#paper world

The fish lives.

Paper World

Guy Leclef

Lannoo, Belgium 2022, 272 pages, 28x34cm, ISBN 978-940- 1486 743

euro 55,00

email if you want to buy [email protected]

Discover the exceptional beauty of old paper

Guy Leclef is a paper artist. Rhythm, balance and aesthetics play a leading role in the creations through which he has developed his own unconventional language and technique. The result is richly expressive and coherent works of art that impress.

Leclef makes his way through paper like an explorer, looking for order in the chaos, and, by harnessing his innermost emotions, creates a fascinating paper landscape with an existential dimension.

The artist is constantly looking for new interpretations and forms of expression to take paper in new directions. By tearing his material into strips, then folding, moulding or cutting them up again, he has developed an impressive range of styles and ideas.

Looking at his poetic landscapes, we discern craftsmanship in them, but in reality he is searching for sublimation through the flow of planes, shadows and tints in infinite nuances and colours. However, in the end, it's the paper that tells its own story.

W. A. Gallenbury, Entry 2

The Crow, The Widow, The River

Disclaimer: I have not read these books in order nor have I read all the pages.

The Widow is the sequal to The Crow. Similarly to the first book, the title character isn't who the story is about. Or, it is on the surface, the whole book focuses on a man's interactions with a newly widowed woman (from a farm in rural England... ringing any bells? She happens to be the protagonist of the first book.) In the background you see his family life play out and how his father and mother pass away in sickness and leave to fight for his part of the inheritance with his entitled brother. Throughout the story he falls in love with the widow despite having a wife. At the end he loses both inheritance and wife, blaming the widow and losing her too.

After being spooked by my encounter with the paper beings from the previous book I was extra careful and took this reading much slower and more broken up, making sure I couldn't turn the page properly by putting paperclips everywhere. I almost flunked physics to get through this one.

No encounters with the Paper World during this read. Still definitely Paper World related by the feel of it, as I've mentioned in the diary you just know.

W. A. Gallenbury, entry 1

The Crow, The Widow, The River

Disclaimer: I have not read these books in order nor have I read all the pages.

The Crow is the first book of the trilogy by W. A. Gallenbury, self-published 1934. Most of the works with ties to Paper World are self-published, though some have publishing houses credited. Sample size of 14. Could be wrong.

What I gathered from the story (take this with a grain of salt as I jumped back and forth, skipped pages, went backwards, what will you) it follows the perspective of a mother of three. The story takes place in rural England. Time period, post-industrialization. A crow has fascinated her and most of the story is her feeding it, following it, running it away from her chickens, and talking to it. In the background of her thoughts and monologues and playing children we see her husband give up on farm work and deciding to take up factory work to bring in extra money, as well as how her kids grow up and have to choose between city life and farm life.

As I read, I took many breaks. When I failed to, when I read too many pages consecutively, I predictably noticed a crow on my way to school. (Last year of high school, September 2022) It was in a murder. The reason I know it was from Paper World is simply because it stood out. The other crows didn't interact with it. If it fkew, the others didn't, but it followed them the same way you follow the other students in gym class when you didn't listen to the instructions.

When I left the book closed and tucked away for long enough, the crow stopped showing up. Definitely a paper crow. (That's what I'll be calling the beings of paper world from now on though it sounds kind of silly rip.)

Handling Paper World Reading Material

I realize others must have come across paper world materials too, or could be curious to find them, so this is my method from handling books, pamphlets and comics safely. For other visual media like animations or single illustrations I will write separate guides.

Materiel:

Reading material; paperclips; book marks; different colour post its; clean a4 sheets; pencil; eraser.

Method:

Prepare the materiel. Choose reading material (you can also choose a regular book to read intermittently as break). Put in paperclips here and there to separate swaths of pages from each other. 10 clips per 100 pages roughly. The less pages read, the safer. Triple the amount of bookmarks to paper clips. The more the better. Choose what different coloured post its represent (I use green for environments, orange for characters, blue for main plot, pink for side plots) and write the code on a clean A4.

Read out of order. My reading order is usually: last page; middle page; second half page; first page; jump randomly between sections. Never read 2 consecutive pages. Not even in the wrong order, I cannot guarantee the safety.

Use an A4 to cover anything except the sentence or panel you are reading.

Leave a bookmark in every place you have read. If anything on the page was of interest, write a very short summary on a post it and stick it to the page so only the coloured tip pokes out. Close the book. Open to a new page or take a break. Throw in as many breaks as possible.

