A Book-in-a-Box is a Complex Thing

Ephemeral City (Boxed Edition)

We were in lockdown when the final piece of the Ephemeral City puzzle fell into place. It was late 2021 and my book Ex Libris had been out for more than a year. Though it had been released at the height of the first pandemic wave, the idea of a novel made from recombinant chapters was intriguing enough to find a decent audience without the aid of launches or festivals or any of the usual publishing palaver. I had already dedicated a good eighteen months purely to Ex Libris as a publishing project and here, stuck in my house in late 2021, I was finally contemplating what might come next. 

Okay. I say I was busy doing the publishing and promotion for Ex Libris but this is an excuse. In truth, I had been at a creative impasse for some time: filled with ideas but lacking the concentration and energy to see them through, to face the blank screen and blinking cursor.  

Do I blame the pandemic for that? Sure. Why not?  

Weird times, man. 

So rather than force a new idea to fruition, I turned to my archive and a concept that had languished for the better part of fifteen years: the portrait of city over time, told through the stories of people from the margins of history, the people who never expected to be remembered. 

I had a complete manuscript. Several, actually.  

The original idea was to create a collection of stories linked by setting and themes. The individual stories had been successful at the time, published in a few of Australia’s prestigious literary journals, but the collection as a whole gained no traction. I was encouraged at the time to turn the stories into a novel, a reasonable suggestion but one that took years to realise and ultimately led nowhere. After multiple attempts at making it work, I shelved the idea though I never abandoned it. Now, here at this low ebb, the project again beckoned. 

I re-read the various versions of the text and immediately began to imagine the things—big and small—that I wanted to change. However, something was missing.  

Each of the eight stories is set in Brisbane at a specific time, liberally spread between 1931 and 2011. When first writing, I had done a lot of background research on each period seeking to capture the flavour of the time without wanting to draw direct attention to it. In the process, I had amassed quite the collection of digitised ephemera: photographs, print ads, a newsletter, a lottery ticket. Now, reading between the stories and the ephemera—jumping between text and images and people, places, and times—reminded me of less of a short story anthology and more of personal collection of keepsakes, a container—maybe something like a cigar box—filled with treasures. 

That was the moment.  

Indeed, something had been missing and in my reading and re-reading of the stories and research, I stumbled on the ideal way to present the stories. Ephemeral City was created there and then, but it would take another two years for the project to be completed. 

Ephemeral City (Obsolete Edition)

I can explain the floppy disk.  

See, due to a tangled series of false starts and delays, my publisher and I began accepting pre-orders for Ephemeral City before the shipment of book boxes—the actual containers these stories would sit inside—had arrived from the manufacturer. It was a gamble that led to a stressful few weeks, wondering if we would indeed be able to ship the product when promised. We were surrounded by stacks of content, but there was no way to compile them until the shipment arrived. See, Ephemeral City is published in a boxed edition as well as a regular paperback edition (for the normies).  

Each copy of the boxed edition consists of nine booklets and nine pieces of reproduction ephemera. The lottery ticket goes inside the Christmas card which goes into an envelope. The small string of random words needs to be folded and carefully placed at the bottom of the pile. Three separate print runs were involved from two printing companies. And that all had to be organised before we could finalise the design and manufacture of the box. 

I had initially wanted to use an actual cigar box for the container; the reading experience would commence with removing a slipcase. Then, like the ephemera, the box itself would form part of the fictional world of the stories. Remove the slipcase and you enter the story world. I still like the idea, but cost quickly rendered it impractical and I had to disappoint a very excited cigar box manufacturer based in Texas. I have the sample they sent me and it’s cool, but I suspect the solution we arrived at is better. Certainly, it’s more practical. 

All of which is to say yes, a book in a box is a complex thing to put together. I mean that should come as no surprise to anyone, but no amount of forewarning actually prepares you for the experience. There were an alarming number of variables for which we had to take an educated guess and hope everything worked out okay. To keep the workload manageable for my long-suffering designers, I suggested the paperback and the boxed edition’s booklets should be identical in size, meaning the same page layout could apply to both editions, a very early decision that determined the size of the package. There were decisions on choice of paper, typefaces, each with their own knock-on effects.  

And then there was the question of what depth to set the box. How thick would this pile of booklets and ephemera turn out to be? We had no way of knowing for sure without actually making all the things first. What we could be sure of was that nothing would be worse than a box that can’t close properly or one that looks half-full.  

My publisher, Sue Wright of Tiny Owl Workshop, is possibly the only person on this planet capable of helping me shepherd a project like this. Our mantra throughout was that we would give the book whatever time was needed to get it right. That’s pretty much how it played out. There’s not much I would change if given the opportunity even though every stage of the process took at least twice as long as initially anticipated. When we made the agreement to work together in early 2022, I thought we could probably knock the completed book out by the end of that year.  

Sigh. 

The thing is, as you approach the finishing line, frustrations over delays begin to bite that much harder. There’s a point at which you just want this book out of your head and into someone else’s. Lots of someone else’s, if we’re going to be honest. 

And yet, by early this year the text had been finalised, the designs for the ephemera and the cover were done, and delivery of the book’s internal elements was imminent. The bound edition paperback was done. The promotional material was prepared, including a series of videos blogs visiting locations from the book and revealing the real–life stories behind the book, a separate project that could be subject of its own essay. So, I took the best educated guesstimate I could at the size of the final package, approved the box design, and set the manufacturing in motion.  

Now what? What does one do in that final interregnum?  

I noticed the zip file I’d sent the printer containing the nine booklets for the boxed edition came to a very satisfying 1.1MB. 

Hmm. You know what format that file would neatly fit onto? And for a collection built around historical artefacts, why not play around with some dead media while I’m at it? 

That’s how I found myself scouring eBay for a brand-new floppy disk drive and a box of old-new-stock diskettes, fashioning a never-initially planned-for obsolete edition of the book. 

Yes, it’s real. Yes, it works. And yes, real people have parted with some of their hard-earned for one.  

There are still a few available. And, should you acquire one, what you do with it is up to you. If need be, I can hook you up with a drive via eBay. 

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Compared to my previous work, Ephemeral City leans much more heavily to the physical and the organic. I have always maintained a strict separation between the technologies used in the making of literature and the technology through which it is read. The fluid and flexible nature of the digital tools we use every day can be applied intelligently and creatively to the craft of narrative and the presentation of text, even when the output is purely ink and paper, still for me the gold standard of reading experiences. 

And as our interconnected electronic world become increasingly undermined, artificialised, scammy, and enshittified, as archivists and thinkers around the world contemplate the possibility that we have already entered what future generations will consider a dark age, personally I find it more rewarding to create a tactile reading experience that rewards a longer engagement through unconventional means than shovelling yet more instant consumption into an ephemeral attention economy.  

I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. 

Ephemeral City is available now online.