Of especial note this year is the publication of The Library Book a collection of writings from authors such as Alan Bennett, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith and others, exploring the importance of libraries through memoir, polemic and short story alike. Proceeds got to the Reading Agency‘s library readings programme.

For my own part, I’d like to chip in with two particular memories which, in their own small ways, hint at the greater good of keeping books available to all of society.

First, a memory from the early 1990s: Myself and my brother are visiting South Yardley Library, where we join a crowd of supervised children in a corner, all putting blindfolds on. We are given blindfolds too. As we plunge into a disconcerting world of darkness, we follow instructions to walk carefully forwards and duck under an unseen entrance.

To this day I remember the hesitant steps we took, as the storyteller guided this unexpected Fellowship down deep ravines, through thick forests and across dead marshes. At first, our imagination was stimulated with words alone, but soon our faces were being brushed by the tendril fingers of Ents or the trailing webs of vast spiders, as we stepped over bridges and crawled down mining tunnels.

Or perhaps we were simply clambering around strategically placed tables and chairs, scattered with cushions, dangling ropes and half-filled washing up bowls? Either way, what the clever organisers of that modest weekend amusement achieved with words and some basic props has stayed with me all these years later. It was as vivid an introduction to Middle Earth as anything Peter Jackson would conjure up a decade later.

My second memory comes from years afterwards, when academic libraries had become a familiar sanctuary for my studies. Searching for some book or other that the campus library did not have, I visited the public library on Canterbury High Street.

Inside, I was struck to see a familiar homeless man, who I was used to seeing begging on pavements outside, quietly engrossed in a book at one of the reading tables. With his scruffy unkempt appearance he was a striking sight in this context. I couldn’t help thinking how excellent it was that everyone, no matter how down on their luck, should have somewhere in the warm and the dry to while away some time picking from a selection of books.

Put simply: libraries can help the disadvantaged, and inspire the young. Reason enough to keep them open in my books.

Some cynical commentators predict a dystopian future along these lines might not be so far-fetched. Others remain more optimistic.

Either way, it cannot be disputed that decades from now, technology will indeed have progressed in as-yet-unimaginable directions. The cultural history of the written word will undoubtedly have undergone yet more plot twists and cliffhangers, whether those are played out on paper, screen, or both.

But our film isn’t really about the future so much as it is about the present. It is about exploring this odd era we find ourselves in, where old established ways of life are called into question and changed so utterly by technology that is relatively recent and fledgling. We mould our lives around Facebook, around our mobile phones, just as since the 1950s we have moulded ours lives around TV viewing (nowadays increasingly online).

Many people will tell you that the only way publishers can make money is by printing tons of celebrity books that are essentially parasitic upon the entertainment industries in general. So it’s interesting then to see how portable entertainment technology responds to the issue of books. How it furthers their story, if you will.

One of the latest flashy pieces of kit is of course the iPad (although ironically I understand it doesn’t support Flash… ahem, little IT joke there). I was recently made aware of an interactive iPad app featuring a character called Morris Lessmore, which is more than a little bookish in nature. Here’s an advert for it…

Now, I’m not in a position to review the iPad app. Most obviously because I don’t have an iPad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I live a life of relative poverty peppered with the occasional purchasing of actual books. I’m not a complete luddite: I make films, I blog… I’m capable of making lame jokes about Adobe software. But I don’t for example have a snazzy phone. I don’t use social networks. I had a go on a Nintendo 3DS this Christmas and my brain nearly boiled at how futuristic it was.

Nevertheless, as an interactive reading experience you would have to be a real misery guts to deny that The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore looks pretty startling. And that’s not simply because I’m a fan of silent films and Morris clearly owes a debt to Buster Keaton. I can well imagine a child (including children who have the inconvenience of being adults) getting drawn in by all the usual swiping, scrolling and prodding of the iPad’s touchscreen as they manipulate the animated environment. I’m also impressed to read in an interview, the lead artist saying that “every functionality had to be something that kept the reader in the story, or moved the story forward (rather than) bells and whistles that don’t serve the story, and in fact often pull you out.”

