Publishing – Bowblog

Art book sale!

I’m having a bit of a clear-out. Here are some of the art books I’ve accumulated over the years. All priced to sell (I don’t think you’ll find any of them for less online) and all available for immediate purchase on eBay. Click the eBay links to see many more pages from each book.

The Futurist Cookbook – Marinetti

A page from Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook showing an item about the 'aerosculptural dinner in the cockpit'

A splendid, beautifully reproduced edition of the weirdest (and perhaps most sinister) cookbook ever published. It was written/assembled by founder of Italian Futurism Filippo Thommaso Marinetti, who also wrote the more famous Futurist Manifesto (and Musolini’s 1919 Fascist manifesto, since you’re asking). Marinetti campaigned against pasta because “…it induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism”, which I guess might be true. David Runciman discussed this culinary curiosity in an episode of his podcast that was about the manifesto. The translation, by Suzanne Brill, is excellent. Read some of the recipes in the eBay listing. It seems to be a rarity and this first edition is selling for £200 and more. I’ve got it on eBay for £150, art/history/politics fans! Buy the Futurist Cookbook on eBay.

Hybrid Imagery – April Greiman

Front cover of Hybrid Imagery by designer April Greiman. Colourful pixelated close-up fills the cover

Anyone interested in digital art or design back in the early days worshipped April Greiman, a brilliant American graphic designer who adopted and invented new techniques for production in multiple media. It’s still a thrill to flick through the pages of this book and reminds me of the days we used to struggle to get this kind of exciting imagery out of our lovely new Macs. Buy Hybrid Imagery on eBay.

Barbara Kruger – We Won’t Play Nature to your Culture – 1983 ICA exhibition catalogue

Front cover of 1983 Barbara Kruger exhibition catalogue. Upside-down big close-up of woman's face in black and white - leaves cover her eyes. Text overlaid reads: 'we won't play nature to your culture'

Another exciting moment from the eighties. An ICA exhibition that anyone interested in photography, contemporary art or feminism rushed to. This is the original exhibition catalogue, the first edition bought from the gallery shop. On the eBay listing you’ll find more pages from the book. Buy We Won’t Play Nature to your Culture on eBay.

Bellocq – Photographs from Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans

One of the loveliest books here: a beautifully-printed, large-format collection of E.J. Bellocq‘s spontaneous, touching portraits from Storyville – and it’s in impeccable condition. The reproductions are based on the prints made by another American photographic legend Lee Friedlander and there’s a famous introduction by Susan Sontag. On the eBay listing you’ll be find lots more photographs from the book. Buy Bellocq on eBay.

The Sculpture Show – 1983 exhibition catalogue

The Scupture Show: 1983 Hayward Gallery/Serpentine Gallery catalogue front cover

Flexidisc and gallery guide from 1983 exhibition catalogue The Sculpture Show

This was an important show: identifying a generation of important artists, and a decade before the YBAs. It was a huge show, across the whole of the South Bank and the Serpentine Gallery. I was at St Albans doing a foundation course and we all trooped down to London to see this. It was a bit of a thrill. The catalogue comes with a flexidisc of ambient audio and sound art by some of the artists from the show which is a genuine rarity and sells on its own for a decent sum on Discogs. Buy The Sculpture Show on eBay.

Paul Graham – A1: Great North Road

Paul Graham's 1983 collection A1: Great North Road. Photo book with front cover image of a roadside cafe lit up at night

Colour photography from a British master of the form, published in 1983 and thought of as very much a response to the hyper-saturated work of the American Ektachrome artists. It’s a beautiful, humane, melancholy work. Click the eBay link for more pics from inside. Buy A1 on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – 18. Oktober 1977

Richter belongs to the generation of West Germans that had been too young to serve in WW2 but had then had to metabolise and transcend the essentially untranscendable: the terrible crimes of their parents and of the criminal state they obeyed or at the very least tolerated. This book represents a series of paintings, from Richter’s photorealist practice. An extraordinary and chilling set of images based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group (alive and dead). Buy 19 Oktober 1977 on eBay.

