Posts Tagged ‘Zero Emission Book Project’

I already wrote a bit about the book in an earlier post.  Author James Kaelon and videographer Miles Kittredge are mid-tour, by bicycle, promoting Kaelon’s “We’re Getting On.” They just left San Francisco this morning and are heading north.  Abandonment of technology is a central theme of Kaelon’s stories, and now he and Kittredge are living the dream.  The tour and the book are 100% carbon neutral.

The novel has garnered exceptional reviews and landed Kaelon on the cover of Poets & Writers.  I got to see Kaelon read at Green Apple Books on Friday and was not disappointed.  If you have the opportunity to see these guys somewhere along their journey, seize it!

I just read James Kaelon’s new novella, “We’re Getting On.”  The story is remarkable and Evan Karp wrote a great essay about it, but I want to consider the book itself, as an object.

Wrapped in a 100% recycled cover, which actually sprouts into birch trees when planted (detailed instructions are on the back cover), the book is the result of FlatmanCrooked’s Zero Emission Book Project.

With alternatives to print like the Kindle, the iPad, and now even Nintendo DS, and free online publishing gaining serious traction, we’re on the brink of an age when a physical, paper book might have to justify its own printing.

I kept feeling the texture of the pulpy cover, admiring the embedded seeds, and thinking about the book decomposing and then flourishing as a tree, all while reading Kaelon’s tale of human devolution and nihilism.  The book as an object added to my experience of the story.  This is a high achievement, and one that makes this book-as-object more than just a medium for the printed word.