NEW CONTEST: THE BOOK OF THE FUTURE

In honor of our museum's 300th acquisition, and leading up to our first anniversary, I am announcing a new contest, open to all, on the theme THE BOOK OF THE FUTURE.
This can be interpreted any way you like. It could be a mysterious book that comes to us from the future, or a book of speculations and predictions about the future of books and literacy, in particular, or the future in general, or any other way you care to look at it.

This time I would like to encourage text entries, fiction or non-fiction, as well as visual art. Prizes will include a fine print of your choice from my Lost Book images, and many more to be collected and announced as offered. To enter, note me with a link to your entry. All entries will be placed in our (now empty) favorites gallery until the end of the contest, at which point all of the best ones will go into the museum.

DEADLINE: Our first anniversary, September 21, 2008
PRIZES:
will contribute a fine print of any one of his Lost Books
will contribute a one year dA subscription
will dedicate a News article and journal feature to the winners
will give two six-month subscriptions (2nd & 3rd prizes)
MORE TO COME...

JUDGES PANEL (so far)


Help in spreading the word would be greatly appreciated, as would any donation of prizes. I will post a news article soon. More details to follow. I am considering inviting two or three guest judges to help me choose the winners (1st, 2nd & 3rd place).




WHAT IS THE LOST BOOK CLUB AND MUSEUM?

It is a gallery of fragments, both text and image artifacts, connected by a common theme: The Deconstruction and Reimagining of Books and Book Culture in our Post-Literate Age.

EXAMPLES: Fragments of ancient texts in forgotten languages, scientific & technical illustrations from unknown sciences and technologies, false starts of books, covers or title pages for non-existent books, impossible bindings, enigmatic fragments of torn burned or rotted pages from mysterious religious works, histories, cosmologies, fragments of art, diaries, found poetry, interesting scraps of paper found in the street, books made of unexpected materials or hollowed out to contain unexpected objects, banned, burned, forbidden, unfinished, unwritten books, unidentified alphabets, hieroglyphs, ideograms, iconography, books from prehistory, books from the future, books from parallel universes, books with built-in lenses and peep-holes, pop-up books with animated scenes, magical books, books of pressed flowers, pressed bugs, pressed dreams and nightmares, catalogs of stains and odors, unnatural histories, abnormal philosophies, Readers' Digress condensed and compacted books, Books of tree rings and geological strata, books of Tibetan sand paintings that spill into the gutters as you turn the pages, broken books exposing their inner workings, or with their guts spilling out, neodada collage, putting bits of image and text together haphazardly like the early attempts to reassemble dinosaur bones, books made of folded-spindled-mutilated IBM punch-cards, books written in UPC code, suggestive receipts and office memos, shopping lists and telephone doodles, fragments of catalogs of fragments of catalogs of fragments, et cetera, et cetera...