Histoire(s) du Cinema – Jean-Luc Godard

The four volumes of Jean-Luc Godard's 'Histoire(s) du Cinema' laid out in a row a counter. Elegant, dark blue coveres with white and light san-serif lettering. — Godard

Sold. Four hardback volumes and five CDs in a very solid slip-case. This is a splendid thing. The whole soundtrack of Godard’s amazing eight-part TV history of the movies (a project that some – including me, I think – consider to be his most interesting work) plus four beautifully designed books in a handsome slipcase. And it’s an ECM edition, which I guess makes perfect sense.

Semiotext(e) Architecture

One of the more bonkers Semiotext(e) editions: a three-foot, in-your-face, on-your-lap monster. Chaotic and frankly nausea-inducing design – kind of David Carson on acid. Complex texts struggling with graphic design that’s intended to give you a visual and conceptual headache. Inside you’ll find Atom Egoyan, Félix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Catherine Ingraham and other members of the po-mo and theory elite, in a volume too big to open in most city flats. Buy Semiotext(e) Architecture on eBay.

From my Window – André Kertész

Front cover of a book of photos by Hungarian-American artist André Kertész. Glass ornaments on a windowsill refract the light from the New York sky beyond. — André Kertész

This is such a gorgeous book. I remember loving the fact that Kertész carried on taking photographs and making his beautiful art after he couldn’t get out so much by turning his camera to the view from the windows of his apartment in New York. Now that I’m older (still getting out, though!) I find this even more moving. A great artist who narrowed his focus so that he could stay productive. Wonderful. I also kind of love the fact that the cover is unevenly faded, presumably by the sunlight from the windows in my house. Buy From My Window on eBay.

Art and Its Double, A New York Perspective

This is a fascinating and quite rare thing. It’s the catalogue from a 1987 group show at the Fundació Caixa de Pensions gallery in Barcelona; a snapshot of a local art scene that went on to become essentially hegemonic, to define contemporary art since then. The artists: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Peter Schuyff, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe. Buy Art and its Double on eBay.

Chris Marker – Staring Back

Front cover of a book of black and white photos by Chris Marker. A young woman looks seriously at the camera, the background thrown out of focus by a large aperture. She is smoking a cigarette — Chris Marker

Lovely book of black and white photos by the great Chris Marker. I guess we knew he was an obsessive photographer of his world: his first feature, a film I’ve always found to be so unsettling I can barely watch it, was made entirely from still photos. This is a gentle book, maybe not so hard-edged as the movies. It’s beautifully printed, in the way photography books ought to be, and it’s in a lovely approximately 35mm aspect ratio, which make it even more treasurable. Click the link to see more of the photos. Buy Staring Back on eBay.

Ralph Gibson – Syntax

A high-contrast black and white portrait of the side of a man's face. The front cover of a book of photos by American artist Ralph Gibson — Ralph Gibson

A beautiful and quite rare collection of photographs by American art photographer Ralph Gibson. I loved this kind of cool abstraction when I was trying to get started with photography. In fact I still find the camera roll on my mobile to be full of squared-off urban scenes, grids, shadows and so on. Gibson’s obviously still lodged in my brain somewhere. The book is in beautiful condition and the photographs, printed in the highest quality, are among the most distinctive of their era. A treasure. Buy Syntax on eBay.

Branded Youth and Other Stories – Bruce Weber

A young man leans, asleep, against a huge pig , lying calmly in straw. The cover of a book of photos by Bruce Weber called Branded Youth — Bruce Weber

Sold. It’s a beautifully-printed, heavy hardback published for Bruce Weber’s popular exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1997. The title refers to a story of some wild-child teenagers Weber met in Montana, who in an act of teenage bonding had branded each other on the shoulder with the heated blade of an army bayonet. It’s a bit of a gay classic and long out-of-print.

Sol LeWitt – PhotoGrids

Grids of drain covers photographed by artist Sol LeWitt — Sol LeWitt

Sorry, this one’s gone. A beautiful and quite rare paperback from an important phase in Sol LeWitt‘s career. Over 400 photographs of found grids from his travels around the world: doors, windows, fencing, gratings and manholes. Photographs of grids laid out in grids, a visual exploration of the grid’s organizing influence on our everyday lives. The cover is scuffed but the interior is perfect.