The Morris Lessmore website makes it clear that their project is in fact not simply an iPad app, but a film and a physical book too. Indeed, the iPad app appears to have been a later consideration.

All of which is food for thought when we consider how the story of books and bookselling might progress from here. And how advancing technology might replace, hybridise with or perhaps even harmonise with book-based storytelling…

As you can see, the design has changed slightly from the concept art that we posted back in August, in that credits will now be displayed on the insides of various antique books, rather than along the spines.

This exciting development means that the film is now 99% complete. Which means we are now very close indeed to an announcement of the film’s completion. Watch this space…

The Bakery (our creative collective responsible for producing The Last Bookshop) will be blogging a daily advent calendar.

We shall take it in turns to post up videos, photographs, audio trinkets and any other bits and bobs that we like, for your enjoyment. The advent blog will inevitably veer from the opaquely bizarre to the self-explanatory, but hopefully there shall be plenty of Christmas cheer and amusement along the way.

Grab yourself a mince pie and head along to webakestuff.co.uk/blog

On our film’s limited budget, it hadn’t been practical for the location scout to take in any bookshops too far afield; so I was keen to use this opportunity to browse some of the bookshops that were logistically denied us. My dad half-remembered a certain bohemian vibe to the nearby town of Totnes, and so the family and I trotted off to find amusement in the drizzly afternoon.

If you’re in the area, give Totnes a visit. It has bags of character, an attractive church, and a thriving centre of independent shops. It felt reassuringly alive. Largely absent were the clusters of vacant lots and closed down shops which seem to dog so many English towns.

And yet, a worry began to niggle at me as we ducked in and out of the various arts and crafts shops. I noticed one of the shops contained a full-length bookcase. As did the next shop. And shortly afterwards, so did another shop. I had the worrying thought that – like the treasured possessions of a deceased elderly relative divided up among the surviving grandchildren – the local bookshop may have been closed, dissected and distributed. Soon the randomly-located Beano annuals and Enid Blytons and ‘How it works’ Ladybird books of Computers started looking like evidence of a terrible retail fatality.

My pessimistic imagination was starting to run away with itself, fuelled by years of reading doom-mongering in the Guardian, and hand-wringing in the Bookseller, and indeed having witnessed enough closed-up shop fronts myself between interviews with shopkeepers telling of their diminishing returns and increased rents.

But, as the old saying doesn’t go: there was light at the end of the high street. I was soon relieved to be browsing the stock of the Totnes Bookshop (which I later learned was justifiably shortlisted for The Bookseller’s Best Independent of the Year back in February) before a purchase was made over the road at Harlequin Books. This latter shop in particular is crammed with an excellent selection of old secondhand books.

A short stroll towards the castle soon revealed a further bookshop, modestly nestled among crooked houses. A sign declared its pleasingly eccentric opening hours, and – typically – the weekday we had chosen to visit was not favoured. Perversely, this made me rather happy. Surely there is nothing more indicative of a shopkeeper’s retail confidence than in deciding to be regularly closed on a day that would evidently bring good custom. I peered through the window and saw intriguing volumes.

All told, the trip to Totnes was a satisfying step back in time. The place felt untouched by the fears abundant elsewhere in the country. That said, the fact that Totnes has its own unique currency surely can’t be motivated by anything other than a desire to keep local money artificially trapped within the town for fear of it draining away elswhere.

Though not a bookshop, an honourable mention must surely go to one of the best shops in Totnes, the Drift Record Shop. Just as I like to champion the bookshop independents, who provide a service, function and experience necessarily different to Waterstones; it is also satisfying to happen upon a quirky record shop whose eclectic stock and earnest enthusiasm is a million miles away from the unpleasantness of HMV. Accordingly, we relieved The Drift Record shop of no less than three CDs that afternoon.