When all pages have been covered and documented (never take notes outside of the book unless they are purely digital and never print those), change the position if the paperclips and do everything again for the new pages. Three times is usually enough to get an understanding of what is going on.

Cleanup:

Entry 1

Summary: blog purpose, safety rules, introduction to paper world, first interaction with paper world

The reason I'm making my diary digital is to circumvent, what I assume is, one of the key components of paper world.

Every part of paper world I have been able to find has been, well, created or printed on paper. Which is why I will ask any potential guest on this blog not to print out anything found here, and especially not paint or draw or write on paper about it. For safety's sake. Nothing against traditional art, I just want to be on the safe side.

My run ins with paper world started long before I even understood it existed, and paper world's interaction with the world will remain long after I'm gone. These are the only two things I am sure of.

A third thing I am almost sure of is, you will know, instinctively, if you come across paper world. You won't know-know it, you won't understand it, you may not have the words for it, but it's ever so different from being immersed in a book or imagining things. And no, I don't have carbon monoxide poisoning.

The first sign that you've encountered Paper World is; the story reads you, as much as you read it.

That sounds dumb typed out like that. You'll just have to know. There's this eerie sense that, you are the story, the characters see you, hear you, maybe you can even smell the flowers on the page.

The second sign is; immersion. Beyond a daydream, beyond getting engrossed in the story. For a moment, all that existed WAS the story. It wasn't a story. It was life. It was the moment. If you lived in the moment, the moment was Paper World, and when you get back it lingers. Not as a thought. As a sensation. You might even see the imprint of it, a hint of something at the corners of your eye, or, if you're unlucky, yourself on the paper.

That happened to me once. I didn't understand at the time, more than that I never wanted to read that book again. I wasn't in middle school yet, though I could read, and my grandpa took me to the second hand shop in town. I could pick anything I wanted under 50 sek. Book worm as I was, I padded over to the older children's section where they had nonfiction about animals.

Something else caught my eye, though.

With a red back as though it was stolen from a library, it sat on the lowest shelf, standing taller than the other books. It didn't belong. Too tall, the wrong genre, no alphabetical sorting. No price tag. 0 was less than 50 and that was all that mattered to me. I picked it up and grandpa haggled the price to 20 sek.

I read it on the school bus.

The text was simple enough for a 1st grader to follow, though I must've been in 3rd already. Watercolour illustrations covered every page. A family of three, mother, baby and father, as plain as can be. What we'd call a "Svensson-Svensson" if that tells you anything. Think, average white middle class family. Only something felt off.

When a house is pristine like an Ikea catalogue it doesn't feel like anyone lives there. That's how the book felt.

The bus ride passed me by. I chalked it up to my wild imagination and the high quality of the book, though I no longer consider that the truth. Because. At my stop. Right before I got off, farther down the line of kids who were going to the same school, was a family of three. Mother, child, and father. Straight from my book.

I could've been wrong. To make sure I opened the book, to a random page, somewhere in the middle, and what I saw wasn't the family staring back at me. It was their house seen through the window of my own room. My own pyjamas laid on the bed.

I closed the book.

At school I taped it shut and covered the whole front and back with markers. When I got home my neighbour's house looked just the same as usual, and it relieved me, but I still check my window sometimes just in case.

That started my collection. I have found 14 samples of this phenomenon I call paper world.

At first I thought they were separate works. They all told different stories in different styles by different authors. Some were even handmade watercolour animations. Not even books!

The similarities popped up the more I studied them. (I'm very very careful not to read a full book from front to back.) Characters would overlap. Backgrounds would show up in different works, by name or appearance or even vaguely hinted at on a map. No, I can't 100% confirm a comic panel is the same place as a swamp on a fantasy map, yes, I'm still 100% sure it is. You'll have to take my word for it.

It is my theory that paper world actually is a world jus like our own, though bound by completely different rules.

These books don't technically exist. Searching for works by the same author yields nothing online, even as I have a trilogy from a certain W. A. Gallenbury.

To anyone with experience of paper world, PLEASE send in your stories. DMs or ask box or submission doesn't matter. All I ask is that you under no circumstances re-read or re-watch anything with ties to paper world. No links to videos should be posted for anyone to see, though short clips that don't contain the whole story might be safe to watch. DM if you're unsure.

Thank you.

Sincerely,