This is a little book made by Melanie Alexandrou. Normally at christmas you have to do the compulsory open-reaction-thank-repeat but for this one I had to sit and go through all it's little parts.
Firstly a little card fell out with a hand-printed logo, which has all the contact information on the back in really nice handwriting.
Then I noticed a little pocket on the inside cover with another contact slip and a teeny little info sheet with information about what the photographs that fill up the main body of the book are of.
I was firstly amazed by the handcrafted splendour of it all. Handwritten contact cards with little emblems (I see them as square-head jellyfishes), punched out holes from the photographs stuck on the cover, cable-tie binding, corrugated cardboard cover and back, brown paper and string bag, typewriter ornamented pockets and much more. It screamed manual and I loved it. You couldn't look at it without enisioning one person having to sit and make each part which amoungst the usual shrink wrap and celophane of ASDA christmas sets it made it silently bounce about (quite aptly) like a silent happy cat (another strange coincidence as next door now have a really cute cat which spent the majority of christmas at our house).
Then I actually sat and stalled the rhythm of present opening by looking at every single picture. It reminded me of the time when I'd spent three days pulling pictures from forsakenplaces.com for fear of it vanishing. Beautiful scenes of abandoned rooms with scrawling paint peels and delicate wallpaper curls only hanging on with damp. It was speckled metal rust, cracked wood, desolate shining lonely windows trapped in huge somber walls and I loved it. Obviously a bit of a personal because even Dad appreciated the craftmanship of the book yet was perplexed by the subject in each photo: "Lovely book, but, why would anyone want to look at that?". It made me laugh because it highlights just how specific a love it is to have. Holding a book made by somebody else containing no sales margin or profit gain percentages, just a pure simple love and projection of it was exhilarating because me and my sister (or maybe not, yet she stills sees that I see it) could say "This person 'gets' it".
I'm not too sure if I've got the titles of the links right but here they are:
Personal Myspace
Craft Collective Myspace
No comments:
Post a Comment