The sense of timelessness continued as we moved on to Newton Abbot and Ye Old Cider Bar, reputedly one of only two cider houses remaining in the UK, where I had a mug of cider and a glass of the nicest mead I’ve ever tasted. Highly recommended.

As The Last Bookshop blog forges on with its mission to explore the current plight of bookshops as context for our forthcoming short film, Totnes seems to forecast a sunny outlook after the storm.

Fry is so deeply associated with modern technology, with Apple and Twitter, that it was especially interesting to hear his reflections on good old fashioned paper and ink. Indeed his reputation is such that when we were planning The Last Bookshop, we joked that the Boy’s Gamazone hologram might be entirely voiced by Stephen Fry, perhaps as a posthumous tribute to Fry’s endorsement of the holographic technologies developed in his own old age.

The fourth episode of the series, titled ‘Spreading the Word,’ highlighted the importance of modern technology in preserving old texts, and in taking the written word into new environments. But it also took time to compose a personal ode to the wonder of physical books, with Fry describing how he felt when he first encountered a published copy of his debut novel.

It was in interviewing Prof. Robert Darnton, the Director of Harvard University Library that the programme addressed the fate of physical books, and how we currently live in a time of media transition. Prof. Darnton was the voice of wise optimism, asserting that history tells us “one media does not displace another,” before going on to draw parallels with the co-existence of print with radio, and later radio with television, and later still TV with the Internet.

Fry himself sounded a little less certain about the future of libraries. And in his passion for such book temples, brought my own thoughts resolutely back to The Last Bookshop film, and our desire to champion buildings filled with tomes.

The rise of technology need not necessarily mean we must end up in the book-bereft fantasy world in which our film is set. And yet, a glance at our society shows us libraries under threat and bookshops increasingly unable to stay open.

I’ll leave the last thoughts to Mr Fry himself:

“Almost everything I am, I owe to libraries.

“It’s like a will-o’-the-wisp; one book lights another book, which lights another one, which lights another one. I suppose libraries still, for me, have this extraordinary charge: when I get in one I feel this buzz, it’s almost sexual.

“There’s something about the fact that behind all these bound copies there are all voices, there are people murmuring to you, seducing you, dragging you into their world. These are wonderful, magical places. And I suppose if I have a campaign that I’m really behind, it’s that of saving our libraries. Because everyone surely has the right to access the voices of the past.”

So far, I have largely resisted the temptation of setting out any particular argument or definitive viewpoint on this blog. The Last Bookshop film is itself, I suppose, my response to the current mood; the grim predictions; the undeniable reality of shop closures.

Some might say there is an irony in the fact that we have chosen to champion the bookshop through the medium of film. But perhaps the greater irony is the fact that we are encouraging people to keep paying for physical books, through the medium of (what will ultimately be) a free-to-view online film.

It is a striking illustration of the division between old forms of media and new. In the old days, artists, booksellers and media corporations alike used to earn money by identifying their hard work and endevaour with physical trinkets (CDs, DVDs and indeed books). It was never simply the plastic and the paper you were paying for (although sometimes people seem to think it was); it was the wages of the editors, the writers, the actors, without whom the work could not exist.

In the Internet age the emphasis is away from buying physical trinkets. Yes, you can use Amazon to buy a heap of pristine books for a price that suggests you’re just paying for a cheap bundle of paper (you are not; you are buying the hard work of those who created the books). But I’m really talking about the transformation of books (and albums, TV programmes etc.) into strings of downloadable data.

Free internet content is of course a familiar concept to all of us. Nobody pays to watch videos on YouTube. This very blog is part of the modern media movement of user-generated free content for worldwide access. The Internet has flourished on this idea that web content (whether that is films, or journalism, or peoples whole lives on Facebook) is free to enjoy. More often than not, it is the associated advertising (adverts on YouTube, banners in your inbox) that does the paying. But how can the hard work involved in the creative processes ever be balanced out by such an approach?

