| When fourteen years ago I bought my first computer, I began to make a book
almost right after setting it up. It is titled Elephant's
Tail.
I found this title a very good name. And I named... What did I name?
It was not a publishing house, because I used to do more and in a
different way than a typical publisher did. So I couldn't say that I
was a publisher. I couldn't say either that I was a writer, because I
used to do much more than a writer usually did. A couple of days
later a word bookmaker came to my
mind – a notion similar to baker
or shoemaker. I derived
bookmakery
from
this word and thus appeared ELEPHANT'S TAIL BOOKMAKERY. A few years ago, a friend of mine, Zenon Fajfer, invented a word liberature. He hasn't invented liberature itself, because liberature has been existing for very long time. That's the way names function: they create nothing, only sometimes they help to notice and distinguish certain affairs and phenomena, of course when they are proper, otherwise they only obscure and confuse. Liberature is much more interesting notion than bookmaking – it refers to literature, book (liber) and freedom (liberty). Also liberatory is more interesting than bookmakery – it can be associated with both scriptorium (computorium) and laboratory. While first two letters remind Linux I have been using for some time. So, quite willingly I transformed a bookmakery into a liberatory. Besides nothing has been changed. I go on making my books by myself: imagine, write, translate, draw, design, print, bind..... It is very important to let a book be born in one mind – then all its elements can be integrated to the maximum, filled with meanings, a drawing is no longer an illustration, while fonts can be deliberately ugly, because what they can comment with their shape, a kind of counterpoint their form make, is more important.... In my liberatory I combine old techniques with the new ones, primitive ones with modern and sophisticated ones: I design True Type Fonts, but I can cut robust types in wooden blocks, I draw on paper with a pencil but I use a tablet as well..... Maybe that's the reason my books are incorrect in every respect – if conventions and rules can somehow limit a message then they have to be rejected and disobeyed. The world inside me and around me is not straight rows of black little letters. The world is a set of incredibly numerous tales happening simultaneously and extremely tangled and mixed one with another – one letter, one sign can belong do many stories, while it can contain many other stories as well. So, maybe description should be replaced with nondescription? A book describing non-linearity in a linear way is something absolutely different than a non-linear book, like a well ordered description of chaos is something else than a chaotic book, where one can experience and touch chaos directly.... Probably books should be like the world is. I'm not complicating excessively the world that itself is enough complex. It is simply an attempt to understand this complication at large, not replacing it with simplified models and patterns, although they themselves can be beautiful and really complex in spite of their superficial simplicity.... And this is what I do in my liberatory: I nondescribe the world. <<< |