Allan Sekula – Fish Story

Cover of Allan Sekula's book 'Fish Story'. At the top a photo looking forward along the top of a container ship - in the background a cloudy sky and choppy sea — Allan Sekula

Sold. Sekula spent his whole career trying to invent and then popularise a politicised, realist art photography. He was a kind of photographic Brecht. This book is typical – the tip of a vast iceberg. Fish Story wasnt’t just a book of photos or an exhibition, it was a huge, multi-year, documentary project that traced the entire fishing supply chain. This book documents the project. This edition was specially printed to coincide with a show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London and comes with the original printed material from the exhibition. It also has an updated foreword by Laleh Khalili, an academic who has studied global supply chains. Fascinating and beautiful.

Bernard Tschumi – Event-Cities

Front cover of an architecture book by Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. A red and black duotone image of a modernist structure — Bernard Tschumi

One of a famous architecture series created for MIT Press. This one’s now quite rare as far as I can tell. It’s a double-phone-book 600-page collection of Bernard Tschumi‘s most important projects. Gorgeous, head-spinning 1990s design (very MIT), packed with provocative illustrations and texts. A po-mo jewel. Buy Event-Cities on eBay.

Gilles Deleuze – Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation

The front covers of a two-volume book by Gilles Deleuze called Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation. — Gilles Deleuze

I remember spotting this in the Pompidou bookshop and being brought up sharply by an unexpected collision of Bacon’s decadent London modernism and glamorous French philosophy – I didn’t know these worlds had ever met, or that they could. It’s all aesthetics, objects of perception (‘percepts’) and sensation.

It’s a beautifully packaged two-volume set in a slip-case. Volume 1 is the paintings and volume 2 is Gilles Deleuze’s essay on the painter and his work. I bought this edition during the gallery’s 1996 Bacon exhibition. It’s in essentially perfect condition. Buy Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation on eBay.

Bill Brandt – Portraits

Front cover of a collection of photographs by Bill Brandt. White text out of black and a sombre portrtait of a very serious man in a large greenhouse — Bill Brandt

This is the catalogue from a landmark 1982 exhibition. Brandt was an enormous inspiration to me when I was beginning as a photographer – something about the unlimited possibilities of a wide-angle lens and a roll of HP5. This is a lovely, slim introduction to his portraiture. From the gallery’s description of the show: “Bill Brandt has for some time been recognised as one of the established masters of British photography. This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major retrospective devoted entirely to his portraits: from the earliest, taken while an assistant to Man Ray in Paris in the late 1920s, to the famous series of poets photographed for Lilliput and Picture Post in the war years. There are also examples of his later work, and many recent portraits which will be seen for the first time.” Buy Bill Brandt: Portraits on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – Atlas

The front cover of Atlas, a collection of found art, drawings, photographs and painting from German artist Gerhard Richter. In the middle of the cover one of the artist's works in which a young woman in a floral jacket turns away from the viewer — Gerhard Richter

This is a mighty tome – one of the many clever and beautiful editions the Richter machine seems to produce. It’s a pretty special and quite rare edition of a career-spanning collection of sketches, collages and photographs from Gerhard Richter, who must be one of the most collected contemporary artists (imagine how rich he must be!). This material has been collected by the artist since he was a young man (click the eBay link to see some of the book’s layouts). It’s a beautifully-produced, oversized (34x24x3.5cm, 388 pages) monograph that’s considered rare (and the marks on the cover, like a artist’s accidental marks, are all part of the design). Buy Atlas on eBay.

Ava Hofman – poems

Front cover of a book of poetry by Ava Hofman, apparently designed to look like the cover of a very worn old music manuscript, brown and stained. — Ava Hofman

This is a lovely, slim paperback that’s somewhere between a collection of poems and an artist’s book. A self-consciously visual collection that’s really charming. More pics from inside the book in the eBay listing. Buy Ava Hofman – Poems on eBay.

Gerhard Richter – Tate Gallery 1991

Front cover of a Gerhard Richter exhibition catalogue. A blood-red abstract painting with prominent brush marks fills the cover.

I bought this at a big Richter show at the Tate in 1991 (this is before the power station was converted so we’re in Pimlico). It’s mainly the gorgeous and quite haunting abstract paintings, reproduced beautifully. Buy Gerhard Richter on eBay.

