Saturday, October 24, 2009

Mostly Truthful, Flax018

Feeling a bit Douglas Adams in this... Despite the The Crowd Without, Flax018, being my last digital anthology designed for Flax, here's another one.


Mostly Truthful is a collection of non-fiction from authors based in the North West of England. For the cover, we were trying to find something a little humorous, a reflection of an information source which claims to be authorative, but not quite (oddly, on the very day I completed this project, I waited a good hour for my wife to arrive in Edinburgh on a train that, according to railway boards not disimilar to this, had been cancelled – the ghost train arrived, unannounced and unheralded about 55 minutes late).


When editor Sarah Hymas saw this cover in its initial idea stage she laughed, so I knew we were in the right area. As the designs for these anthologies have tended to work in pairs, I wanted to move away from the dominantly white, kind of serious looking covers we did in the spring and move to a more lush and amusing style.


Mostly Truthful is available for free download from the litfest website and contains some really nice writing, including an interesting piece by Kate Feld on long term emigration and what it does to our understanding of our youths to be totally immersed in a foreign culture. The digital publication also contains links to the authors reading samples of their work and to their blogs.


If you are in Lancaster today (October 24th) you can pop to the Storey Building and enjoy the launch event which may or may not involve brass band music.