Miscellanies - book proposal fleshed out a little

(Apparently pronounced with emphasis on the - Cell - thanks Bob)

Book Proposal

I have chosen Visual Miscellany as the working title of my book proposal.

It cover many bases and could be read as vague but I think the mass audience is getting used to the idea of what a miscellany is.

Here are some reasons:

There are already enough excellent encyclopedias and histories of WWII.

My book will present certain ideas that best communicated visually. This is the main reason for their collection.

Swollen Market

The military history book market place is so full that the only selling points are to have something new (many do not) or claim to be more concise and authoritative than the last person (Now Includes More Words!).

My book will show things as they haven't been shown and collected together before. That is a grand claim. The main theme at the moment is not weapons or tactics etc -  but the idea that there is a lot of different visual information there. A Visual Miscellany. It was actually Julia who came up with the M word)

Schott's Miscellanies

I recently got stuck on a train in the June '07 floods. I was reading the Times and came across a one-page Miscellany of British Prime Ministers. It was done by Ben Schott who has cornered the Miscellany market.

My first idea was that this information would have been much better presented more visually instead of the rather dry table. But I thought some more and decided that most of this info was best as a table (and it followed the Schott style guide -  so it looked good).

Well managed serendipity

I then thought about miscellanies more and realised that they are actually very well managed serendipitous journeys.  (Have they been rediscovered by a book industry confused at the new power of the web to connect the seemingly unrelated?)

They seem to be random lists, chaotic and unordered but actually they have underlying structure and foreshadowing. They let the reader build up a body of knowledge around a subject for themselves.

Not to negate narrative

The reader feels free in their wonderings and certainly not bogged down in an A to B journey. (Do not get me wrong - there is nothing wrong with good narrative but it was a revelation to think that a Miscellany can (and should?) have a structure - albeit a looser one - more open to interpretation by each of it's readers.

It's more about curating and presenting a bunch of stuff rather than being too strict with the overall strcuture. I am trying to make each page coherent though. It is just when to stop with that.

The spectrum of organisation

I am figuring out where on the spectrum of organisation my subject matter needs to be - rigourously ordered - purposeful argument - editted version - curated facts information - seemingly random facts - a big mess? (maybe not the last one)

At the moment I am settling on three main themes - tactics, technology and turning points. I hope that each of the spreads play chords that start some common themes throughout and between these alliterative lables.

Accessibility

I am still working through this - but I think there is an accessibility to a Miscellany and I would like to reach many with this book. They are sometimes overtly playful when the randomness is amped up and I think I will try to keep some order.

Comments welcome. (But do not ask why I am currently capitalising the M in Miscellany. I am not sure.)