Bani Abidi – the Speech Writer

And this is an actual artist’s book. I should say I don’t think I’ve ever been very sympathetic to the idea of an artist’s book: “artists, you do the art; authors, you focus on the books.” Maybe I’m just being pedantic. I mean this one is nuts, though. Click through to the eBay listing and you’ll see that it’s substantially more than a book – more of a puzzle or a card game embedded in a book. I can’t actually remember where I acquired this but it’s genuinely unique. Buy The Speech Writer on eBay.

Slow progress

It is possible for geniuses to explain things in ways that non-geniuses can understand but sometimes they need to switch formats to do it.

I’ve spent a stupid amount of time trying to understand politics and political science. I ought to have just gone to college or something but it’s too late for that so I buy books and subscribe to periodicals and so on. I follow interesting people on Twitter, I read Substacks and listen to podcasts. I’m all over it. But to be honest it’s not really working. I mean it goes in one ear and out the other. The best I get is a very gradual – almost undetectable in fact – improvement in my understanding. Pretty much the same kind of glacial change I’m seeing in my ability to write poetry (which I’ve also been doing for years) or to construct decent-looking shelves for all the fucking books.

This has go to do with my age obvs but also, it’s clear, to do with the fact that I’m doing this in the piecemeal, unsystematic way of a distracted hobbyist. My kids went off to university and studied this stuff for three years and now they explain it to me like I’m an idiot. I obviously envy their comprehensive, organised understanding, given to them in the time-honoured way by experts and, in fact, by geniuses. But I’m still here, trying to figure it all out.

This guy, Dylan Riley, is one of the geniuses, a big brain who teaches sociology in California and writes books and papers and long articles about Marxism and society and so on. He came to my disorganised attention last year when he co-wrote an influential piece – with an even bigger genius called Robert Brenner (who has a whole area of disagreement named after him) – about the emergence of something they call ‘political capitalism’.

It’s a very persuasive idea that seems to account for the way investors and corporations continue to make increasing profits even as the return on investment declines almost everywhere. The piece has been influential beyond lefty circles and the ideas contained in it have begun to show up in mainstream politics and journalism. A kind of breakthrough for cloistered Marxists.

Anyway, the piece – and the other stuff he’s written that I’ve dug out since then – is full of deep insights and lofty ideas, as you’d expect, and a lot of it goes whoooooosh over my head while I wrinkle my brow. So I was kind of intrigued to learn that Riley had also written a little book made up of tiny, informal notes that he wrote – in longhand in an actual notebook – during the pandemic. To be clear, these are not the shopping lists (“400 rolls toilet paper, 20kg spaghetti”) and reminders (“stay indoors”) that I was writing during the pandemic, they’re notes about the genius stuff – and in particular they’re reflections on Covid, lockdown, the bail-outs and so on.

So I thought “that’s going to be right up my street, it’s going to be accessible stuff that I can get my head around, in small chunks that aren’t going to put me off and make me feel stupid.” I always jump on texts that promise to make the abstruse and theoretical transparent to me (in the same way I occasionally buy the latest ‘Quantum Physics for Know-Nothings’ from the table at the front of Waterstones).

And it is right up my street. I mean it’s still full of big ideas and a lot of assumptions are made about the reader’s understanding of politics and sociology (get ready for a lot of Durkheim) but it’s also full of nifty, two- or three-line insights – aphorisms, I guess – that genuinely illuminate the whole scene, the whole post-pandemic, end-of-the-end-of-history, collapse-of-neoliberalism thing – but also Trump, Biden’s green programme, lockdowns, Trump’s announcements, music education, the economics of slavery, utopias, illness…

Riley’s language is never less than academic and can be po-faced. I’m going to say that he’s a pretty orthodox Marxist. He has no time for ‘IDPol’ or for ‘liberal hand-wringing’ in general. In his writing he never doesn’t take himself seriously. And this is something I also kind of envy, actually. I mean the confidence to lay down idea after idea without at any point feeling the need to make a joke at your own expense or understate your intelligence or whatever.

Like, for instance, demolishing the whole idea of democracy in four lines:

To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality.

Or illumating the present moment via the ancient state:

The state is an object of struggle among competing political-capitalist cliques. In antiquity two models emerged: the universal monarchy, which to some extent disciplined these groups; and the unstable republic, which allowed them to run rampant. Are there not analogues in the current period? Putin’s Russia could be thought of as the Roman universal monarchy, and the United States the unstable republican form.
Dylan Riley. microverses

That kind of thing.

