Printer Matters - Fireflies, The Reader and Round not Square
/On the 28th November we are hosting Printed Matters #1 - a celebration of Berlin’s indie publishing scene that we are very proud to be a part of. We are also very much aware than many of our readers are not in Berlin, and so we want to use the opportunity to present some of our friends here on the website. Here are three more very different publishing projects based in Berlin:
With two homes, Fireflies is a print film magazine with one foot in Melbourne, Australia, and the other with us here in Berlin. Each issue brings together an international group of writers, artists and critics to celebrate the work of two extraordinary film directors through personal essays, creative responses and exclusive interviews with the filmmakers. Fireflies passionately expands the possibilities of film criticism, inviting audiences to discover and explore treasures of world cinema, and past issues have explored Pier Paolo Pasolini, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Béla Tarr and Abbas Kiarostami. The upcoming Issue #3 celebrates the cinema of Claire Denis and Jia Zhangke.
We have known Victoria Gosling and The Reader Berlin for a long time, have benefited from her editorial advice, been involved in The Reader’s workshops and seminars, enjoyed the results of the short story competitions, and are now really pleased to be able to present the Streets of Berlin anthology at Printed Matters. This collection of ten award-winning short stories was published in September 2015 and it showcases the distinctive voices of ten emerging talents. United only by the city that inspired them, they bear witness to one of the world’s greatest, most mutable cities: Berlin.
Of all the projects we have presented on the blog over the past week or so, it is Round not Square that makes us most sad for the people that won’t be able to experience the project in person. Round not Square is devoted to the reinvention of scrolls, reviving a format that was the main means of reproducing content back before the invention of bookbinding and other publishing methods we take for granted. Why do they do this? Well the good folks at Round not Square argue that this allows them to eliminate pagination and create a real flow of storyline, allows them to print imagines larger than book formats would allow, and of course, because of the aesthetic quality of such a striking object. If you can join us in Berlin on Saturday, you can see for yourself!
