Board book, 140 x 140 x 12mm approx.

Overview

A lift-the-flaps board book about alcoholism.

Background

Barry’s Bottles is the story of a man and his partner, searching through their home to remove all the bottles of alcohol hidden there. It is an illustrated picture book with lift-up flaps, similar to books for very young children, such as Where’s Spot? Although it is illustrated in a similar fashion to My Secret Dog and Sometimes I Feel Sad, this isn’t a book for children. What I like about writing kid’s books, though, is the simplicity and directness you can use with them. That felt appropriate for this story about alcoholism, where all the attempts to control Barry’s drinking will be for naught if he can’t change the patterns of his thinking.

An early, black-and-white version of Barry’s Bottles was shown at the Work Show Grow group exhibition The Power of Play, in London in May 2023. There have been several changes since that version, most notably the addition of colour to the illustrations. The physical format of the book has also changed somewhat, with the heavy grey board removed from the volume to make it lighter and easier to work with.

Although I settled on the technique for constructing the book quite early on, this went through many, many iterations as I tried to get a result I was happy with. In the end, there are still a few kinks which I just couldn’t iron out. Board books are manufactured items, made with industrial die-cutting machines and mechanical folding and sticking processes. The precision required is a difficult thing to pull of by hand (at least for me). Had I realised earlier that there was no way to attain that absolute perfection, I might have leaned the other way and explored what imperfections and rough edges could bring to the story. As it stands, I’m quite happy with it, but also glad it’s over.

As the complexity of the making meant that Barry’s Bottles was going to be a very limited edition, I decided to make a digital version of the book which could be freely distributed. For this, I used an odd combination of software (Affinity Suite, Blender, Tumult Hype) to create something sort of like a Flash site of the early 2000s or a CD-ROM. Again, I settled on a process early on and made about 80% of the site before thinking it wasn’t perfect enough. After attempting a couple of times to remake it, I found the results were sterile and didn’t feel as good as the imperfect early version. I went back to the early version, finished it, and uploaded it to itch.io so it could have a permanent home. The online version of the book can be found at https://tomlxndr.itch.io/barrys-bottles.