And it’s one of those books that make you think “come on, geniuses, why don’t you do this in all your stuff? If you can make big ideas clear in a flash and in about 300 words of pellucid prose in one format, why can’t you do it when you’re filling a big, fat book?” There’s obviously something about the stylistic liberty provided by the informal layout that permits these more relaxed, generous, explanatory insights and something about the academic format that inhibits them, that explicitly excludes them.

Anyway, Riley’s book is a jewel – and it’s so short you’ll read it in a couple of days – or, since it’s not in any way linear, you can just keep it by the toilet.

Robert Brenner wrote another piece (free PDF from the Internet Archive) earlier in the pandemic which also crossed over a bit and was picked up in the wider debate about bail-outs and support for ordinary people. He called it ‘Escalating Plunder’ and the phrase has become a kind of shorthand for the enormously lucrative raid on the public finances staged by big business during Covid.
Top book buying tip. You can buy the book in all the usual locations but if you buy it from the publisher, Verso you get the eBook for nothing along with the print edition (and, in fact, the eBook on its own is only £1.50, as against £7.99 at Amazon and, because it’s not copy-protected, you can read it on any device). This, in fact, applies to everything you buy from Verso, so might constitute a good reason for you to get started with your own hopeless effort to learn about Marxism. Not that there’s necessarily anything hopeless about it but you know what I mean.

David Hepworth – a Q&A about curating music

It has been my privilege, over the last few years, to write a few pieces for Britain’s best music (and arts and movies and stuff) magazine The Word – including, a couple of issues back, an article about the curation boom (my articles went the way of all flesh, of course, when David and Mark closed The Word, but here’s one about my early Internet life that I scanned).

The magazine’s publisher is David Hepworth (its editor – and the man to whom I tremblingly submit my copy – is David’s long-time publishing partner Mark Ellen). David oversees the selection of tracks for Now Hear This, The Word’s covermount CD: a monthly curatorial gem that regularly stays in our car CD player for the whole month (until the next one comes out).

I asked David a few questions about this rather successful example of 21st Century music curation (and also about his Saturday morning vinyl curation habit #platterday).

SB: tell me about the Word covermount. How does it come together each month?

DH: It’s put together by Andrew Harrison and Alex Gold with ideas thrown in by everybody else.

Are you extensively schmoozed by label PRs? Do bands send you stuff?

The record business is on the bones of its arse but you wouldn’t know that from all the stuff we get sent. Yes. PRs are instructed to try and get certain acts on the CD. it’s one of the few places where they can place unheard music and assure it gets heard.

Are there punch-ups in Word Towers about who’s on it or do you keep it all to yourself until its done?

No punch ups. You chase thirty tracks and you can’t get all of them. You might get twenty possibles which you edit down to fifteen. You need a mix.

What are the economics of the covermount? A few years ago everyone seemed to have one – and the newspapers went mad for them. How do they work?

Newspapers etc. have them for totally different reasons. They pay big money for music in order to outsell their competitors. Eventually they realised that the likes of Prince were taking them for a ride. They cost a lot of money because you have to pay mechanical royalties with them.

What’s the fate of the covermount? Will you replace it with a memory stick or a Spotify playlist?

No. It works because it’s a physical object.

Supplementary question: tell me about #platterday. Is it a model for publishing in the social media era or just what you do with a bacon sandwich on Saturday mornings?

I just got out my old deck and loved restoring the ceremony of playing black vinyl records on Saturday morning. Twitter just seemed an obvious way to share that experience. I posted a picture of a shelf full of my records and people started saying “oh play that one” which is clearly insane.

What is curation in this new sense? Is it different from being an editor?

I dunno. What I’m always trying to do is say something that doesn’t sound like the usual over-heated recommendations. It’s very hard. I find 99% of recommendations don’t actually convey anything about the nature of the thing recommended at all. They’re just endless variations on the expression “it’s brilliant!” Saying something meaningful about music is very hard, that’s why most people don’t bother.

Is there a business in it?

Shouldn’t think so.

