Just before Christmas, a colleague of mine excitedly recommended a book she was reading (thanks, Kath!): The Doorbells of Florenceby Andrew Losowsky. It’s quite a special book to look at – a small hard back with nice quality paper, full of colour photographs, graphics and an attractive font. And it’s not only attractive physically, but the whole idea of it is absolutely adorable.

Basically, it was inspired by Losowsky’s random decision to photograph a bunch of doorbells in Florence. Fortunately, Italian doorbells are a lot more beautiful than my rather uninspiring doorbell, shown above. Anyway, once he had his bunch of doorbell pictures, usually including the names of the various tenants who occupied the building, Losowsky let his imagination run wild and he wrote short (usually very short) stories to explain something of the lives of the people living in the building. And that’s what is in this book. It’s perhaps a little hard to explain, but it’s just gorgeous and you should see it for yourself.

When I went to read a bit more about Losowsky and his doorbell project, I discovered that he’d first published parts of it on Flickr (the web home to billions of photos) as “Flicktion” – that is, a collection of Flickr photos which have a piece of fiction attached to them. It’s worth having a browse through the Flicktion tag over at Flickr to see what else other people have been doing. In any case, this book has got me totally inspired. I want to make my own! I’ve got so many ideas for what kind of objects I could “collect” to inspire some stories. And one day I’ll do it – just watch this space, okay?!

(In the meantime, if anyone can concoct a good story to match my uninspiring doorbell, I’d be most impressed. I don’t think I can do it.)