Friday, February 10, 2012

1000 Journals

When I was in Seattle last week, I discovered that Tracy V. Moore is currently in possession of one of the 1000 Journals.  Book 381, to be exact.

Have you heard of this project?  You can read about it here.  Basically, someone sent out 1,000 books to various locations around the world and is now waiting for them to be filled up and returned.  (Here you can read a sad story about the search for missing journals #114 and #194, which contain contributions by an unfortunate soul named Andy who was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident in 2001.  There are no updates to the search for these journals since 2002, which is sad to think his family might still be waiting to find these journals.)

Here's what the cover looked like last week:

and if you look here on the website, you can see how clean and new it looked originally, as designed by someone named Joshua Swanbeck of California: cover of #381.

The first few pages are mostly handwritten, like a diary, and written in Finland. 

There seems to have been a big gap between 2002 and 2007:

I liked this explanation for one of the time gaps:

Then people started to include art, like this:

and eventually, colour:
Jane Davenport's page
This was one of my favourite entries:

I'm not sure where Tracy got the journal in the first place or how long he has had it but I quite enjoyed having a look through it and having the opportunity to add to it.  On the website, it says, "Unfortunately, you've got a better chance of winning the lottery, then of getting a hold of a journal. That's the problem when there are only 1000 of them." So I'm feeling pretty lucky right now to have been able to make my mark in this book, along with some of my favourite artists like Jane, Tracy, Juliana Coles, Stephanie Lee, Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen, L.K. Ludwig and Traci Bunkers.

Here's my page:

It's not the most creative spread I have ever made and it's a little messy where the ink smudged but I'm still honoured to have something I created included in this project, in such good company.

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