The book maze

London (and elsewhere around the UK) is still filled with events relating to the Cultural Olympiad - an arts festival that runs alongside the other sporting activities, which are now just starting to be a fading memory.

I travelled up to London to catch the festival atmosphere in the sunshine over the weekend, but very quickly became entranced with an artistic installation in the South Bank Centre* called aMAZEme. Essentially, it is a maze built out of 250,000 books that you can wander round and explore.

The maze in itself is not hard to navigate. But what really interests me are the books themselves. They lie open on the walls, and you can pick up, browse and read. I recognised many books I have read myself. Some with intriguing titles. Some I wanted to buy. Others that I couldn't believe a publisher would put their money behind.

As a book lover, it made me think how brilliant this world is - of all the thought, imagination and hard work that went into creating these packages of communication designed to inform, entertain or evoke laughter or tears. As a Christian, it made me excited at the God-given creative endeavour of mankind, and provoked me to think about how to make the gospel shine brightly in such a world of competing ideas.

But it also started conversations. People sharing their favourite books. Strangers asking what they thought of this or that volume they were flicking through. And people talking over the experience of running their hands over a section of braille books along one section of wall. I could have stayed and wandered and talked with people for hours.

But perhaps the biggest emotion it evoked in me was the sense that this is an era which is slowly changing. Publishers like us are wrestling with the issues of the relationship between ebooks and treebooks. We now routinely publish all our books in both formats (see a full listing here here). But, although we love the smell, touch and feel of a physical book, we're mindful that some commentators suggest it's unlikely that publishers will be producing treebooks routinely in 20 years' time.

If you get a chance, do visit the book maze. It's brilliant, and a great place to have profound thoughts and interesting conversations.

If you can bear it, I recorded the short video below in the maze itself. It gives a sense of how it works and what its like. Lovely music in the background too. A prize if you can say what the music is that is playing in the background.

*aMAZEme was created by Marcos Saboya and Gualter Pupo, and is in the Clore Ballroom on the 2nd Floor of the Royal Festival Hall until the 26th August. You can watch a magnificent timelapse of it being built here