For those of you who don't know, Graham Rawle is a writer and collage artist who made a name for himself with his early work Lost Consonants, a series of visual collages playing around with the meaning of words, which appeared in the Weekend Guardian newspaper for a lengthy period of fifteen years, and later published as a series of books (see some amusing examples here).
His career has moved increasingly into the realm of writing and the literary, with the visual dimension of language and narrative continuing to be a significant part of his work. His two novels, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (1998) and Woman's World (2005), both use collage and are multimodal (I've written a chapter on the latter in my forthcoming monograph).
Rawle's newest novel will be The Card and will be published in April of 2012 (How long am I going to have to wait?!). Since news of this project emerged, there has been lots of speculation about the nature of this book. In particular, that it may be "a piece of writing rather than collage".
On his blog, Rawle has finally put a stop to such speculation, revealing some 'rough page layouts' that show, beyond doubt that the book will be multimodal (though as you can see, it doesn't look like collage).
According to Rawle, The Card, will be about "a man who picks up cards he finds on the street, believing that they hold clues to a secret message". As such, he has also created cards for the purpose of the book, such as the example below (more on his blog):
It's not yet clear whether these cards will be shown in images throughout the book (which I suppose has genre connections to novels such as Italo Calvino's (1967) The Castle of Crossed Destinies) or whether they will be provided as a deck of cards accompanying the book and/or in addition to images of them in the book.
Either way, I am already far too excited. It's going to be a long wait until April 2012!
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