David keeps a rather good blog of his own and curates a storytelling night called True Stories Told Live.

UPDATE: I asked David why he no longer picks the tracks himself. He says:

I did it for three years and was only too delighted to pass the job on. If you choose the tracks you have the unenviable job of writing the accompanying blurbs, which is like pulling teeth.

Magazine masterclass

Right, I’ve been very busy with my new thing: I’m blogger in residence at the BBC. Honestly. It’s really cool. Follow my comings- and-goings at the special blog I’ve set up for the purpose at commonplatform.co.uk (the feed’s here). More about the whole thing here later…

In the meantime, I just want to share with you a small masterclass in how to run a web site and talk to your customers if you’re a magazine publisher. Mark Ellen and his team over at Word Magazine are in a tough market up against some pretty big-and-ugly competitors and their web site is full of lessons on how to make that work to your advantage.

Check out this brilliant forum thread about subscription prices, in which senior staff, including publisher David Hepworth, make funny and honest contributions that must have influenced the opinions of the complainers who started the thread and probably even sold a few subs. It’s the kind of thing that would almost certainly have been supressed or ignored by an EMAP or a NatMags but which the tiny, independent Word turns to its advantage. Perfect. 10 out of 10. Go to the top of the class.

I also really like the very simple video promo for the current issue that’s on the home page at the moment. One take, no edits, shot in the office, hosted on YouTube—brilliant. (declaration: I write the odd bit for Word, including this piece about memory and the Internet and an earlier one about Wikipedia and I’ve got a piece about why futurology’s rubbish in the current issue—so I’m probably a bit partial).

What’s so cool about The Economist?

There’s nothing quite like The Economist. Many have tried to duplicate its authority, its prescience, its attitude but it takes a blend of uptown (that’ll be Oxbridge) haughtiness and downtown worldliness to produce writing quite so learned and quite so sarcastic at the same time. Take this week’s excellent feature about Google. No new information here but just the right synthesis of critical distance and intimate understanding to produce enlightenment – an intensely satisfying read. I’d like to claim The Economist’s unique tone of voice for Britain and it’s true that, by comparison, the American newsmags are miserable, irony-free zones, but I’m afraid this kind of provocative, highly condensed wit is rare on this side of the pond too.

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” – Tim O’Reilly

I’ll join the throng bookmarking this cogent defense of file sharing from publisher Tim O’Reilly. Tim is the man who made a fortune by selling his early portal, the Global Network Navigator, to AOL and has been able to pursue the life of the Libertarian Gentleman Publisher ever since. His books (with their beautiful Dover Press animal woodcuts) are the backbone of the geek culture and his conferences and events increasingly organise the whole geek mindset.

Anyone give me odds?

This may be my weblog’s first authentic scoop. A ‘friend’ (picture removed) – an author and publishing insider – tells me, with some credibility, that Michael Crichton’s Nano-frightener Prey will be followed by two more books – each focused on extinction-level threats to humankind – from Robots and Geneticists respectively (but not necessarily in that order). The implication is that Crichton has made a close reading of uber-worrier Bill Joy’s 2000 Wired article in which he lays out the existential threat from nanotech nasties, self-replicating robots and out-of-control genetic engineering (He’s mostly wrong, of course). Joy’s paranoid-determinist vision will be published as a book next Autumn.

Blogging – is this the hypergrowth phase?

Apps that add comments and notes to blogs and web sites are booming but some can’t take the demand

I got comments working – so now you are required to tell me what you think about all this blather. Enatation was the only site still accepting registrations when I researched annotation. Presumably all the other guys have stopped accepting new users because they can’t afford the bandwidth for the epic number of clicks their hobby sites are now attracting. Of course, two years ago they’d have called a venture capitalist and drawn down two or three million dollars to fund them through to IPO. The slightly flustered ‘closed’ signs swinging behind the plate glass at the annotation sites are telling us something. I don’t have any figures to hand (do you?) but I think the blogosphere is probably just entering the scary hypergrowth phase. The phase that comes immediately after the dogged pioneers and just before the steady flow of settlers – when the network effects really start to bite. Enatation was so trivially easy to install that I surpised myself. Copy, paste, copy, paste, save. Done. Blimey. Why did we ever spend all that money hand-crafting web sites? Don’t answer that.