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Dear Readers,
I’m writing to you today with the most butterflies and beta blockers I’ve had bobbing around in my guts in a loooong time. It’s mum’s spaghetti over here. But also, I’m proud. Hugely, immensely, roaringly proud. Like a parent sending a kid to kindy for the first day proud. I’ve done all I can. Time to let this thing out into the world:
Together with my friend and colleague Alice Rose I have founded my own company to run international travelling book clubs.
Bibliocarta is travel for readers and a library for travellers.
We’re launching today with our first trip: Morocco in May 2025. From today Certified Legends have special early access to shotgun places by putting down their deposits. Then (set your alarms!) whatever spots are remaining will open to the public on Wednesday 20 November.
I’ll be personally hosting the first few trips Bibliocarta offers, but our ultimate goal is to gather other authors, academics, and artists to host journeys as well. As you can imagine, in my line of work I’ve met dozens of extraordinary thinkers who are like magnets for fellow kind nerds.
When I dreamed up this tagline, ‘travel for readers and a library for travellers’, I knew it would only appeal to 0.0001% of the population. And guess what? I don’t want anyone else. We don’t need anyone else. I am fully and completely committed to serving this specific type of person I know well by now because I’ve travelled with them and met them at workshops and in signing lines.
I’m proud of Bibliocarta’s mandatory, generous, and included-in-the-trip-price tipping policy. I’m excited to hand-pack and post you the required readings. You’re Five Star Nerds. You’re Certified Legends. You’re kind people who love learning.
When I look back over the last decade of my working life I see that every time I’ve taken a big risk—financially, artistically, intellectually—it has ultimately paid off. Deep underneath the spaghetti and butterflies is a rock-solid conviction that kind nerds want to be able to travel and read together. As I mention on our Bibliocarta’s About page:
Imagine sipping and snacking on local delicacies whilst taking part in the funniest and smartest book club of your life, and you’ve just finished a guided walking tour of the city in which your novel is set. That’s Bibliocarta.
This week’s edition of News & Reviews takes you behind-the-curtain of Bibliocarta. I’ll explain the ‘library’ part, introduce you to Alice, give you a little insight into our design process, and explain who the Certified Legends are and why they’re so important.
Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive in getting us to launch stage. All the DMs, emails, and in-person well-wishing genuinely gave me such confidence. Let me know in the comments if you’ve got a dream destination. How fun to be able to write that!!
Best wishes and happy reading,
Bri
The Library on the Site
Obviously my dream is for Bibliocarta’s library to grow… enormously. Certified Legend Tiana, for example, has added her recommended read for Sri Lanka. We’re also working on making it search-able by destination.
The two sides of Bibliocarta are really deliberately complementary: the travel and the reading. The travel is, by its very nature, expensive and exclusive. I puzzled for a long time: how to make something with more of a communal generosity of spirit? What’s the most beautiful place where everyone is nice and everything is free? A library!
People are always emailing and DMing me asking which book they should read before they go overseas, and for ages I was thinking of having some kind of reader-generated list here on News & Reviews, but it was one of those beautiful a-ha moments, when it first occurred to me to marry the trips with the online space. I’d say that was the split second Bibliocarta was really ‘born’ in my mind. The vision became clear.
Now, regardless of whether you’ve travelled with me before or not—or if you ever will go on a Bibliocarta trip—you can both contribute to and draw from this library. If you’ve recently travelled somewhere and read a book you’d recommend to anyone else en route, please add it to our library! Your review should be 3-5 sentences of what the book is about and 3-5 sentences of why you would recommend it to someone en route to that country.
Alice and I (and Judit)
Alice Rose and I met a few years ago and became friends. She’s got almost a decade of experience working for global travel brands across operations, customer service, and product development.
When I started running workshop weekends in Sydney I brought Alice in to the Workshop Manager role, and I was totally blown away by how good she was at every single part of her job. She handles everything with the venue, does the emails and messages with attendees in the lead-up, and makes sure everything on the day goes perfectly. When I saw the way people spoke about her in the feedback forms I just knew I had to get her to do this company with me:
Alice is a legend, and supported the workshops beautifully. I felt very ‘held’ from start to finish.
Alice was amazing—so much communication, everything ran like a dream. She made the day amazing.
Alice is, as always, such a delight to speak to and liaise with. Everything was crystal clear and organised very well. I knew exactly what to bring and where to go.
Alice was amazing, couldn’t have been better. I felt we were very well taken care of and in very organised hands!
Alice was fabulous! All of the communications were timely and clear. I knew what to bring and what to expect. The WhatsApp group chats were great, loved being able to put in coffee order and the cocktail poll was great! And Alice in person is just as lovely as she was on email and WhatsApp :)
She’s gonna be embarrassed by all this, but honestly, you need to know how good she is. Alice and I are equal partners in Bibliocarta and she is the actual human being point-of-contact you’ll have from the moment you book with us. Attention to detail. Warm. Problem-solver. Legend!
The Bibliocarta Design Journey
I’ve been scribbling ideas in my diary and screenshotting images I like for about a year. That’s how pipe dreams start. When I went through all the imagery some recurring themes stood out. I loved maps and, in particular, the illustrative details that surround old maps. (Sometimes called ‘cartouches’, from the French meaning cartridge or seal.) I read this gorgeous Phaidon publication, Map: Exploring the world, from cover to cover and pulled these examples.
