I’m really looking forward to being a guest at the Proboscis ‘Pitch In & Publish’ event on Friday 15th October 2010. It’ll be a chance to get to grips with bookleteer once again and think about how this kind of personal printing might fit into some of the crossplatform ideas I’m currently working on. Join us if you can!

Details of how to book a place can be found here: http://cityasmaterial.eventbrite.com/. Just £10 to hang out and make interesting stuff together feels like a bargain to me.

What is bookleteer?

If you don’t know what bookleteer is, this is a great opportunity to find out and spend a day designing personal booklets (or ‘zines’) for the rest of the world to download, print and use.

I say ‘use’ rather than ‘read’ because the great thing about this kind of low-cost personalised publishing is that you don’t have to use it exclusively for getting other people to read your pearls of wisdom.

Bookleteer is just as effective as a way of publishing maps and local guides – or for distributing notebooks, sketchbooks or doodlepads that other people then fill in, annotate or generally deface (in an artistic way presumably).

*And* bookleteer is a very interesting way to capture and adapt digital assets such as Flickr pics, texts or tweets and quickly incorporate them into a printed work. It means you really can think seriously about mixing online and ‘offline’ experiences together in terms of photos, texts, sudden thoughs, map references, web links etc.

I’ve used bookleteer a couple of times as part of my ongoing BlakeWalks project where I walk prescribed routes around London with whoever cares to join me and we talk generally about issues and feelings that Blake’s life & work arouse in us.

So far I’ve been keen to arm fellow BlakeWalkers with booklets that they can use as notebooks or sketchpads, so we can add to the record of the walk something that isn’t just external pics and words and sounds but may be internal thoughts and more spontaneous artistic outpourings. Here’s a booklet for S:BlakeWalk3.

Frankly, I haven’t come up with a form for this that I’m entirely happy with, so I’ll be keen to spend the Pitch In & Publish day thinking more deeply about how bookleteer could be used to create a more effective printed thing for BlakeWalkers to carry through the city on their appointed round.

I should add, though, that there is a set theme for this event – ‘The City As Material’ – and there is an intention to produce at least one collaborative work focussing on ‘Streetscape – the street level of the city, its routes and human interaction whilst travelling through them’.

I’m hoping my BlakeWalking experience (and to some extend my golfonthemoon work) will be useful in this regard since both projects focus on walking though chiefly urban landscapes whilst mapping the route, recording what happens on the walk, and teasing out themes and impressions that arise out of impromptu gatherings and generally taking to the streets.