The Word Made Flesh is officially out TODAY
Hey, guess what? Fourteen months after first announcing our project on this site, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is as real as a needle driving ink into your skin. Today is Publication Day for us, and my co-editor Eva Talmadge and I want to take a moment to offer our gratitude to all of the HTMLGiant readership. Without your early support, encouragement and re-blogging, this project might well have come to nothing. But instead, we’ve got this full-color anthology of hundreds of tattoos in a panoply of languages from book and body-art enthusiasts all over the U.S. and the world. Eva and I have done a lot of press already, and there’s more coming. I won’t be gumming up the works here at Giant with a running tally, but one of the highlights for us thus far has been our appearance this morning on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can stream our segment here. Also, many listeners are uploading pictures of their own literary tattoos to a fan gallery that NPR is hosting on their site. We’ve also been getting a lot of new tattoos to our submissions address, tattoolit@gmail.com , and we’ve been posting those on the book’s official site. If you’ve got one (or ten), we want to see it, so please do keep ’em coming in. And thanks–seriously–for everything. Cheers!
Official Word Made Flesh Book Trailer Now Officially Official (and Live!)
Uncategorized / 33 Comments
September 8th, 2010 / 11:37 am
September 8th, 2010 / 11:37 am
The Word Made Flesh Mobilizes on Multiple Fronts
Just about one year to the day (7/24/09) from when the idea was launched from this very blog, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is an imminent reality. The book–a full-color photo-anthology co-edited by Eva Talmadge and yours truly–will hit stores in October. You’ll be hearing plenty more about it then (we hope), but in the meantime I wanted to let folks know that we now have a website up and running at tattoolit.com. The site–which is primarily a tumblr–updates daily with re-blogs of literary tattoos from around the web that we find, literary quotations that seem like they might be worth writing on your body forever, and in the future will also have some previews/excerpts from the book itself, a book trailer, and whatever else we think of. You can also follow TattooLit on Twitter (the Twitterfeed streams to the website, but please don’t let this stop you from following it). Also^2, there’s the Facebook page. Also^3, even though the book is finished, we’d be glad to post a picture of your literary tattoo on any and all of the above-mentioned, so if you have one or are getting one, please feel free & encouraged to send them our way.
Absolute LAST Call for Submissions to “The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide”
Alyssa Carver, "fragment from Faulkner" - Brooklyn, New York
From the very first day that Eva Talmadge and I announced that we were putting together a photo-anthology of literary tattoos–in a post I made from Hong Kong to this blog, on 7/24/09–we have been overwhelmed and elated by the response. Photos have come in from all over the world, from all different kinds of people, each with their own reason for having chosen their line or lines or illustrations that pay homage to everything from Twain to Twilight, from Shakespeare to King’s Dark Tower, Plath, Dickinson to Salinger, Shel Silverstein, Dostoevsky, John Berryman, J.K. Rowling, T.S. Eliot, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, Moby-Dick–I could go on (which reminds me: several fine Becketts already, including at least two versions of the line alluded to here). And yet, despite the sheer volume of amazing work we’ve received–and the fact that we had declared 12/31/09 the submission deadline–we are still looking for more. We’d love to hear from you anytime between now and, say, Valentine’s Day. But don’t delay, because after that it really will be over. We will turn the book in to our editor at Harper Perennial very soon after that date, and it will be on shelves this coming fall. Detailed guidelines are posted on the original call for submissions, but here is the most important thing: Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible as an attached file in jpeg format to tattoolit@gmail.com. Pixel resolutions should be at least 1500 x 2000, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide. I can’t tell you how many people have sent us excellent ink in unusable formats or at too-low-for-print quality levels–this close to the deadline, there simply may not be time to wait for re-sends, even if we love the work. A million thanks to everyone who has shared their work with us thus far, and to everyone else–hope to hear from you soon.
Alec Bryan, "Dore's Ezekiel with Melville Banner" - Ogden, Uta
Dan Slessor, "text from Neuromancer" - Brighton, England