Certified Legend Thea Powell who came with me to Egypt (and who is coming to Morocco!) did our design for us. There were some challenges we laid at her feet. We didn’t want it to look too costume-ey; it had to be clean and clear. The words I kept coming back to were ‘premium yet artisanal’. It couldn’t be DIY-crafty because we’re professionals. But it had to have character. Some time ago I saw this font and kerning (top right) for CERO MAGAZINE and it lodged in my mind as a modern version of the serif types I’d been seeing on the antique stuff.
The other things we needed to avoid were the colonial and neo-colonial approaches. As in, British Empire-style ‘all the world is ours to discover and conquer’. That’s the opposite of Bibliocarta’s spirit of learning and kindness. We didn’t want to be using iconography from cultures that weren’t ours. Yet we didn’t want to lean too heavily on those empty-feeling PR/stock-style photographs you see everywhere. We went through a round of design ideas using antique photographs and they looked really beautiful, but ultimately it was too risky to look like were admiring earlier times when some of our destinations were variously colonised and/or ‘occupied’. Very! Bad!
The answer came in what we’ve lovingly come to call our ‘muses’. We found them—along with the quill and dove and shells—on the edge of a centuries-old map. Thea got all these beautiful pieces out off the map and tweaked them. Have you noticed how she moves on the landing page? And the muse for the library and trip pages are holding quills!
And my favourite detail? They’re all wearing Phrygian caps:
‘The Phrygian cap, also known as Thracian cap and liberty cap, is a soft conical cap with the apex bent over, associated in antiquity with several peoples in Eastern Europe, Anatolia and Asia. The Phrygian cap was worn by Thracians, Dacians, Persians, Medes, Scythians, Trojans, Amazons and Phrygians after whom it’s named. The oldest known depiction of the Phrygian cap is from Persepolis in Iran.
Although Phrygian caps did not originally function as liberty caps, they came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty first in the American Revolution and then in the French Revolution, particularly as a symbol of Jacobinism (in which context it has been also called a Jacobin cap). The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of emancipated slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty.’
Thea had all kinds of beautiful ideas, like the longitudinal lines being subtle in the background, and the little basked in the top right being an actual illustrated basket.
This whole process has given me a far greater appreciation for the design details on people’s businesses and websites. I think we’ve ended up with a beautiful result because a) we worked with a great designer, and b) we had a really clear idea of who we are and who we’re not. Which leads me to…
Certified Legends
The absolute number one ‘special sauce’ I wanted to keep and protect from the previous trips was the Certified Legend component. Every single person who has travelled with me has been lovely. People have made genuine friendships. This was—from start to finish—the number one goal in all of the planning. The name, the tagline, the branding and imagery… everything had to appeal to the Certified Legends I already knew.
Here’s an example: when I return to Morocco in May, I’ll be bringing a package of gifts for Fouad, our guide from the Morocco trip in 2022 who we all adored so much. He’s had a son since we were there. There’s a beautiful email thread of all the CLs right now exchanging the best ideas for what I’ll pack in my suitcase.
Here’s another example: a CL named Rosie was supposed to be coming to my workshops in Sydney this weekend and had something come up at the last minute. She emailed us: ‘I was wondering if there was a possibility I could gift my spot to someone who may not otherwise have been able to go or who missed the chance to sign up. Bri is too good to miss out on so if there is someone who would benefit I would be so happy for them to take up the weekend!’ With her permission, the runner-up of the scholarship spot will now be taking Rosie’s place. Rosie has just made someone’s week. That’s a CL right there.
I’ve also just made another $2000 donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
Every person who comes to a workshop knows that $50 per day of their fee goes straight to the ILF. As of today, since starting to run my workshops at Ace in 2023, CLs have donated a total of $7,600 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. That is HUGE! A representative from the ILF called my mobile last year to describe the kinds of programs they can run when they get chunky lump sum donations like this and it was so exciting to hear. That’s the combined power of the CLs.
That’s it for This Week!
If you’ve got an operational question, check our FAQs and then email Alice at info[at]bibliocarta.com.au and if you’ve got any questions about Bibliocarta as a whole, drop them in the comments! Please also drop a comment for Thea if you think the site is as beautiful as I do. :)
Giveaway
The winner of last week’s giveaway, the copy of Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine, is #57 out of 113. I’ve emailed you, Angus!
This week’s giveaway is the first in a particularly lush series of three big giveaways thanks to Hardie Grant. There’s a copy of the very beautiful Literary Journeys up for grabs! ‘From the comforts and confines of our homes, this book brings to life some of the most significant, exciting, dangerous, tragic and uplifting journeys ever written about.’ This thing is SO much fun.
Enter with your name and email address here and I’ll draw the winner at random next week. For this week, as a special occasion to celebrate the Bibliocarta launch, all subscribers—both free and paid—can enter. Good luck!
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Smart takes on books, news, and culture. Straight from Bri's desk in Sydney to your inbox each Wednesday at 5pm.
GREAT GREAT JOB BRI AND ALICE!!! (If anyone is hovering over the comments tossing up whether to go or not - I’ve been on two trips with Bri and can’t recommend them enough. One of the best travel experiences you’ll have, pinky swear!)
The details in the website design are everything! ✨️ Loved reading about the thought process behind it. Congratulations Bri and team!