Let's Get Lost

I'm sure you can't wait to hear what I finally did with all those "postcard" photographs, so here's the latest on that. After much sorting, resorting, and staring at my little printed double-spreads, I decided I had essentially nine decent sequences of about a dozen pairs each. The theme that united them was clearly something to do with "place", and initially I thought of calling the book "Locality", "Topology", or something like that. But those two quotations I mentioned in an earlier post – the one from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and the one from Keats about "negative capability" – kept popping into my mind, and the idea of "living the questions" (rather than providing any answers) became compelling. After all, the photographs seemed to be as much about "where the hell are we now?" as anything more strictly topographical, so I decided to call the book Let's Get Lost, and to structure it around some suitably fundamental, locality-related questions. Which, of course, now I come to think of it, is pretty much the essence of a Situationist dérive.

Obviously, nine lots of twelve double images amounts to a hefty book of over 200 pages, so I had to do some ruthless editing to get it down a bit, ending up with six smaller sequences occupying 126 pages. Which is still quite a large (and expensive) book when produced one at a time via Blurb. So I decided to make two versions of two versions. The first two are the full, no-expense-spared job, in hardback and paperback on premium paper which no-one will even consider buying at £60 and £50 respectively. There will, of course, also be a PDF at £5.99, but for whatever reason no-one ever buys those, either.

The second two are based on an even more heavily-edited version at a mere 72 pages, wittily titled Let's Get (a little) Lost. Heh... One version of this will be a "trade paperback", which is as cheap as I'm prepared to make it, using "standard" paper at around £15 (I don't know for sure, but I expect the very cheapest "economy" colour paper would deliver a downright fugly result). The other will be a photobook paperback on "standard" paper at around £25. All four versions are 8" x 10" (20cm x 25cm).

Naturally, until I've received my proof copies I'm not going to make these publicly available. Despite my superlative proofreading skills something unfortunate may have sneaked through, even if it's only a misaligned caption. Which is easily done using the BookWright software, which I resent being forced to use if I want to make magazines or "trade" books, as it still lacks many of the basic book-design facilities of the original BookSmart software. I mean, why can't I choose to have page numbers on some pages but not others? Or create and edit a single running header that is automatically placed on alternate pages? In fact, where possible, I've taken to creating a book in BookSmart, uploading it to Blurb, and then downloading it again so I can use it in BookWright. Which is just as crazy and as annoying as it sounds.

Still, I shouldn't complain: nobody is making me do any of this. I could just as easily have spent the last few weeks watching TV or staring at the ceiling. Not that I haven't been doing those things: I've watched most of two series of Money Heist (in Spanish Casa de Papel) for a start. Bella ciao, ciao, ciao! And those cracks up there won't fix themselves. But maybe I'll get the "urban trees" sorted out first...