The Literary Platform is hosting an international competition inviting creatives to produce an animation that illustrates a rare and prophetic audio recording of Douglas Adams talking in 1993 about the Evolution of the Book.

In 1993 Douglas Adams, the world-renowned author of The Hitchhikers Guide of the Galaxy, recorded a short piece of audio for his US publisher of the time – Bob Stein of Voyager Expanded Books. Who would know how prophetic his words would sound nearly twenty years later, and how accurate his sense of the evolution of the book was. … Read more »

It is Saturday 16 April 2011.  Richard and I fly to Vienna to meet Michael Embacher, the author of Cyclepedia.  The following day he introduces us to the photographer Bernhard Angerer who shot the pictures for his book now published by Thames and Hudson.  Some of the shots have been blown up and printed, poster sized, on Bernhard’s studio wall.  The detail is eye-popping.

We pile into Michael’s MPV to visit his collection of bicycles stored hugger-mugger in an old factory and decide we want to capture the special atmosphere of this collection in the app too.  Richard and I agree that Bernard’s first-floor studio is perfect for the special shoot we have in mind: to mechanically turn the suspended bicycles and photograph them with a strobe flash so that when sequentially reproduced in the app they can be spun round seamlessly using the finger-swipe function on the iPad’s touch screen.  The problem is that neither Richard and I, nor Bernard, has ever done this before. … Read more »