Rewards!

I spent most of last week feeling a little like Father Christmas. After several days of shopping, organising, card-writing and wrapping, I headed off to the Post Office on Friday afternoon with a huge stack of parcels.

I posted 18 x books, 14 x red 10″ vinyls, 12 x black 12″ vinyls, 100 postcards/bookmarks (35 handwritten) and a 20 extra silly somethings (see below!). This all took sooooo much longer than I’d intended, but I do hope they’re enjoyed when they get there. A couple have already been delivered and photographed and I’ll add the rest to the comments below. It’s nice to know they arrived safely!

The extra silly something

Since the vinyls are white labels they don’t have covers so I was a bit worried about how they’d travel safely in the mail. Back in the UK I had special cardboard envelopes but they didn’t make it in the big move across the pond. I decided I needed to do something to reinforce the packaging & figured what better to reinforce vinyl than more vinyl? Much opshopping later and I had 20 oldschool records. Some are GOLD, and I honestly wish I could have kept a copy – so I photographed them.

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WTF is the-phone-book.com anyway?

For those who don’t know the-phone-book.com, it was a project I co-created with Ben Jones and Ben Stebbing back in 2000. Remember “WAP”? It was a kinda of a crap LoFi mobile internet technology that could only hold about 150 words of text to each screen. So, inspired by the limitations of the platform, we commissioned writers to devise ultra-short-stories in 150 words or less, 50 words or less and 150 characters or less.

We published quarterly to our WAP mobile internet site and a website where we also hosted spoken word recordings of each story. The project lasted three years and amassed 935 stories written by 330 writers from 24 countries. It spawned a company called the-phone-book Limited which continued to empower artists to make creative use of the technology they carried in their pockets.

the-phone-book.com website closed several years ago but the wonderful waybackmachine archived a copy so you can still read the entire collection online. In fact this grab has a page all about the vinyls – a DJ scratch battle tool we made for Futuresonic in 2004. This page talks about the books that we made in 2002. There are CDs too but I’m sorry to say don’t have any in Australia.

I still have a handful of vinyl left but all the books are now gone *sob*. I hope you enjoy them with the love that we felt in making them all.

All the thanks

As well as all the awesome people who supported the project (check out this really big list of all the Pozible supporters!) I wanted to say thank you to ANAT for letting me turn them into a mailroom for several days. I also want to thank the lovely Jayne McRostie for kindly donating a whole bunch of wrapping paper from her gorgeous shop Presence on King William Road in Adelaide.