I'm Going to Wales to Talk About Ink

+I've been planning this for a while, and now that it's close enough to feel real I want to tell you what I'm actually going there to do, because it's more than a trip and it's more than tourism. It's the first real field research Analog Proof (that's me) has undertaken, and I'm genuinely excited about what it might produce.

Here's the short version: I'm traveling to Wales and Bath to visit independent stationery shops, craftspeople, and the kinds of places that exist because someone cared deeply enough about paper and ink and the tools of writing to build a business around that care. I want to talk to those people. I want to understand what they know that the rest of us are still figuring out.

The longer version involves an audio essay.

The first major work I'm producing for Analog Proof isn't a written piece. It's a recorded essay, something closer to what you might call a documentary in audio form. The working title is "The Ink in the Stone," and it's an attempt to capture something that's genuinely hard to capture in text alone: the atmosphere of a place where analog culture is not a hobby or a niche but simply how things are done. The sounds of a shop. The texture of a conversation with someone who has spent years developing an expertise that most of the world has stopped valuing. The specific quality of attention that fountain pens and handmade paper seem to produce in the people who work with them.

I've been an audio producer for more than twenty years. I know how to make something worth listening to (I hope)! What I'm going to Wales to find is the material worth making.

This post is also, if I'm being transparent, a kind of public commitment. Saying it out loud here means I have to do it. And I want to do it. I want Analog Proof to be a publication that goes places and talks to people and brings something back that you couldn't have found on your own. The UK trip is the first attempt at that.

If you're in Wales or Bath and you work with analog writing tools in any capacity, I'd genuinely love to hear from you! Reply to this article or reach me at phillip@analogproof.co.

Phillip