The Daily Rag: Writable Fabric

What I am imagining here is the benefit of a printed medium that is not susceptible to water damage, that is foldable, crumpleable and washable. I know this is totally possible. And I want it for home use.

I carry a handkerchief. I know that that seems real outdated and possible even gross to you all. But I like it so back off. It lives nicely folded in my pocket and when I take it out to blow my nose I unfold it and can leaf through it like the pages of a book. Now imagine that. You could be on a tightly packed bus and you could just pull out this little wad of fabric and read from it. Infinitely portable, no worries about damaging it and if you found the author's ideas detestable, you could blow your nose of them.

Clearly this has to work for shorter things like pamphlets and short stories, or even brief sorts of magazines with pictures. I mean we are talking maybe eight folds here. Meaning maybe the equivalent of, what?, 16 or 20 pages. But hell, it is also a novelty. People would eat this up. Or at least I would.

I imagine problems would include the durability of the print on the fabric, which seems negotiable and less of an issue because they are probably not keepsakes but sort of convenient travel items. Also I am sure it is the type of thing that right now you would need a large industrial machine to produce. But I can also imagine that it would not be too difficult to develop some sort of thin rigid tac board that could serve as a sort of plate to hold sheets of fabric in place so that they could pass through a home laser printer. Maybe even silk screening could be a way to look for this.

The possibilities are endless. The increase to portability and durability could be phenomenal. It could even be a way to resuscitator slowly devolving genres like the short story, pamphlet, scholarly article or chap book or poetry. All of which could use a physical format on which to stand alone instead of waiting for a collection to come by and pick them up into a larger book.

Dude. This is so going to work.