It is difficult to say how things will move on from here. People are right when they say that artists keep creating things whether or not they can make money from it. In some ways that’s the definition of an artist.

When we (The Bakery) decided to make The Last Bookshop film, we knew we weren’t going to be raking it in from the project. We saw the situation bookshops are in, and we reacted in earnest by using our creative energies (and personal funds) to support the plight of the bookshop. I love independent bookshops. I want them to exist for as long as possible. So if our film prompts a few people to remember their local bookshop, and maybe pop their head round the door next time they pass, then that can only be a good thing.

On this wider issue of free online content and old trinket-based media, The Guardian newspaper recently printed a thought-provoking piece entitled ‘Are books dead, and can authors survive?’  in which author Ewan Morrison outlined his argument from the recent Edinburgh international book festival. As an overview of how the fate of books is bound up in this wider issue of free media, it gives a comprehensive account, and is worth a read.

Of course, in the old days you had to pop into a newsagent and exchange coins in order to read the Guardian; nowadays you click on the website and read its contents all for free…

Among others, we have a looping sequence from our satirical University of Konkerbury promotional film, which we created for the dual purpose of jibing our old University’s attempts at promotion, and also to promote our own FM radio sitcom Konkers, set at the fictional University in question. For anyone who doesn’t already know, we also created a mock academic website konkerbury.co.uk to complete the fictional world.

Other trinkets smuggled into the hologram’s bewildering array of flickering screens include the animation Nasrudin and the Hangman’s Dilemma, produced to compliment our 2009 BBC Radio documentary series. There are yet more Bakery references, but we’ll leave it to the hardcore fans to spot them all.

The hologram itself was the hard work of Chris McDonald and Adam Droy, who spend their days making flashy magic things happen at The Mill. So it amuses me to note that one of the video screen shows Mr Droy’s somewhat simpler (but no less charming)  A-Level coursework animation of a Lego dinosaur.

Our resident resourceful solver-of-practical-problems Jan Grimshaw (an essential crew member on The Last Bookshop, responsible not only for conjuring up a school badge using only a dust cloth and Wonderweb; but also for extensively illustrating the Boy’s story-scrapbook) had recently taken a trip to Morecambe. While there she stumbled inside The Old Pier Bookshop, and later told me that upon entering she felt like she’d stepped straight into our film.

Her descriptions of doorways framed with bookshelves; ceiling-high shelves; scattered boxes, and – naturally – a stuffed goose, sent me hurrying to the Internet to seek out images. And when I found these cracking pictures, I couldn’t help agreeing that The Old Pier Bookshop was clearly yet another brilliant bookshop which could have made yet another perfect filming location.

But, of course, filming on The Last Bookshop has wrapped. And we have been lucky enough to film in some of South-East England’s most remarkable independent bookshops. Also, let’s not forget that the film shoot was practically complicated and lengthy enough as it was, without factoring in the notion of having relocated cast and crew to Morecambe or elsewhere!

It is always difficult to draw a line under a creative project and say “it is done.” The mind keeps redrafting, tempting you to add a bit there, or cut a bit here. I sympathise with the author who picks his novel off the shelf and finds sentences (or worse, characters)  in want of extra crafting.

Don’t confuse this with dissatisfaction on my part, by the way. Far from it, I am very happy with how The Last Bookshop has come together, and I can’t wait to share it with a wider audience.

So, to be honest, I hope that I do indeed happen upon a good many additional bookshops in the near future. Bookshops which feel like magical, unexplored avenues of our very own Last Bookshop. Bookshops which fire my imagination with ideas of what aspects they could, in alternative universes, have lent to our film.

Because of course, that’s why we made this film in the first place: to embrace and support all those fabulous bookshops that are in danger of disappearing. And I hope that, in promoting our film, I will find out about a great many more of these brilliant shops across the UK. And hopefully get to pick up a few purchases along the way.