on a hand made dummy of in ramallah, running -pre design meet

My hand-made and -cut rough mock-up of In Ramallah, Running this night…

I can’t  resist sharing my pleasure at having assembled all the elements of In Ramallah, Running in hard form for the first time tonight in preparation for a big design and layout meeting tomorrow. It’s very strange to materialise something that has existed in my mind as a project and proposal, then a place and people as well as a piece of my own inevitably elliptical work, before becoming a project once more with a range of very special people responding to and contributing work to the book, for all of that to eventually come together from all over the world and now to have a dummy of it in my fingers and see that it is pretty much as conceived -albeit only held together by a single bulldog clip- except that it’s so much better in actuality!

So many, too many, thanks are due and will go out [and in of course!] more carefully and there’s still a lot of work to do and nothing to look at as such yet -though the artist’s contributions, most of which are in colour obviously, are brilliantly apposite, potently  considered as well as beautiful. But now I know the book is there, here! It’s substantial and good and will earn its place in the world. What a joy this thing of tree pulp, human particularity and engaged … love, is. What potency it represents and what troubles and what joys there will be in store for me and all of those it belongs to! All to be relished…

Meanwhile, I should say that what you see, after a day of hand cutting every page of the book,  is just my clumsy rendering of one of my 80 pages and one of the really beautiful images that Paul Noble has contributed. I hope he [you!] won’t mind my doing this with it at such a stage when his [your] intentions were so touchingly humble and precise from the beginning about how to place the works amongst my own words in this kind of way… Also you might notice it says page 031 when for one thing that will more likely be page 131 and for another the font is yet to be decided and it probably won’t be in italics… etc! It’s VERY rough, peeps!

Now all the detail about paper types, coatings, weights, and bindings that really open out properly and so on [and on] will begin to lock off and will need to do so quite fast to meet our pub date of February 28th 2012! Looking forward…