHV. When she left to open her own studio in 1991, he asked her to create a personal book for him to give to family and friends on his birthday. He also commissioned Boom, and the art historian Johan Pijnappel, to produce a book to commemorate SHV’s centenary in 1996.

They had an unlimited budget, and an exceptionally indulgent patron. “All he said was, ‘Make something unusual,’” Boom said. “It started out as a dream project but became a nightmare, because of the time.” Having decided to compile the book from found text and images, she and Pijnappel scoured SHV’s archives for material and traveled all over the world to find more. When Boom had to cancel the order for her first choice of paper (after being told by the Japanese producer that it would take 14 years to make) she invented her own paper….

“There are so many possibilities with books, and so much to explore,” she said. “At a time when the Internet is so powerful, making books is more and more important. Seeing Sheila’s work in a book is completely different to seeing it on the Internet. That’s why I’m always looking for new things to do with books.”

meal Photograph by JoanLovesPaper.

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. Chances are that you have a keyboard and a computer screen off to one side, and a clear space roughly eighteen inches square in front of your chair. What covers the rest of the desktop is probably piles — piles of papers, journals, magazines, binders, postcards, videotapes, and all the other artifacts of the knowledge economy. The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. The pile closest to the cleared, eighteen-inch-square working area, for example, generally represents the most urgent business, and within that pile the most important document of all is likely to be at the top. Piles are living, breathing archives. Over time, they get broken down and resorted, sometimes chronologically and sometimes thematically and sometimes chronologically and thematically; clues about certain documents may be physically embedded in the file by, say, stacking a certain piece of paper at an angle or inserting dividers into the stack.

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. Kidd writes that many of the people she talked to use the papers on their desks as contextual cues to “recover a complex set of threads without difficulty and delay” when they come in on a Monday morning, or after their work has been interrupted by a phone call. What we see when we look at the piles on our desks is, in a sense, the contents of our brains.

Malcolm Gladwell. The Social Life of Paper. The New Yorker Magazine

white trash, Photograph by only alice.

At the time that I created my book-binding company, in 1996, and even as late as last year, in Australia, a business plan built around NOT making books seemed like a goofy idea, as if I were one of those parodies of business leaders that Groucho Marx used to play. When I talked to people about the books that they used, and what they wanted me to make for them, I realised that they used parts of books, grew attached to covers, and wanted to move sections of books into other books. I wanted to build components of books, to re-use pieces and find a way not to waste the last ten or fifteen pages that are often left unused in notebooks.

Business plans are generally based around what’s made, and sold, and while inventory management is a crucial part of any plan, deciding what not to make, and being responsible for a product once it’s outlived its usefulness is only just starting to be a part of our thinking process. So I was intrigued when Doug Farquhar the President of Renovos, a company that consults on “business solutions in pursuit of zero waste” left a comment on my review of the book Trash. His company’s strategies involve being able to look at the whole system of a business as a dynamic unit, and being able to evaluate the consequences of each activity, material and use and how they relate to one another.

I asked him how much of a problem he believes waste paper to be and he replied:

Paper consumption is our biggest issue as a society – 30%+ – the good news it is both reusable and biodegradable – although there are some toxicity issues – the bad news is the water consumption to make paper is substantial, not to mention a fair amount of energy consumption.

We’re all familiar with the waste paper on the streets in the form of disposable coffee cups and the cardboard insulating holders, but in Washington State, where the office of Revenos is based, the home of Starbucks there’s also a great number of discarded burlap bags that the coffee beans are transported in, from growers around the world.

Doug Farquhar sent me this statistic:

“The US consumes over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps each year. 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans.”

Revenos linked these statistics to the need for developmentally challenged people to find work to enable them to have an independent existence, and a programme with the advocacy and training group The Arc of Multnomah Clackamas to make tote bags from the burlap bags.

Noriko Ambe work, Photograph by ginrikki.

Noriko Ambe is an artist who works with cutting paper, often Yupo® synthetic paper. I’ve only seen photographs of her work and I don’t have much of a sense of their scale, but there’s something deeply serene about them that makes me think (if this isn’t an too contradictory) of the Buddhist state of emptiness. It’s the completely pristine topologies that have grabbed me even as small photographs on a computer screen. They suggest a whole new world, the world as a blank page. The fact that they’re made from Yupo® means that they don’t decay and fray and discolour in the way that regular paper does. The new moment is eternal, every moment the world is remade and is fresh again. I have several sheets of different weights of Yupo® sitting on my desk and so I know how Noriko Ambe’s topologies would feel, how sensual the surfaces are, how warm the white is. The process matters very much to her, the act of cutting a new world. We don’t look at the artworks and only appreciate how beautiful the form is, we ponder the forces and actions and rituals that brought these worlds into being.

This is her artist statement, from her website.