My twitter book-making project

In other news, I made a book. A book of all my tweets since December 2007.

I’m still not sure what I think about the exercise.

Twitter’s the closest thing I have to a diary. I’ve never tweeted specifically in order to make a daily record, but that’s the form I chose for the book.

And, I’ve got my own, personal reasons for wanting a record of the last couple of years.

So, this book – it’s 393 pages, give or take. And it has just short of 5,000 of my tweets in it. It cost me £20 to get printed.

It certainly does work as a device to take me back to certain times and certain places.

I like the way the references to webpages, events, and even people are already somewhat cryptic and heading towards being lost altogether. I do wonder what I’ll think of it in 5, 10, 15 years time. I wonder how much I’ll remember.

In form, it reminds me of a play or script, and there are certainly dramatis personae. But I’m the only one who speaks, and there’s little drama to the thing.

Sometimes, though, in the midst of my ramblings are some magic tweets – our last night in Berlin; the 12-week scan; Leonard coming home from hospital.

Browsing through it feels like going through an old box of photos.

This version is something short of beautiful. But it’s a start. I’m going to literally put it on the shelf for a month or two and then come back to it.

In the meantime, if you want to make your own, you can try to run the scripts I wrote. I got this copy printed in Blackwells on Charing Cross Road, where they have a special in-store bookmaking machine. I’ve got another one on order from lulu.com in a slightly different format.

Tags: book, lulu, twitter