Friends, if you’ve been following along at all on Twitter, you might have seen that I’ve been big into cyanotyping these last few months. I’ve been making prints of maps using water and sunlight (and some chemicals).
As part of my explorations of this technique, I’ve spent some months creating a couple of versions of a 33-page Atlas of Great Lakes Islands. Here you can see the loose sheets of three copies, printed on heavy kozo.
Here’s a complete copy of the atlas, carefully torn by hand down to the final dimensions and with a Japanese stab binding.
And here’s the loose pages, pre-binding, so you can see them a little bit better.
I’d like to share this book with all of you, but due to the significant labor and expense, I’ve only printed three copies. So, here’s what I’d like to do: send the book on tour. I mail it to you, you look through it for a few days, then you mail it to the next person who wants to see it, and so on.
If you’re interested in helping this atlas travel, here are a few more details:
- The book will go through a chain of people. Each person sends it to the next person on the list. I will keep the overall list private, but I will need to share your name and address with the person who will be sending the book to you.
- A few weeks before it’s your turn to receive the book, I will contact you by email to confirm that your address hasn’t changed, and that you’re still available to participate. If you’re temporarily unavailable, we can shift your place in the queue. If you don’t answer in a timely fashion, you’ll be skipped.
- There are a lot more people signed up than I expected; this means it may be that your turn on the tour does not come up for many months.
- Once you receive the book, you can keep it for a week, and then you’ll need to send it to the next person. I will email you what address to ship it to.
- You are responsible for the cost of shipping the book to the next person. This person may be in another country, but I will try to minimize the number of times this happens. I’ll collect names of potential hosts for a while, and then order them somewhat geographically, so that the book doesn’t spend a lot of time (and money) skipping back and forth around the world.
- You’re welcome to show the atlas off to other people while you have it. Bring it to work, school, geo-events, etc.!
- Signing up isn’t a guarantee. For various reasons, the tour may be cancelled before you get a chance to see the book.
- Try not to spill anything on it.
- In case you’re hesitant about the responsibility of hosting, don’t worry: it’s printed on durable paper, it’s pre-wrinkled, and it’s not something I absolutely must get back intact. I made an extra copy specifically to send around, and if misfortune befalls it, it’s not a huge problem.
If all of that sounds good to you, then sign up by clicking here! Note that sign-ups close on January 15th!
While the initial sign-up period has closed, I may occasionally add extra stops based on where the atlas is on its tour route. If that’s how you found this page, send me an email at somethingaboutmaps@gmail.com to let me know you’re interested!
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