It’s a book and it’ll take twenty-four hours to make
I was invited to chat about a couple of my favourite books with Tim Cox on Brisbane’s ABC radio this afternoon. Fortunately, the book I’d chosen — Simon Garfield’s Just My Type was also a favourite of Tim’s so we had no trouble discussing the book and the importance of typefaces more generally.
Right at the end of the interview, though, Tim Asked me what I’m working on right now. Well, the thing is, right now I happen to be working on preparing a 24-Hour Book.
What do you mean I haven’t mentioned this on the blog until now? Oh yeah. Right. It’s one of those if:book things that happens elsewhere on the web. Okay, if you need a primer on the 24-Hour Book, go take a look, then come back.
Cool, no?
The project has managed to attract eight of the best and fastest writers in Australia whom I shall attempt to wrangle into creating some kind of book in a very short space of time. And you can watch the work in progress unfold on the web, either through a liveblog or reading the text and hitting ‘refresh’ every now and then. Think of yourself as the Beluga whale and us as the mariachi band.
So at the end of the interview, I casually drop this little project without really much detail at all about how it works or who’s involved or anything else. Just the title alone elicited enough excitement and curiosity. That’s when I realised the possibly the best asset of this project are the words:
TWENTY-FOUR HOUR BOOK
If you hear nothing else, you’ve heard the hook.
